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Welcome to the English Martyrs Didcot and St John Wallingford parish website. We are two neighbouring churches within the Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth. We currently have about five hundred regular parishioners and many activities.

English Martyrs Church Didcot is open daily for private prayers between 8am and 5pm.

St John the Evangelist Church Wallingford is open daily for private prayers between 8am and 6pm.

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This Friday, 1st November is the great Solemnity of All Saints (a Holy Day of Obligation). On this day, the Church venerates all those known and unknown, whose virtues and efforts in this life are considered to have earned them an eternal reward from God. In doing so, we the Church on earth traditionally give thanks for their lives, consider their example, strive to emulate them, ask for their intercession in the trials of this life, and glorify God through the multitude that have gone before us, remembering that we too are all called to be saints. Veneration of saints is giving glory to God in them and through them. Their graces are God’s gift to them and their example is our hope. This feast also reminds us that great saints who have their own feast days, like these ones who do not, have come from all states and walks of life: clergy and lay, married and single, humble and mighty. Today, beatifications and canonisations are of people from a great variety of backgrounds and countries, and it is possible to form a more comprehensive view of what constitutes the universal holiness of the Church. In the early centuries, martyrs alone were venerated as saints and a feast of “the Martyrs of all the Earth” was celebrated in the East in the mid-fourth century. The feast caught on in the West, especially after Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in 610 to Saint Mary and All the Saints. Subsequently, Pope Gregory IV (d. 844) formally fixed the 1st November as the date for this feast. (Portsmouth Diocese e-News)

All Souls Day
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Image: Shutterstock

This Saturday, 2nd November is All Souls Day, when we honour and pray for the dead, especially for our own departed loved ones. It is definitely a day when, if we can, we should attend Mass, offering it for the faithful departed. YouCat, the Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church (London, CTS: 2011) explains well what we pray for on 2nd November in two of its questions. 159 What is purgatory? Purgatory, often imagined as a place, is actually a condition. Someone who dies in God’s grace (and therefore at peace with God and people) but who still needs purification before he can see God face to face is in purgatory. When Peter had betrayed Jesus, the Lord turned around and looked at Peter: “And Peter went out and wept bitterly”—a feeling like being in purgatory. Just such a purgatory probably awaits most of us at the moment of our death: the Lord looks at us full of love—and we experience burning shame and painful remorse over our wicked or “merely” unloving behaviour. Only after this purifying pain will we be capable of meeting his loving gaze in untroubled heavenly joy. 160 Can we help the departed who are in the condition of purgatory? Yes, since all those who are baptized into Christ form one communion and are united with one another, the living can also help the souls of the faithful departed in purgatory. When a man is dead, he can do nothing more for himself. The time of active probation is past. But we can do something for the faithful departed in purgatory. Our love extends into the afterlife. Through our fasting, prayers, and good works, but especially through the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, we can obtain grace for the departed.

Past events

Where to find us

English Martyrs Church,
15 Manor Crescent, Didcot, Oxon  OX11 7AJ

Telephone: 01235 812338

didcot@portsmouthdiocese.org.uk

St John the Evangelist Church
Market Place, Wallingford, Oxon OX10 0EG

(All correspondence to English Martyrs Church Didcot)

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