A MASS WILL BREAK 600

r.... MMMMM Closed Black Death• b; the YEARS OF SILENCE
NEW LIFE FOR A KENT CHURCH
VHUT and silent for nearly 600
"years, a tiny Norman church in Kent is to have Mass again next June 21.
The celebrant will be Bishop Cowderoy of Southwark.
Dode Church stands in Wrangling Lane, far from any village and surrounded with overgrown hedgerows, hidden in the trees between Luddesdown and Snodland.
Miss Arnold, of Shorne, Kent, daughter of the late Mr. G. M. Arnold. a former Mayor of Gravesend, who bought the building in 1901 and restored it, is to hand it over to the Church of the English Martyrs, Strood.
Regarded as one of the antiquities of Kent, Dode Church is only 25 ft. long.
It is all that remains of a oncethriving village whose population was almost wiped out in the Black Death of 1349.
Last Mass
William de Neistin, who e as rector of the parish in 1364. was probably the last priest to celebrate Mass there, for in 1367 the church was closed and the remnants of the parish were united with near-by Paddlesworth.
Very little is known of the church's origin. It is not known exactly when the church was built. The architectural features are clearly the work of a Norman mason. Nor is it known who gave the site, built the church, endowed it, or bywhom it was consecrated.
The crumbling walls were restored and the thatched roof tiled by Mr. Arnold, but the original beatenearth floor of Norman times remains.
The land around the church is to be used as a camping ground for Catholic youth organisations.
'Legion' for two Little Sisters
Sister Genevieve de Sainte-Chantal of Paris. Superior General of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and Sister Therese, who for 56 years has worked in Cachan, near Paris, have been awarded the Legion of Honour.
On her visits to the sick, Sister Therese, still active at the age of 80, often finds that she is helping the great-grandchildren of those she helped when she first became a nun.
Franciscan out of Red China
After 30 months in a Hankow prison, Fr. Sigfrid Schneider, 0.F.M., of Louisville, Kentucky. has been released by the Chinese Communists and is now in Hong Kong.
Fr. Schneider was arrested on May 26, 1951, with Bishop Kowalski, 0.F.M., of Wuchang, They were charged with "baby killing" in the mission orphanage in Wuchan g. Bishop Kowalski was released in September.