Posted by This past Sunday, the Dominican church in London, which is jointly dedicated to the Order’s founder and Our Lady of the Rosary, celebrated the feast of the Most Holy Rosary with His Eminence Vincent Cardinal Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster. (The Dominicans first established a presence in England in 1221, and so celebrate the eighth centenary of their English province this year.) Our long-time contributor and photographer extraordinaire, Fr Lawrence Lew OP, who is also the church’s rector and prior of the community that serves it, kindly shared with us these photos of the Mass, and some other recent goings-on.
New Liturgical Movement: Pictures of Rosary Sunday in London
The shrine has 15 side-chapels, each one dedicated to a mystery of the Rosary. The Joyful mysteries and the first two Sorrowful ones run down the church’s left side-aisle, from near the main sanctuary toward the back; the latter three Sorrowful and first four Glorious go from the back up the right side-aisle. The fifth Glorious Mystery, the Coronation of the Virgin, is commemorated in this chapel in the right transept, which has recently been restored. The Virgin Mary is here also honored with the title “Seat of Wisdom”, in reference to the Dominican vocation to scholarship and teaching.
Decorations of the main sanctuary.
A nice tribute to the medieval heritage of the Dominican Order; lecterns decorated with eagles in this fashion were so common in the Middle Ages that the rubrics of medieval liturgical books often refer to them simply as an “aquila.”
This statue of the Virgin and Child is carried in the procession after the Mass. The friars are also holding a candlelit procession through the church every Saturday evening at 7pm this month; pictures of the first procession are seen below.
The tabernacle of the main altar.
The first of this month’s processions by candlelight in honor of the month of the Holy Rosary.
Mass on Rosary Sunday. The friars are wearing vestments decorated with symbols of the Dominican Order, recently commissioned by Fr Lew, as we showed in a post this past June.
The procession
Decorations around the priory.
