46 days, 46 churches

The British journalist set himself a challenge and “made it extra hard for myself by undertaking to go to a different church every day, so by Easter Sunday I'd been before 46 different priests in 46 different churches in 46 days”, he explained.   

Chiles is Catholic, so he went to daily mass for more than a month. Before the experience, he believed: “it would be a real struggle - a penance”. But “it turned out to be anything but. It was a rich and enriching experience - spiritually, obviously, but I was also enraptured by the churches themselves, the communities they serve, and the people with whom I shared all those Masses”, he added.

He started on Ash Wednesday, when he went to St Illtyd's in Port Tennant, a neat little community, where he was impressed by the statue outside of Christ on the cross, made from some metal that had corroded kind of creating new stigmata on it.

FUNNY, SAD, AND CURIOUS MOMENTS

One Friday at St Patrick's in Soho Square, he has just chosen her pew, he sprang back up in alarm as he realised there was someone in a sleeping bag motionless at his feet. “I looked around at the rest of the congregation but no-one else seemed very concerned, so I shrugged inwardly, knelt and prayed for him, or it may have been a her. Who knows?”, he recalled.

Other random mass moments he experienced was at Sacred Heart in Fareham at 7am, when he, on his own words: “sighed a little as an impossibly ancient lady in a woolly hat stepped forward to do the reading. This could take a while, I thought. But it turned out that in her younger days she could only have been an actor or Radio 4 newsreader. Her voice, clear as a church bell.”

Chiles started on Ash Wednesday, when he went to St Illtyd's in Port Tennant. / BBC

OLD CONGREGATIONS, DIFFERENT PRIESTS

Chiles commented that “it was striking how similar the [Catholic] congregations were at weekday Masses. There is no getting away from it: the average age must be somewhere in the seventies. But there was also invariably a young family of Asian origin, usually with young children. “

According to the British broadcaster, there were 3 different types of priests:

"A third of them I found to be great, with a handful quite life-changingly brilliant. Another third were sort of OK. The rest were pretty hopeless, not least because I often could not actually hear what they were saying. And a handful was grumpy to the point of malevolence”, he concluded.

“THE CLUE IS IN THE WORD”

Talking about the liturgy, “essentially the same script which priests do day in, day out”, he quoted what Father Paul Addison of Our Lady of Delours in Kersal told him during one of the interviews he made: "The clue's in the word; communion is all about communicating."

Chiles came to the conclusion that “one of the beauties of daily Mass is, frankly, its brevity - invariably less than half an hour. Sometimes the sermon is dispensed with altogether, but often it just takes the form of a thought or two, which I find much easier to get my head round than one of Sunday's lengthy orations”, he said.

Mosaics of Church of the Sacred Heart and St Catherine of Alexandria in Droitwich Spa. / BBC

“MORE MASSES THAN THE POPE”

After 46 days visiting 46 churches, “someone pointed out to me at around the 35-priest mark that even the Pope probably had not heard Mass said by so many different priests in so many different churches in such a short space of time”, he wrote about this experience.

He concluded affirming that he “will always think back to this Lent as one of the most rewarding and quietly intense 46 days of my life.”