A Favourite Feast Day!

Today was the feast of one of my patron saints - St. Anne Line. I wrote a chapter about her which was published in English Catholic Heroines - my only claim to fame as a "proper" author... though I have written a couple of small pieces for the Catholic Herald (they must have been short on copy!)

I chose St. Anne as a patron saint because I liked her acerbic tone, first at her trial and also at her execution by hanging at Tyburn. On being asked whether she repented of her "crime" of harbouring a Catholic priest, she retorted that, "...so far am I from repenting that I would I could have sheltered a thousand!"

That feisty attitude in defence of the Catholic Faith, her clear understanding that, without priests, there would be no sacraments and therefore no Church, plus the fact that she taught children and showed hospitality to priests, really struck a chord within me. St. Margaret Clitherow and St. Margaret Ward, who share St. Anne's feast day, never captured my heart in the same way, although they, too, lived and died heroically.

About 8 or 9 years ago I went with Joanna Bogle on a mini-pilgrimage to find out more about St. Anne - at the time there were only three articles on the web about her life, and details were extremely sketchy. You can read more about my pilgrimage there.