Bishop Hudson shares lessons from his parents' 52 year marriage

Image: Diocese of Plymouth

Source: Diocese of Plymouth

The Bishop of Plymouth, the Right Reverend Nicholas Hudson reflected on his own parents' decades-long marriage in a homily at the annual Mass for Marriage at Plymouth Catholic Cathedral - the Cathedral Church of St Mary and St Boniface, on 12 September 2026.

Speaking to couples celebrating their anniversaries, the bishop opened with a reflection on Ein Karem, the hillside town near Jerusalem where, according to the Gospel of Luke, Mary visited Elizabeth shortly after the Annunciation, going, as Scripture puts it, "with haste into the hill country." He invited the couples to recapture the same sense of expectation they felt on the eve of their wedding - "the 'how will it be?'... 'How will we be - together?'"

He recalled his mother often telling him growing up: "Marriage isn't easy, you know!" - usually after a small disagreement with his father - and yet "they had a great marriage." On their Golden Wedding anniversary, when his mother was in hospital, his father spent the entire day at her bedside instead of his usual hour-long visit. When the bishop later asked her whether it had been sad to spend the milestone in hospital, she answered with a beautiful smile: "All we would have wanted was to be together - and we were!"

He also shared a memory from one Ash Wednesday, when his mother confessed, "I've broken my Lenten resolution twice already!" Asked what she had done, she admitted, "I've nagged your father twice." The couple simply looked at each other and laughed.

Reflecting on what his parents taught him, the bishop said: "Marriage is a vocation to forgive," explaining that to forgive is "to bear with the weakness of the other." He described marriage more broadly as "the deepest act of trust" - trust "not just in God but in the 'yes' the other made for you."

Listening, he said: "has to be one of the major keys to marriage." He recalled that his parents belonged to a group of couples called the Teams of Our Lady, the Équipes de Notre Dame, in which five couples would meet once a month to share how their family life had been, study a book together, pray together, and share a meal. "I can still hear my parents sitting in the kitchen many a weekday... talking to one another about how their day had been," he said. "I think they listened deeply to one another, and were the very best of friends."

He recalled a private Christmas Eve ritual: watching Carols from Kings with his parents each year, he noticed they would always join hands at one particular line in "Once in Royal David's City" - the words "And our eyes at last shall see him." He said he never told them he had noticed, but always watched for it.

The bishop closed with a final prayer, expressing the hope that, after a long life of selfless giving to one another, their children, and all those who depend on them, the couples would be "united with one another" and would "look forever on the face of Christ, together."