Sister Natalie Becquart a woman in a tradition of leadership pioneered by St Hild of Whitby – The Tablet

All who knew her called her mother because of her outstandingdevotion and grace. (Bede)

A birthday last week brought me a pleasing handful of cards, including one from my former literary agent in which shed inscribed: Sorry local shop is closed.

I was pleased the local shop was closed, as instead of a birthday card it was an English Heritage one with an atmospheric photo of Whitby Abbey on the front.

I first saw the abbey when I was five or six. My tiny (Anglican) church school just 20 or so pupils went to Whitby for the day every summer (and in spring to York Minster, but thats another story). The high point of the daytrip no pun intended was walking up the 199 steps from the harbour to the Abbey, pausing at the top to look at Caedmons Cross which commemorates the 7th century Anglo-Saxon poet whod lived as a lay brother and herdsman for most of his life at St Hildas monastic community, the predecessor to the present-day abbey. The steps, originally wooden, date back to the early 14th Century and are supposed to be a test of faith. The guide books say that they and the abbey were made famous by Bram Stokers Dracula. I confess Ive still to read Dracula, and a visit a few years ago which coincided with one of the bi-annual gatherings of goths hasnt raised it up my list of musts.

Accompanying us always was our parish priest (who also happened to be my guardian) parish priest, never vicar, for ours was an avowedly Anglo-Catholic parish, whose former patroness had spent huge sums on church building and beautification and had helped found a seminary in the village. Fr Wilson had a particular devotion to St Hilda (or Hild, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition), and did his best to impart that devotion to us children as we ate our picnic amid the ruins of the abbey.

He also told us how the German High Seas Fleet had fired at the abbey in 1914. For many years I believed that its ruined state was the result of Hunnic naval gunfire, rather than Henrician despoliation nearly four centuries earlier.

Abbess Hilds monastery had been destroyed by Vikings long before that, however. The Gothic replacement wasnt built until the 13th century.

But the principal story which Fr Wilson told us each year was how Abbess Hild hosted a great synod in 664 (synod, he explained, being Greek for a meeting), and which the King attended. Or rather, King Oswiu of Northumbria, there being, rather confusingly, other kings in other parts of England at that time. The meeting was called to discuss how monks should cut their hair.

In fact, of course, it was to resolve the fundamental issue of Romes authority in these islands. The old Celtic Church had deep roots, preceding the pagan Anglo-Saxon colonisation of Southern England that prompted Pope Gregory the Great to send St Augustine (of Canterbury) on a mission to Christianise the King of Kent. How a monk wore his hair full, as in the Celtic tradition, or with the Roman tonsure was a side issue. Much more important, if not to us children, was the dating of Easter.

After much discussion, King Oswiu, although an adherent of the Celtic tradition, declared for Rome. Apparently he was persuaded by the argument that in St Matthews gospel, Christ had mandated St Peter and his successors to determine such matters: Et ego dico tibi, quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam And I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and especially the gift of the keys to the kingdom of heaven: Et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum.

And thus it was that the Celtic Church receded in England, and Romes authority spread.

All this we children took in, if a little vaguely, but most of all that it was a woman, St Hild, whod arranged everything at the synod.

In later years I wondered if St Catherine of Sienna had known of Hild when she embarked on her mission to bring the Pope back to Rome from Avignon. Im not a medievalist. Im not even very comfortable with the Tudors. But Ive long been intrigued by the evident influence of women in the medieval Church, especially in England. Not just the big names either Richeldis of Walsingham, Julian of Norwich et al but at parish level. Professor Eamon Duffys The Voices of Morebath (2001) is a revelation in this regard. Morebath parish church on the edge of Exmoor was run by women through its various guilds, sub-accounts the flower guild, candle guild, altar guild etc, whose charge was much sought after, and elected.

All this, of course, was swept away at the Reformation. No more flowers, no more candles, and certainly no more altars. So it seems that women then had little choice but to take literally St Pauls injunction, which they could now hear their minister declaim in the English of the Tyndale Bible: Let youre wyves kepe silence in the cogregacions. For it is not permitted vnto them to speake: but let them be vnder obedience as sayth the lawe.

Or worse. The odious Scots Calvinist, John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment [unnatural rule] of Women (1558) railed against gynarchy in the civil sphere hed objected to Mary Tudor not just because she was a Catholic sovereign (of England) but that she was female. And if women could have no role in the civil sphere, which was governed ultimately by Providence, they certainly couldnt in the ecclesiastical.

So what? Only that the Churchs oft-quoted medieval misogyny may have been rather less pronounced than supposed. That in England, at least, it was more the Reformation and the loss of the religious houses that marginalised women. So, to me, the appointment of the French Sister Nathalie Becquart XMCJ as an undersecretary of the synod of bishops is, in the long view of things, hardly remarkable. Who am I to detract from what Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the synod, said was the pontiffs desire for a greater participation of women in the process of discernment and decision-making in the church?

And I dont, for evidently it is. But when I recall all those years ago sitting among the ruins of Whitby Abbey, I cant help thinking that Abbess Hild might be smiling at the memory of her own synod thirteen and a half centuries ago a synod of great and learned men that reconciled what some at the time thought was irreconcilable.

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Sister Natalie Becquart a woman in a tradition of leadership pioneered by St Hild of Whitby - The Tablet

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