PARISH HISTORY
THE
HOLY FAMILY AND ALL SAINTS
CATHOLIC
CHURCH, WITHAM
The Catholic Parish of Witham is one of the oldest in the Diocese of Brentwood. It can trace its origins to 1575 when, in the period of the persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth I and her successors, a clandestine ‘mission’ was operated under the auspices of the Southcote family and then the Stourton family at Witham Place.
There were priests resident until 1800 and thereafter there were only a few years (e.g. the 1840s) when no priest lived at Witham. The first sacramental registers for the Witham mission date back to 1774.
The first public post-Reformation Catholic Church (The Holy Family) was opened in Newland Street on 22 October 1851, just one year after the Restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy of England & Wales, when Witham became part of the Archdiocese of Westminster.
The Parish of the Holy Family was canonically erected on 21 August 1918, Essex and much of East London having been separated from the Archdiocese of Westminster in 1917 to form the Diocese of Brentwood. Holy Family Church was consecrated by Bishop Beck (3rd Bishop of Brentwood) on 20 September 1951, almost 100 years after it was opened.
On 1 November 1989 the present Church of Holy Family & All Saints was opened in Guithavon Street, using the former Anglican Church of All Saints, built in 1842 but closed in 1969.
It is a Grade II Listed Building. A new presbytery (priest’s house) was built beside the church. The original church in Newland Street was duly sold as private housing, although the small cemetery attached still survives, with one of the former priests of Witham (Father William Baines, at Holy Family Church 1853-1887 ) buried there.
Meanwhile, a Mass centre at Silver End had been started in 1932 in conjunction with the Crittall Estate (served from Kelvedon until 1932 and thereafter from Witham). On 9 November 1966 a permanent chapel-of-ease was opened (St Mary, Sheepcote Lane, Silver End). There had been a small Catholic school attached to Holy Family Church in Newland Street in former times. This school had closed after the First World War but as early as the 1940s attempts were made to provide a new school. Holy Family Primary School in Maltings Lane opened in 1979. The present Parish Priest is Father Nixon Gomes (appointed in 2020).
ST MARY'S, SILVER END
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