st catherine’s church
St Catherine’s Wyville is a small parish church in the Harlaxton Group of Churches, part of the Lincoln Diosese. Along with many other Churches, it does not see the footfall that it used to, but it remains in good condition and still offers respite to passers-by and villagers alike. With a new parish priest, after a vacancy that lasted over a year, overseeing a steadily diminishing congregation, services have been reduced to the almost non-existent). However we believe that, despite the current doldrums, the church is an important part of our community and our hope is to be able to keep it running and perhaps even give it a new lease of life.
The current St Catherine’s was built in 1857 by George Gregory (who also oversaw Hungerton Hall and whose nephew built Harlaxton Manor). However there had been an earlier St Catherine’s Church, situated quarter of a mile across the valley where the Sycamore farm buildings now are. We don’t know much about the old church, other than that there was a significant graveyard (coffins and skeletal remains have been found), and that there are stories of an attached leper hospital run by the Order of Saint Lazarus.
Our assumption is that the original St Catherine’s Church must have been of a respectable size; there are huge flagstones in odd places around the estate that have been repurposed from a fairly grand building and, if there was truly was a leper hospital (tied to the associated stories of a healing spring), there would likely be the supporting infrastructure around it, including a significant church.
There is some debate as to which Saint Catherine the church is named after (Alexandria or Siena), but the windows depict St Catherine of Siena, who was a lay member of the Dominican Order and the first female Doctor of the Church. Born in 1347 in Siena, Catherine was quickly recognised as being special, presenting mystical phenomena such as invisible stigmata. She soon became very influential in the Catholic Church, credited with effecting Pope Gregory XI’s move from Avignon to Rome. It was she whom, among many other missions, he then instructed to travel to Florence to negotiate peace, which she succeeded in doing.
Upon Pope Gregory XI’s death Catherine returned to Siena, where she set about recording her set of spiritual treatises, The Dialogue of Divine Providence. The Papal Schism in 1378 lead her to return to Rome with Pope Urban VI, writing a great number of letters to cardinals and princes in order to promote favour for the pope. Two years later she died, exhausted.
Her popularity grew after her death, being canonised in 1461,
declared patron saint of Rome in 1866, and of Italy in 1939. In 1970 she was named as the first female Doctor of the Church, and in 1999 was appointed as patron saint of Europe by Pope John Paul II.
You are a mystery as deep as the sea; the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find the more I search for You.
St Catherine of Siena