St Patrick’s is a special corner of West Hendon, welcoming and unpretentious from the outside and warm and bright inside.
The priest writes:
“St Luke records: “He then went down with them and came to Nazareth and lived under their authority. His mother stored up all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men” (2: 51-52). As most of you know, before I came to Spanish Place I spent a decade as parish priest of Kingsland in London’s East End, and for eight of those years I was the Catholic dean for Hackney. As events unfolded in those dreadful few nights at the beginning of August I was particularly concerned about people and an area which I had come to know and love. It is too close to events to attempt any serious analysis, and anyone looking for a single cause of the sudden upsurge of arson and looting is not doing justice to the complexity of the situation, but perhaps I can venture to offer a couple of thoughts – though I am no sociologist or psychiatrist. “