London: Monastic afternoons at Tyburn Convent

The Tyburn Nuns will throw open their doors to the outside world on Sunday, 6th September, when they resume their monthly 'monastic afternoons'.

The events held at the Tyburn Convent, the Mother House of the Tyburn Nuns near Marble Arch, feature talks on the lives of the 105 beatified or canonised Catholic martyrs who died on the 'Tyburn Tree' - the three-sided gallows that once occupied a site just yards from the convent - during the Reformation.

The monastic afternoon will also give members of the public, including women who may feel called by the vocation to the religious life, the opportunity to meet the nuns and to learn about them, their way of life and what they do. The next monastic afternoon will be held between 2pm and 4.30pm at the convent at 8 Hyde Park Place (on the Bayswater Road), London.

They will continue on the first Sunday of each month.

The Tyburn Nuns - the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre Order of St Benedict - are an order of cloistered contemplative Benedictine nuns. The aim of the congregation is to glorify the Most Blessed Trinity, finding practical expression in the daily participation in the Holy Mass, the choral celebration of the Divine Office, the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed in the Monstrance, and in daily prayer for the Holy Father, the Church, the country and for the entire human family.

The nuns live within the monastic tradition of the Church under the Rule of St Benedict, following his instruction ora et labora - pray and work.

Tyburn Convent near Marble Arch, London, is the mother house of the Tyburn Nuns. In recent years the order has grown and spread to Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Africa and France.

The Tyburn Martyrs are the Catholic men and women executed at the Tyburn gallows during the Protestant Reformation. The first was St John Houghton, the prior of the London Charterhouse, who was hanged, drawn and quartered on 4th May 1535 for refusing to take the oath attached to the Act of Succession recognising the progeny of the King Henry VIII and his mistress Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the English throne. The last Tyburn martyr was St Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh, who was hanged, drawn and quartered on 1st July 1681 after he was falsely accused of conspiring to kill King Charles II under the fabricated plot of Titus Oates. There are 20 canonised saints among the martyrs. They include St Edmund Campion, St Robert Southwell, St John Southworth - as well as two women, St Margaret Ward and St Anne Line.

For further information: Please contact Tyburn Convent tel: 0207 723 7262, email at prioress.tyburn@btinternet.com

See: www.tyburnconvent.org.uk Follow us on Twitter: @TyburnConvent