Letter from the Rectory - March 2025

Dear Friends,

If people think about saints at all, it’s probably the long-dead heroes of the Christian Faith, such as the early followers of Jesus’ depicted in the stain-glass windows of churches like Withyham. Protestants tend to have more restrained view as to who should be made a saint, whilst Catholics adopts a broader approach.

Some contemporary Catholic saints - and potential saints - have often led interesting lives. One of these was Clare Crockett.  She was born in Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1982.  She once described herself as a ‘wild child’ teenager.  She later became an actress – ‘beer in one hand, cigarette in the other’ – until one day she shocked her friends by declaring that she was going to become a nun.  She declared to them that her motto in life was ‘all or nothing’.  

When she was 16, a famous hypnotist came to Derry; there were about 800 people in the audience. She was called out onto the stage and pretended to be hypnotized. A few years later, at home with her family and a few friends, she explained “Remember when I pretended to be hypnotized?” Everyone stared at me and there was complete silence. “Remember?” I repeated with a nervous laugh. “No, No,” they responded, “you really were hypnotized you don’t remember anymore.”

She went on, “I tell this story because when I realized that God was calling me to the religious life, nobody could believe that God would call a girl like me. For many, it was impossible that I could have a vocation. Yet somehow, they could believe I’d been hypnotized. G. K. Chesterton once said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they then become capable of believing in anything.”  God can call whomever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants… Why? Because he is God.”

Clare went out to South America to teach music in Ecuador.  Tragically, she was killed during an earthquake when the building she was in collapsed in 2016; she was just 33.  The case is being made for Sister Clare - as she has become known – to be officially recognised as a saint. A ceremony took place in the Catholic Cathedral in Madrid in January.  In the Catholic Church, a person must have been dead for at least five years; there is an investigation to discover whether the person lived a particularly holy life as a ‘servant of God’; if their prayers have resulted in a miracle, the person is first ‘beatified’, then, if a second miracle they are ‘canonised’ - made a saint. God calls all sorts of unexpected people.

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James Campbell