UNVEILING OF WAR MEMORIAL AT ST. MARY’S

On Wednesday evening, July 28th, a War Memorial Window was solemnly unveiled by the Right Rev John Neville Bishop of Zanzibar, in the pretty church of St Mary’s, Pocklington. In spite of a number of other events that were taking place about the same time, a large gathering assembled to witness the ceremony.

The Rev Father McCabe introduced the Bishop to the congregation in fitting words.

It was he said, his pleasant duty to extend him a hearty welcome. It was the first time they had the pleasure of a visit from a Bishop other than the official visitation of the Bishop of the Diocese.

He wished therefore to express his keen appreciation and acknowledgement of this unprecedented honour. The stained glass window which his Lordship was going to unveil this evening is, he said, the work of the Benedict Ecclesiastical Art Co, London, and represents our Saviour stretched out upon the cross, symbolical of the agonised world that was crucified in the Calvary of the last Great War.

His Lordship belonged to the great missionary and Educational Society of the Holy Ghost who has distinguished colleges of which the most famous are in Blackrock and Rockwell in Ireland and Pittsburgh in the United States.

The Rev Father made an appeal to all present to come to the aid of the arduous and self-denying mission extending about 100,000 miles in Africa. They would also pray that his labours would be crowned with a continuation of that success that hitherto had blessed his efforts to shed new glory on his society, and furnish fresh evidence of the indestructible vitality of that church of which he was so zealous an apostle.

It was his hope that the bishop’s visit might prove a benediction and that the words he was about to address them would remain in their memories as a beautiful perfume embalming their lives with a seed which for many a day would bring forth abundant fruit. 

The Bishop then delivered a most impressive discourse. He had come he said to unveil the stained glass window in commemoration to the men of Pocklington who had made the great sacrifice in the War.

The image of Christ crucified on the window would speak to them of God’s infinite love and the ransom He paid in his blood. He died that we might live.

This window would tell of those in Pocklington who had willingly laid down their lives after the example of the Master, that men might be free, and saved from the slavery of an ambitious tyrant. It would tell us that when a mighty power wished to trample underfoot the laws of God, and all true civilization, and to cast to the winds all the ten commandments, when it dared to preach that might was right, and the weak, weak because weak had no rights of their own, Great Britain and the allies of her far flung empire rose as one man to repel the invader, and died in their millions in a sacred cause.

His lordship himself was engaged in a life of sacrifice propagating Christianity in foreign lands, the cause of Christianity is the cause of civilization. Christ died for all men whether black or white and wished them impartially to gain the reward which His infinite Goodness had prepared for them from eternity.

The Bishop then unveiled the window, he was the guest of Rev Father McCabe from Saturday till Thursday afternoon when he left for Liverpool, where he reads a paper on the African Missions at the Catholic Congress, after which he leaves for his far-off African Mission.

Mr Hobson ably presided over the organ during the ceremony.

The local work in connection with the War Memorial Window at St Mary’s, Pocklington was efficiently carried out by Messrs J Allison and Sons and Mr J E Brock, both Pocklington firms.

Unfortunately the year of this newspaper article is not known, but believed to be around 1921.