Procession

Today we had our first Mass of Corpus Christi and annual procession of the Blessed Sacrament: our retired priest, Fr Tony Lovegrove, presided at the latter with his customary panache. We had about 180 people present, which was encouraging.
We were the guests of the gracious Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in their grounds, and we are most grateful for their kindness. This was the second stational altar.

The guests of honour were, of course, those 26 children who had made their first Communions last Sunday—here is a representative sample, with their faces blurred to satisfy the dragons of safeguarding correctness. The boys carried candle lanterns.

We had worried that with the late spring and the early Easter that we wouldn't find enough petals for the girls to strew; however, a resourceful Sister Patrick asked Arundel Cathedral what they were doing with their carpet of flowers (video here) once their procession had taken place. So if you want to know, it ended up providing a second carpet for the Lord.


The final station in the convent chapel. We have three churches in our parish, which accounts for the different uniforms worn by the servers. We'll do something about that one day, when we have some money.
And yes, in case any of you were worried, we did use an ombrellino for indoors, a canopy for outdoors, two thuribles &c, &c; it's just that the photographer didn't happen to catch this. But I'm very grateful to Stephen Sharpe for these early pics.

Happy feast, everyone (even though I wish it were still on Thursday)!