Chapel, House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorkshire, 1937

The Chapel, The House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorkshire. Reproduced from The Vision, 72 (October 1937), p. 8. Digital image courtesy of the author.

In the years between the world wars, the Association for Promoting Retreats (APR) in England developed retreat as a mass movement in ways that had never been seen before. They endeavoured to take the model of silent retreats developed by the Jesuits to lay people. The changed contexts in which retreat was offered helped remake retreat itself.

The APR discussed ideas through its journal, The Vision. A striking feature of The Vision under the editorship of Miles Sergeant from the mid-1930s until the outbreak of the war was that the journal carried advertisements for specific retreat houses, involving photographs and a short description of the house. Accompanying a photo depicting the chapel at the House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorkshire (reproduced above), for instance, the text explained that the house ‘stands in a very large and beautiful garden’ and noted that ‘Horbury is only three miles from Wakefield, and buses run frequently, so it is easy of access’ (‘The House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorks.’, The Vision, 72 [October 1937], 8–9 [p. 9]). The weekend retreats were ‘very popular’ in the summer and, the copy advised, ‘people write to book their rooms months beforehand’ (‘The House of Mercy’, p. 9). The House of Mercy was, in the world of the APR at least, a must-visit location. Another contributor asked, ‘are we so poor that we can afford a holiday but not a Retreat?’, and the advertisements urged prospective visitors to combine the two (‘Holidays and Change of Air’, The Vision, 27 [August 1926], 4–7 [p. 7]). Twenty years into the movement, The Vision had established a marketplace for retreat providers. In doing so, and as with other religious practices such as pilgrimage, tourism and religion become interchangeable in ways that were not the case with the Jesuit model used by the APR.

Modernism and Religion explores the ways in which such experiments with retreat reflected tensions between experimentation and tradition, new and old, and mysticism and orthodoxy in twentieth-century religious culture more broadly.