Church of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory
Warwick Street
Dedicated to the Life of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The most famous Portuguese Ambassador who lived in Golden Square was undoubtedly Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later 1st Marquis of Pombal. Soon after his arrival in London in 1739 he drew up a detailed list of regulations and services to be carried out in the Chapel: “Mass and...
The chapel which existed behind the house of the Portuguese Ambassadors after 1724, was evidently situated between the two houses on Golden Square and the stables which fronted on Warwick Street. Thus the chapel itself was much smaller than the present church and probably invisible from either the Golden Square...
At Easter 2013 Warwick Street Parish was dedicated by Cardinal Vincent Nichols to the life of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham as its main church in the UK. The Ordinariate was established by Pope Benedict XVI in 201l to allow Anglicans to enter into the full communion of...
The survival of Warwick Street Parish as a Catholic church open to the public was the purest good fortune. When the Portuguese Embassy moved to Mayfair in 1747, the Catholic Bavarian Minister, Joseph Franz Xavier Graf von Haslang, took over both houses (numbers 23 and 24 Golden Square and so...
The reason why Catholic Londoners could freely attend Mass at Warwick Street Parish, even during penal times, was the permission granted to access the chapels of the representatives of the Catholic powers under the Peace of Utrecht (1713-15). There were, of course, other embassy chapels in London. Those of the...
