A simple story from the Tablet, but strangely moving and not-so-strangely hopeful – about the resurgence of the Catholic Church in Suffolk – for the usual reasons, who come from all over.

And they were not alone. Every Sunday 14 or 15 Keralan (Kerala – an Indian state) families attend Mass at Our Lady and it was their parish priest, Fr Denys Lloyd, who had brought me, one evening during the first week of Advent, to Tommy Joseph’s house. Fr Lloyd had noticed that something remarkable was beginning to happen in his parish: people from other countries arriving, settling – and reinvigorating the community they join. We often hear of such migration to London and other major cities, but this was happening in the heart of Suffolk. Here, the Catholic Church has been instrumental in helping people adjust to life in a new country, and develop a sense of belonging. And in their turn, the new arrivals are helping to renew the Church.

It is particularly intriguing that such a thing should be happening in Suffolk. For centuries, Catholicism has been unwelcome here, threatening to "pollute this pure Protestant town" as a local paper once complained. It was not always so. In the Middle Ages, when the vision of Richeldis made Walsingham the third most visited shrine in Christendom, East Anglia was full of enormous churches and abbeys, many of them built from the profits of the wool trade: the evidence of that widespread piety can still be seen in that every third village seems to be named after a saint. But the area suffered a double attack of iconoclasm – first from Henry VIII’s henchmen and then, a century later, from the followers of the local man, Oliver Cromwell. His lieutenant, the infamous William Dowsing, made particular note of the damage he did to Stowmarket.

The Catholic Church survived underground, in recusant houses, until the middle of the nineteenth century when a new foundation was established – but still things were far from easy. In 1910, for example, there were 35 Catholics, and the average Mass attendance was 17. Several heroic priests kept the parish going but it is only in recent years that the situation has improved, thanks largely to Fr Lloyd, and to remarkable demographic changes that have seen numbers – and confidence – increase.

The parish today is physically enormous, the largest in East Anglia. Covering some 600 square miles, it encompasses roughly 35 medieval parishes. It is, says Fr Lloyd, impossible to count the number of Catholics, as on occasion many of them will opt to attend Mass in Ipswich or Bury St Edmunds. But average Mass attendance is growing at Our Lady, Stowmarket. It has reached around 300 now, the numbers swelled not only by commuters who move there from London but by Tommy Joseph and his Keralan friends, by Filipinos and by Poles. 

Constantly shifting numbers of people from the Philippines come to work for a while – often in nursing – although some stay to marry local people and bring up their families. The Poles’ impact is noticeable, too. We went to visit two jolly, laughing young Polish women, Joanna and Katarzyna, who had just got home from work.