The journey we have made to Sutton today forms part of a revival in pilgrimage among our contemporaries who set out in search of sometimes undefined goals and yet are drawn by the attraction of holiness to those places where the call to holiness continues to re-echo in our time.

The earthly pilgrimage of the Venerable Elizabeth Prout was such a journey, made first into the full communion of the Catholic Church at that same mid-century moment as Saint John Henry Newman. If Newman was led by his study of the Fathers of the Church and her history; Elizabeth was led by the preaching of Blessed Dominic and the first Passionist missionaries to live and announce the ‘memory’ of His Passion.

The story of her religious life is well known to you who have lived the same vocation in the community she founded as Mother Mary Joseph. Yet, in the landscape of contemporary British society we are all called by her witness to draw on those same resources of faith and grace wherever human life and dignity are today threatened.

We cannot fail to think of the lives of the most vulnerable being threatened by medical killing in a seismic change to the way British society views the sick and elderly. In the alien landscape into which euthanasia threatens to lead us, Elizabeth Prout stands in witness to the values we may be in danger of losing: reverence for human life and the care we owe to each other even to the point of sacrifice.

In giving thanks today for her life and witness at the beginning of the industrial age, we ask her prayers and pray the holiness of her life will be recognised and raised up in the sight of the Church.

(Pictures of Bishop Davies preaching at the Mass for Venerable Elizabeth Prout in the Church of St Anne and Blessed Dominic Barberi, taken by Simon Caldwell, Sept. 13, 2025)