Page 4 - LOTN Summer Issue 47 2021

DIOCESE
Mass to celebrate history of Shetland parish

he Shetland Times Bookshop, Lerwick, was
the unlikely setting for a Mass on 28th June to
T celebrate the early history of the Shetland parish.
The bookshop is the former Zetland Hotel and it was here
that Père Etienne Djunkowsky, Apostolic Prefect of the
Mission to the North Pole, celebrated the first Mass since
the Reformation at the beginning of October 1860.
A few days later, a young Belgian priest, Fr Theophilus
Verstraeten, was transferred here by Djunkowsky to start
a Catholic Mission in Shetland. At that time nearly all
Catholics in the islands were migrant workers in the herring
industry or fishermen from mainland Europe. Fr Theophilus
took up residence in the hotel for most of his first year in
Lerwick. He was active also in Orkney and Caithness.
In 1864 the Zetland Hotel was put up for sale and bought Fr Ambrose with representatives of the Parish of St Margaret’s
by the Catholic Church. & The Sacred Heart, Shetland: Pat Loynd, Patricia Nyland,
Mass was said here regularly Hilde and Peter Bardell and Marsali Taylor
for the next seven years. Fr
Theophilus had plans to build died in this building, ten days later, on 30th May 1871.
a permanent Catholic chapel The Mass was attended by the bookshop Manager and
in the garden of the old hotel, a small group of parishioners, most of whom had been
at the junction of Commercial involved in the project of researching the parish's history.
Street and Queen's Lane. It marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Etienne
Sadly his fruitful ministry Djunkowsky and the 150th anniversary of the death of
in these islands was cut short Theophilus Verstraeten and was a reminder of the time, not
in 1871 when he contracted so long ago, when Shetland regained its role as a vital part
smallpox from a Belgian of the Scandinavian Church.
fisherman to whom he had
Fr Theophilus Verstraeten administered the last rites. He Fr Ambrose Flavell. Parish Priest

Confirmations at Church of the Immaculate Conception, Inverurie

A composite photograph of this year's candidates for confirmation at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Inverurie.
Top left - Fr Winthrop Fish and Fr Patrick Rice. Top right - One of the candidates is anointed by Bishop Hugh Gilbert.
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