Prinknash Abbey in the Mid-20th Century

By way of the site of the Liturgical Pimpernel came a photo coming from Prinknash Abbey which struck me. I determined that I would look this up further and was delighted to find even more of these photos on the blog of the Saint Bede Studio (which post incidentally, to bring it all delightfully full circle, was itself inspired by a post on Prinknash Abbey which appeared here on NLM).

As Michael Sternbeck of Saint Bede notes, these images appeared in O'Connell's The Celebration of Mass and were taken with permission of the then abbot, the Right Reverend Wilfrid Upson, OSB.

Images as these always bring to mind for me the great richness of the earlier monastic incarnations of the 20th century Liturgical Movement.

Speaking personally, while I am quite pleased at the baroque and renaissance revivals we have seen in the area of vestments and vesture, it would be gratifying to see more revivals of the particular styles seen here as well.

There are actually more images than what appears either here or at Saint Bede and I may take the time at some point to get higher resolution scans of all of these photographs.