ABSTRACT
The opening of the new Anglican shrine church at Walsingham on October 15 1931 took place during what, in retrospect, can be seen as the most triumphant phase of Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England. Although it was almost imperceptible at the time, the slow decline of Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England seems to have begun almost immediately after the Second World War and had become quite noticeable by the 1960s, with a growing number of churches attracting small congregations of the elderly faithful. Walsingham was very much a feature of its time. Its incorporation into the more mainstream Catholic tradition within the Church of England, and the fact that nowadays even bishops and archbishops of English dioceses are happy to be associated with it, should not be allowed to disguise the fact that Walsingham was a creation of wider cultural trends of that period when to be an Anglo-Catholic was still rather “naughty” and likely to court episcopal disapproval. In this chapter I want to place Walsingham itself, and the restoration and development of the shrine by Alfred Hope Patten, within interwar Anglo-Catholicism and the broader shifts in outlook that made the restoration possible.
