Ewenny Priory 1141 founded by the Benedictines on the edge of Bridgend. Photo: - Fr John Boles SSC
Ask anyone what they know about Bridgend in South Wales and they’ll almost certainly mention the rugby team. Bridgend Ravens (formerly Bridgend RFC) have been stalwarts of Welsh rugby for 145 years. However, just a mile or so away, lies St Mary’s Catholic Church, with a history that goes back nearly two thousand years.
Christianity arrived in South Wales with the Romans. During the chaotic days of the break-up of the Roman Empire and the Anglo-Saxon invasions, Christianity clung to Britain’s western fringes, including the shores of the Severn Estuary. Tradition has it that St Patrick came from these parts. Just a few miles from Bridgend lie the remains of St Illtud’s Monastery, perhaps the most important centre of Celtic spirituality and learning of the fifth century and Christian gravestones from the period have been discovered in Bridgend itself.
Fast-forward seven centuries and the Normans arrive on the scene, bringing with them a different style of monasticism courtesy of the Benedictines. They built the magnificent Ewenny Priory on the edge of Bridgend. The old priory church survives to this day, a glorious example of Romanesque architecture. Ewenny dominated Christian life in the area throughout the rest of the Middle Ages.
It was during the mediaeval period that the pelican was first used as a Christian motif. According to legend, the mother pelican feeds her chicks from blood pecked from her own breast (a belief based on the habitual way a pelican shields its famous long beak in its front parts). Early Christians saw in this a metaphor for the Paschal Mystery and Eucharist of Jesus. Just as the mother pelican gives life to its offspring by the shedding of her blood, so Christ redeems God’s children by the shedding of His blood and gives them eternal life through the receiving of His blood at holy communion.
Columban Fr John Boles (right) with Fr Tim McGrath and the pelican church. - Photo: Fr John Boles
In 1536, Henry VIII dissolved Ewenny Priory, along with all the other monasteries of England and Wales. The priory was purchased by the Carne family, who, despite Henry’s takeover of the Church, managed to retain their Catholic faith into the reign of Elizabeth Their coat of arms was … the pelican. As it turned out, the “vulning” (or “self-wounding”) pelican was soon to become a true symbol of Bridgend’s embattled Catholic population, for troubled times lay ahead. This area was one of the few parts of Wales that kept the Catholic faith and it paid a heavy price for doing so. During the seventeenth century, Saints John Lloyd and Philip Evans were active in the locality. Both were arrested in 1678 on properties owned by the recusant Catholic Turbevill family (who, coincidentally, would later become proprietors of Ewenny). Both saints were eventually hanged, drawn and quartered at Cardiff during the hysteria of Titus Oates’s “Popish Plot”.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the faith was rekindled by the arrival of Irish immigrants. As there was no church in Bridgend, they periodically assembled outside the Coach and Horses tavern and trekked the twenty miles or more to receive the sacraments in Cardiff. Eventually, a member of the local gentry who had converted to Catholicism, a certain Captain Iltid Nicholl, came to the rescue and offered to buy the site of an old sawmill and build a church. This was St Mary’s, opened in 1855.
The congregation was soon swollen by immigrants from another quarter - the Italians who came to work in the local quarries. The rocks around Bridgend include a rare and valuable formation known as quarella, a stone more commonly found in Italy - hence, the attraction for skilled quarrymen from that country. Unfortunately, this chapter took a dark turn. At the outbreak of the Second World War, many of Italian origin were rounded up as “enemy aliens”. Some later found themselves aboard the ill-fated SS Arandora Star. En route to internment camps in Canada, it was torpedoed by U-47 off the coast of Ireland on July 2, 1940. Tragically, the ship sank, with the loss of over 800 lives.
All this rich and sacred history led to the decision in the 1990s to build a new church on the same site. Courageously, the diocese chose to base the design and ornamentation of the church upon the symbol of the pelican, which by then had become representative of the community’s sufferings and triumphs. When I visited St Mary’s to deliver the Columban appeal, the current parish priest, Fr Tim McGrath, was eager to point out every example. He enthused, “Here is the pelican on the doors of the church … Here it is again on top of the tabernacle … See, we’ve even got it as the parish logo on all our correspondence.”
However, he left the best till last. Taking me outside, he pointed out the crowning glory. The whole church has been designed to echo the same symbol. “Look,” said Tim, “the building looks just like a pelican with its beak in its breast and its wings outstretched!”
Perhaps the comparison isn’t immediately apparent to the untrained eye. Yet, as the Gospels teach us, sometimes the “eyes of faith” are what count.
Columban Fr John Boles lives and works in Britain
Listen to "Reflection - The flight of the pelican"
Related links
- Read more from The Far East - March/April 2026
