The Tyburn Nuns have monasteries in Bombay and in Waikato.

The order, properly called the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, has spread rapidly around the world in the last few decades.

As well as the two communities in New Zealand, they have also opened convents in South America, Africa, and France.

Mother Garnier, who died in Tyburn Convent, near Marble Arch, London, in 1924, has been given the title "Servant of God" after the Congregation for the Cause of Saints concluded that there were "no obstacles" to her candidacy.

Mother Xavier McMonagle, the assistant Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns, said the nuns had sought the opening of the cause for 20 years.

"It has been a long time, but that's not such a bad thing," she said. "It has given us time to research her writings."

Mother Garnier was a governess who turned down a marriage proposal to establish a religious order in Montmartre, Paris at the end of the 19th century.

The anti-clerical Law of Associations led to the nuns fleeing London in 1901.

They settled in Notting Hill two years later.

The community was dedicated to the perpetual adoration of the Holy Eucharist, but they were often attacked with obsession, possessions and objects being overturned or thrown around rooms.

Garnier witnessed the Eucharist turn to bloody flesh in a priest's hands during Mass.

She wrote a letter to Abbé Charles Sauvé, a priest friend, describing the experience:

"At the moment in which the priest took a particle of the Holy Host and put it into the chalice I raised my eyes to adore and to contemplate the holy particle," she wrote.

"Oh, if you could know what I saw and how I am still moved and impressed by this vision."

"The fingers of the priest held not a white particle but a particle of striking red, the colour of blood and luminous at the same time..."

"The fingers of the priest were red on the right of the particle, as from a blood stain that seemed still wet."

Source

• catholicherald.co.uk
• catholic.org
• Image: static2.stuff.co.nz

Sir Michael Tegendhat said soaring numbers of lawsuits involving religion pointed to an increasing denial of human rights.

Sir Michael was the UK's top libel and media judge until he retired last year.

His comments came in a speech at Tyburn Convent, just metres from the site of gallows upon which 105 Catholics were executed between 1535 and 1681.

The Catholic Herald reported Sir Michael saying the concept of secularism should guarantee a neutral space.

But instead it was being used as a pretext for hostility towards religion and religious practices.

He said the changes came when a succession of equality legislation was passed without giving adequate protection to the religious convictions of Christians.

This led to a series of complaints of harassment and unfair dismissal.

One of the most high-profile cases involved Nadia Eweida, who was told by British Airways that she could not wear a cross on her uniform.

The Catholic Church in the UK was forced to close or hand over about a dozen adoption agencies because it could not meet the statutory demand to assess gay couples as adoptive parents.

Sir Michael said secularism comes in different forms.

"It can be neutral, as it usually is in the United States and sometimes is in France, but it can also stand for hostility to belief in the ‘super-human'," he said.

"Those who are hostile to belief in a super-human being or to religious practices, I am afraid, sometimes exhibit an attitude to freedom of religion and freedom of speech which are as restrictive of that of Elizabeth I or Burghley [her chief minister].

"They seek to limit those freedoms to the private sphere, but that is a denial of the rights that these freedoms enshrine and that is what the Jesuits and the Puritans fought against," he said.

"Their fight was ultimately successful, as we all know, but at enormous personal cost."

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Image: The Guardian

The film project entitled Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo, involved some five months of filming in Britain, Ireland, Italy, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Australia and New Zealand, and a process of editing that lasted nearly a year.

The film offers an authentic view of life in a cloistered, contemplative community based on adoration of the Holy Eucharist and the Rule of St Benedict.

Mother Xavier McMonagle, Mother General of the nuns, whose formal name is the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, said she was delighted with the result.

"I hope that it serves to inform the general public that in the Catholic Church the monastic contemplative life is one of vibrant, joyous and holy dedication to God, a life well worth living - not only for the nuns themselves, but for all those people who are touched by glimpsing something of this life of hidden, godly dedication," she said.

Mr Davies, who attended the launch, said he was "moved to tears many times by the beauty of what I was filming".

The Tyburn Nuns came to New Zealand just 15 years ago and they now have a thriving monastery supported by the active enthusiasm of local people, including a 92-year-old man who has created a series of bush walks modelled on the Stations of the Cross which have become a pilgrimage destination for tourists.

The nuns are filmed in the New Zealand countryside, nursing orphaned lambs, harvesting herbs and crops and in silent contemplation.

Michael Luke Davies, a non-Catholic, said that filming the prioress sitting beside a river bank was for him the high point in the entire production. "I come from a fashion and beauty background," he said. "I had been filming models all my life and then suddenly I found myself waist-deep in water filming this religious person by this river and I felt to myself: ‘This is what I am supposed to be doing.' It was a massive moment in my life."

Sources: Catholic Herald 1, Catholic Herald 2