MISSIONER HAS TAKEN

MASS TO 127 CENTRES
Chapels were a tea room and dance halt
THE Northampton Travelling Mission ap
proaches Home Mission Sunday—this coming Sunday—with the remarkable record of having within three years brought the Mass to 127 centres, in 97 of which Mass had not been said since the Reformation.
Fifteen places to which the Mass has returned have greedy become regular parish Mass centres.
Never has the missioner failed to find at least one Catholic in the more than 500 villages he has visited in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.
He has said Mass in :
A drawing room, corn hall, studio, sanatorium, cottage parlour, bowling green hall, tea room, domestic chapel, restaurant, British Legion hut, old rectory, council school, cadets hut, council house, tovv-n hall, nursing home, squatters' kitchen, inn, surgery, cubs' room (in a vicarage), village
hall, farm
parlour, old Peoples' ball, Women's Institute, hostel, E.V.W. camp, dance hall, Polish settlement, chalet, agricultural workers' camp, Free Foresters office, cooperative shop, library, guides' hut, brick builders' camp, asylum, a bus, a boat
and In the open air.
Not a week has passed but someone has made his annual Confession and Holy Communion, writes a correspondent.
Every where the travelling missioner has found a few Catholics with real faith and he has found that no one is hopeless.
The palm goes to the man whose father used to get the family off four times a year at 3 a.m.
They used to walk 10 miles, travel 25 miles by train, hear Mass and go to the sacraments. get the train back and walk the 10 miles home.
There is nothing quite like that now although the missioner did 40 miles one Sunday before beginning his third Mass.
G. K. Chesterton, who used to say that he enjoyed any kind of weather except what is known as very good weather. would have enjoyed this last winter. The travelling missioner got literally stuck in the Fens one Saturday.
IN FLOODS
o's man he had been to see said: " For what., Father, would anyone be wanting to build a house here 7" The answer is that in former days the cottager would have gone by boat down the cuts, into the river and so to the nearest village: as quick a way of travel then as any.
Going through the floods at Shabbington, on the Oxfordshire border, the missioner saw half-size goalposts sticking up out of the water, and ducks and swans swimming about over the pitch.
Open-air meetings have been arranged or addressed in six of the seven counties in such diverse situations as a crowded market place at Northampton and the Butlands, Wells-next-the-Sea, with perhaps 20 or so people present.
One of the Wilson-Mather mobile churches, a trailer, is in use and will be doing a good mileage once the summer campaign begins again.
This trailer is 21 feet long and sumptuously appointed.
The travelling missioner also has a shooting brake convertible into a travelling chapel. On its first outing it carried five Popes—Mrs. Pope and four of her children—to Mass at Lidgate.