Splendid tombs of Tichborne

"THINGS" do not matter in religion. Neither relics nor shrines nor holy places replace the essentials. All that matters is the sinners' relationships with God. But, my goodness, the "things" help.
Each year at Tichborne on the feast of SS Peter and Paul there is a Mass said for a family whose main distinction was to
have kept the Faith on and off and to have acquired a baronetage.
This family, the Tichbornes, no longer have an heir through the male line. There is no longer a baronet. The first of these, who could hardly have been a passionate Catholic, proclaimed James 1 in Winchester at The Cross and got his title for it, However, England is a delightful and complicated place. Attached to Tichborne Park there is a Catholic chapel of touching and humble elegance. But up the hill, in the village, there is a very ancient and very English church with Saxon touches that is the parish church of the locality. It has, like a few other places, the extraordinary faculty of having a Catholic aisle dedicated to the dead of the Tichborne family.
This aisle is small, it is cut off from the rest of the church by a splendid row of railings in the shape of spears, and over its entrance there hangs one of the Few tilting helmets left in a church in England.
The aisle is crowded with splendid tombs, painted, restored, done.up as if someone loved them. Below them is a crypt in which the family and their cousins are buried, lapped in lead and encased with wood, heaped up and closed by a great ringed stone in the floor.
But in this small aisle once a year the Catholics say Mass for the family. It is all very simple and quiet. The readings are those of the Holiday.
The congregation overflows into the agonisingly uncomfortable box pews though they're beautifully carved of the Anglicans. (Flow did they endure those interminable sermons?) The priest preaches (briefly) from the pulpit. The lectors read from it.
This church, which crouches on the ground almost like an animal in awe, has been marvellously restored lately with the help of rich commuters, of aristocrats, devout Anglicans, Catholics who love their country, of women who will do anything for anything to help anybody, and who are part of the bright, shining eccentric splendour of England.
The altar itself is a strange thing. It is Elizabethan certainly. It is small, made crudely of oak, and the cross on its surface is not inset but raised above the oak of the altar table. It is low. It is humble. It is blindingly a part of our Faith when it was secret and proscribed. It is on civilised occasions like this that one hungers for a real reunion.