Diocese of Nottingham

Diocese of Nottingham The Catholic Diocese of Nottingham in the East Midlands of England.

• The Assumption of Our Lady •Today the whole diocese keeps the feast of The Assumption of Our Lady. 💐 And this year, we...
16/08/2026

• The Assumption of Our Lady •

Today the whole diocese keeps the feast of The Assumption of Our Lady. 💐 And this year, we have something very special to show you.

For decades, the ceiling of the Cathedral’s Lady Chapel sat under layers of grey paint. This summer, Pugin’s design has come back to the light: a sky of stars and sunbursts, and everywhere, worked in gold, the letter M. Her initial, over and over. ✨

At the heart of it stands the newly restored statue of Our Lady: returned, at last, to her original plinth. And here’s the detail to find when you visit: look at the base before you look up. A serpent. Foliage. Some apples. The Garden of Eden, carved beneath her feet. Pugin never designed at random: Mary stands where the old story broke, because she is the New Eve. The early Church loved to say it plainly: what Eve’s no had knotted, Mary’s yes untied.

That yes was said in openness to the Holy Spirit, without knowing where it would lead. Today we celebrate where it carried her: body and soul, into glory. 🙏

Our Mission Plan asks God for renewal across this diocese. In the Lady Chapel you a tangible expression of that renewal… what was once grey, is now glittering in gold and radiant in colour.

Come and see her.

Part of Restoring Pugin, made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery players. The National Lottery Heritage Fund

13/08/2026

Read at Mass on 8–9 August: the Bishop responds to the assisted su***de Bill. Make your voice heard.

• All Saints Church, Hassop •🏛️ It looks like a Greek temple has wandered into the Peak District. There’s a reason it do...
13/08/2026

• All Saints Church, Hassop •

🏛️ It looks like a Greek temple has wandered into the Peak District. There’s a reason it doesn’t look like a church.

The Eyres came to Hassop in 1498 and never let go of their Catholic faith. Through two centuries of penal law, Mass was celebrated secretly in buildings within the hall grounds. Priests came and went quietly. Generations were baptised without fuss.

Then, in 1816 - still thirteen years before Catholic Emancipation - Francis Eyre built a chapel outside his own gates, where the whole village could see it. The law still expected Catholic chapels to stay unnoticeable: no tower, no bell, no spire. So he built something magnificent that broke no rules: a classical temple, with a coffered ceiling, an altar of Sicilian marble, and a Crucifixion scene in the style of one of the great Italian masters. Quiet on the outside. Glorious within. Rather like the family’s faith had been for three hundred years.

⛪️ It is still a parish church today, the only Grade I listed Catholic Church in our diocese, and Mass is still offered where the Eyres finally stepped into the open.

Discipleship usually isn’t dramatic. It’s the decision, repeated across a lifetime - across generations, here - to keep following, keep praying, keep handing the faith on, when giving up would be easier.

🙏 Whoever taught you to pray was part of a chain like that. Hassop is what the chain looks like in stone.

• St Joseph’s Shrine, Goyt Valley •There’s no road to this one. That’s rather the point.🌲High above the Goyt Valley near...
11/08/2026

• St Joseph’s Shrine, Goyt Valley •

There’s no road to this one. That’s rather the point.

🌲High above the Goyt Valley near Buxton, on foot through the pines behind the ruins of Errwood Hall, you come to a small round stone shrine with a low oak door. The door is never locked.

The Grimshawes of Errwood were a Catholic family, and in 1883 a Spanish lady named Doña Dolores de Ybarguen came to the hall as companion to the widowed Mrs Grimshawe. She stayed to teach, running a little school for thirty estate children. She died in her forties, on pilgrimage to Lourdes.

The shrine appeared in 1889, and nobody knows for certain whether Dolores built it in thanksgiving or the family built it in her memory. Inside, above an image of St Joseph holding the child Jesus, a marble slab carries her initials and a line in Spanish: “No one asks in vain of St Joseph - a token of gratitude.”

Since then, the hall has been demolished and the valley’s farms and cottages lie under two reservoirs. The whole world Dolores knew is gone. The shrine is still there. Walkers keep finding it, ducking through the low door, and leaving flowers, notes, prayers. Nobody organises this. Nobody advertises it. 💚

Maybe that’s what holiness on your doorstep looks like: a place so quiet that when you finally sit down in it, you can hear what your heart has been trying to say to God all along.

🥾Boots required.

• Padley Gorge, Derbyshire •Walkers climb Padley Gorge every weekend. Most never notice the chapel at the bottom.In July...
10/08/2026

• Padley Gorge, Derbyshire •

Walkers climb Padley Gorge every weekend. Most never notice the chapel at the bottom.

In July 1588, two priests - Nicholas Garlick, a Derbyshire man from near Glossop, and Robert Ludlam - were discovered at Padley Hall. They had only meant to stay one night. Being a Catholic priest in England was, at that moment, a capital offence. Within twelve days they had been tried and executed in Derby, near the street where, 250 years later, Catholics would raise Pugin’s first great church. ⛪️

They could have saved themselves at any point with a single denial. Neither gave it. On their last night they shared a cell with a woman condemned for murder; by morning she had found faith, and she professed it from the scaffold. Ludlam’s only recorded words came at the very end, and witnesses say he was smiling: Venite, benedicti Dei , “Come, you blessed of God.” 🕊️

The Church declared both men Blessed in 1987, and pilgrims have been coming to Padley since 1898. The gorge is open every day; the chapel only occasionally, so check before you travel. But even from the path, you’re on holy ground; the place where two men decided their witness to Christ mattered more than their lives. 🙏

• The Peak District, Derbyshire •You may recognise this photograph. It’s the sunrise over the Peak District that Bishop ...
06/08/2026

• The Peak District, Derbyshire •

You may recognise this photograph. It’s the sunrise over the Peak District that Bishop Patrick chose as one of the images on the cover of our Diocesan Mission Plan. 🌅

Today’s feast explains why. On a mountain, three tired friends watched Jesus’s face change, and light pour out of him, and heard a voice: this is my beloved Son. Listen to him. Peter’s response was entirely human — he wanted to stay up there forever.

They came down, of course. We always do. But they came down different, carrying what they’d seen.

That’s what an encounter with God does. It doesn’t remove the valley of life’s difficulties. It changes the person walking through it.

If the beauty of creation has ever done something to your soul, you already half understand this feast.♥️

• Ars, France •Every stop on this trail so far has been within an hour of your front door. Today we go to France, but st...
05/08/2026

• Ars, France •

Every stop on this trail so far has been within an hour of your front door. Today we go to France, but stay with us, because it leads straight back to your own parish. ⛪️

Today the Church remembers a French village priest who could barely pass his exams.

John Vianney was sent to Ars in 1818, a backwater of a parish, because nobody expected much of it, or of him. Within thirty years, people were travelling across Europe to see him; not for his preaching, but for his confessional, where he sat up to sixteen hours a day, and where thousands met the mercy of God and left changed.

Last year, Bishop Patrick made a pilgrimage to Ars with clergy of our diocese, to that same confessional and parish church. 🙏

The Church names him the patron saint of parish priests, and there is the doorstep. The priest who hears confessions in your parish this Saturday is doing, not far from where you’re reading this, exactly what St John Vianney did in Ars.

💌 So, two invitations. That same mercy waits in your nearest parish this weekend- there’s no Channel to cross to find it, why not go experience it? And say a prayer for your parish priest, by name. He carries more than you see.

• St Mary’s Church, Derby •For more than two centuries, celebrating a Catholic Mass in England was against the law. In D...
05/08/2026

• St Mary’s Church, Derby •

For more than two centuries, celebrating a Catholic Mass in England was against the law. In Derby, as everywhere, the faith survived behind closed doors - back rooms, quiet houses, heads down - and the restrictions lifted only slowly. Even when Catholic chapels were finally permitted in 1791, the law set conditions: no steeple, no bell. Worship if you must, but keep quiet. 🙏

Then, in 1829, Catholic Emancipation arrived, and Catholics were at last free to live their faith in the open.

Derby’s Catholics didn’t wait long. Ten years after Emancipation, on Bridge Gate, they raised St Mary’s, the young Augustus Welby Pugin’s first great church, with a tower you can see right across the city. The future Cardinal Wiseman saw exactly what it meant: “the real transition from chapel to church architecture among us.” ⛪️

Step inside and the whisper becomes a shout. A chancel of stencilled colour and gold. Hardman glass above the altar. Our Lady and her Son watching from canopied niches. Two generations of Pugins worked on this church, father and son.

Mass has been offered here, openly, every week since. If living your faith visibly ever feels awkward, come and stand in a church built by people whose grandparents worshipped in hiding and at risk of death.

🔜 Next week, this trail climbs to Padley, where that hidden history has names and faces.

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1 Castle Quay
Nottingham
NG71FW

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