The efforts of the Diocese of East Anglia to get rid of its smaller churches have not gone unmarked on this site. Their intentions are noble, to bring parish communities together at a single parish Mass rather than them being scattered through a dozen Masses at half a dozen Mass centres; but local people have a loyalty to their local churches rather than to the parishes arbitrarily drawn up in 1851 at the restoration of the heirarchy, and they don't see why they should lose their building.

A friendly old bloke doing his garden across the road told me that this was the old Harleston boys school, and was rescued from dereliction by local Catholics taking over the school hall and turning it into a chapel of ease, and the rest of it being fitted out as a community resource. It replaced a former chapel of ease in the old Baptist chapel at Wortwell. Subsidiarity in action, as approved by the Vatican. I wonder what the Diocese makes of it.

Simon Knott, June 2005