Pugin Bi-Centenary Celebrations in Australia

Recently the Pugin Foundation in Australia organized various celebrations around the bi-centenary of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin's birth.

From their website:

The centrepiece of our celebrations was a Missa Cantata in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite on Sunday 4 March in Pugin's St Patrick's Church, Colebrook, with the Choir of Newman College within the University of Melbourne. The setting was William Byrd's Mass for 5 voices, with the Propers for the Second Sunday in Lent in Sarum and Gregorian chant. The celebrant was one of the Foundation's Directors, the Most Rev. Geoffrey Jarrett DD, Bishop of Lismore, NSW.

We thought it most appropriate that the Mass should be in the form which Pugin knew and attended with such devotion in the oratory attached to his home in Ramsgate and in the church, St Augustine's, which he built next door. It was also the form celebrated during his lifetime in all the cathedrals, churches and chapels he designed.

Here are a few images from the bi-centenary Mass. (Photos copyright Mishka Gora.)




Here also are some before and after images from St Patrick’s Church, which has been the subject of extensive and ongoing restoration works by the Pugin Foundation over the past seven years. Their aim has been to return it to the letter and spirit of Pugin’s intentions.




Regarding the new high altar, the Pugin Foundation has noted to us that the painted and gilded reredos is copied from a design in Pugin’s, Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume -- specifically, plate 71. The colours used were "carefully matched to those in his famous St Giles’, Cheadle, Staffordshire."