Our Community

• We are a Chapel of Ease to St Benet’s R.C. Church in Beccles, which stands next door to St Benet’s Catholic Primary School
• We are served by the Benedictine Community of Downside Abbey
• We are part of the Catholic Diocese of East Anglia
• We are situated just outside the main village of Gillingham
• We are occasionally visited by The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales

If you would like to write to a Roman Catholic cleric, Debrett’s lists all the correct forms of address for Catholic priests and bishops (formal and informal).

Our History

• We are listed on the Norfolk Churches Website
• Burke’s Peerage entry for John George Kenyon
• For more information about the Regina Coeli prison at the time of John George Kenyon’s imprisonment, please see the thesis by Olga Touloumi, The prison of Regina Coeli : a laboratory of identity in the Post-Risorgimento Italy, MIT, 2006
• For a full account of the origins and history of the Benedictine mission in Bungay, which puts Benedictine activity in Beccles and its environs in context: Slender Thread, Edward Crouzet, Downside Abbey Books, 2007 (ISBN: 978-1-898663-16-4)
• We are mentioned (p.249) by Gordon J. Beattie in Gregory’s Angels: A History of the Abbeys, Priories, Parishes and Schools of of the Monks and Nuns Following the Rule of Saint Benedict in Great Britain, Ireland and Their Overseas Foundations: to Commemorate the Arrival of Saint Augustine in Kent in 597 AD, Gracewing Publishing, 1997
• You can find our more about the fascinating history of Catholicism in East Anglia on the East Anglian Catholic History Society website