Taken from Eulogies for Catherine Mary Bagnall

REFLECTIONS ON MARY by fellow parishioner MARY ELIZABETH NONO: Holy Angels, Hale Barns

I first made Mary's acquaintance in Autumn 1987. We had a new Parish Priest and things were on the move. Fr Roger Clarke had arrived in September and had visited every home during his first three months in the parish. At the same time he invited four of us to be a steering group to prepare a Parish Assembly in January 1988. This was to be addressed by Pat Jones (now CBE) who had been at the Synod on the Laity in Rome. So there was Mike Prior, Chris McParlin, and the two Marys, myself and the one and only Mary Bagnall! This Assembly was consultative and collaborative. Parishioners were invited to get into groups and to discuss what the parish needed, to make suggestions, sign up to groups and take responsibility for running them!
Mary and I thought we had already died and gone to heaven! Mary was 63, she told me she had waited all her life for such an experience. In fact she told me that I was very lucky to be involved in this when I was still so young, encouraging me to keep going when it got tough. I was in my late thirties. Mary had waited till long after retirement for her skills and talents and energy to be recognised and put to good use for the mission of the Church. Mary also became parish Secretary for about 4 years at this time.

So Mary was very active, participating in various groups that were set up.

There was the liturgy Group, we learned to read and reflect on the Scripture readings for the following Sunday. Mary contributed a good deal to that small group – most of whom are partying in heaven now with Mary- maybe enjoying one of her fabulous and famous Simnel cakes. Oh the home made marzipan! To die for! Mary and I often heard our reflections in Fr Roger's Homilies on Sundays!

There was more Scripture -study this time- in what was called, the Faith-Sharing group. We would meet regularly to read through a Gospel, various letters of St Paul and The Acts of the Apostles. Again Mary took an active part in those meetings and we always invited Fr Roger and our subsequent Parish Priests to celebrate an annual house Mass, usually on 6th January, the Feast of the Epiphany- needless to say there were more cakes and partying!!

Mary, along with Brian Troth was one of the founder members of the Parish Art Group. The hangings that we use here in the parish during Advent and Lent have had Mary's hands on them. They are velvet and velvet is very difficult to sew .The five panel Bread of Life altar piece in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel is also some of Mary's handiwork. The design is Judy Penny's but there was a team of embroiderers involved in the making. Fr Peter's mother Mary Philips, Patch Davies and yes – our dearest Mary Bagnall.

Mary was generous in her giving of her time and of herself. When Mary lived on her own I often popped in to say hello. She would be cooking lunch and plating it up to take over to an elderly housebound person on Tolland Lane for example, or making a cake to take to someone in need of a visit.

Being a Eucharistic Minister was a Ministry that she valued more than we can imagine. The day she was commissioned – 14 February – was the same day as she was to be married many years ago. She told me that she felt as if God had restored her, God had healed all her woundedness and given her the most special gift that she could ever have imagined. She pondered that frequently like her namesake Mary, Mother of our Lord Jesus. She pondered and treasured it in her heart. And opened her heart to those whom she visited. Howard Atkinson's wife Marie was a particular friend and Mary arranged for her sister Patricia go to Lourdes when she became wheelchair bound.

We as a family have been recipients of Mary's compassionate and thoughtful generosity. When we lost my Dad, Mary just turned up with food – full meals for all of us-just ready to eat! When my Mum died Mary was quite a bit older and we just sat around almost joking wondering when and whether Mary Bagnall was going to arrive with dinner!! Such was her reputation!

Mary taught me a lot! She was a Magistrate for over twenty years. She shared with me how difficult it was to see young men with families up in court. She knew she would have to impose a fine and that the fine would be unlikely to be paid and so he would be in worse circumstances. She agonised over the sending of men to prison because of the long-term effect on the family, the loss of the father, the break-up of the family and the emotional impact on the children at the same time as needing to serve justice.

Another quality of Mary's was her insightful intuitiveness. Harry was an elderly fellow who came to the Liturgy group. He was quite poorly- chesty – difficulty in breathing-but he had a Ministry- he used to write letters – copperplate handwriting! to people in prison, people who were more poorly than he, the housebound, etc. I was the recipient of his letter-writing at one point and you can imagine- paper, envelopes, daily first class stamps- Mary noticed and thought about the cost to him so every so often she would send him a note with a couple of packets of first-class stamps! That was Mary's thoughtful generosity and awareness of people's circumstances.

Among Mary's qualities and gifts was a sense of reaching out to those who were different. For many years she would attend the local Hale Lenten groups where people from all the different Christian denominations would meet to read and share their faith and understanding of texts. She valued the friendships fostered by those groups and felt enriched and sustained by those encounters over many years.

Mary was not just ecumenical though! She was very interested in fostering friendships and dialogue with people of different faiths. She had worked as PA for the Jewish cookery writer Evelyn Rose, after her retirement from the Bank of England, but more recently she had been active in the Altrincham InterFaith Group, startedjointly by Alf Keeling, one of our parishioners, the URC Minister and the Altrincham Muslim Association Chairperson after 9/11. Mary attended the InterFaith dinners and the Entertainment evenings and talks. She was a member of one of the friendship circles, in which there are two Jewish people, two Hindus, two Muslims, two Christians plus a Quaker or a Unitarian. Again Mary reached out and accepted all with unconditional love in spite of different beliefs and cultures, from a sure foundation in her own faith in Jesus, Our Risen Lord.

As I come to my final reflections I would like to say something about her spiritual journey. Mary came from a Catholic family and could have been staid and unadventurous but not at all, Mary was so open, desiring to grow in faith and in her relationship with God. She was a daily Mass-goer for all the time I have known her. She was grateful and excited by the breath of the Holy Spirit that blew through the Church at Vatican ll, like a breath of fresh air. She used to remind me of how blessed I was to have been introduced to the Scriptures and Praying with Scripture when I was so young. And how lucky I was to be able to pursue this as a Ministry of which she was so supportive. She was very keen to deepen her own prayer life. All those Liturgy group meetings and Faith-Sharing readings of the New Testament books led eventually to her desire to make an 8- day accompanied silent retreat. She did this at St Beuno's and then a little while later she undertook to make 6 retreats in daily life, the full Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. It was quite a commitment. It meant praying daily, for just over nine months, about an hour and a half every morning and then another half -hour's Examen every evening. In this long retreat experience she was accompanied by a spiritual director, a Cenacle sister, Helen Grealy, whom Mary saw most weeks. For Mary it was momentous! Transformative!

Her relationship with her God, with the Risen Lord Jesus became even more central to her life, deeper than she could have imagined or hoped for-to quote St Paul to the Ephesians. The aim of the exercises is spiritual freedom and Mary experienced that freedom! She skipped and danced up the left aisle of Holy Angels Church here to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel with joy and being free and at one with our Lord. She had an inner freedom and joy that ultimately sustained her through her last few years, enabling her to respond to being cared for with graciousness. She was grateful for being cared for by Caroline and other family and by Val who brought her Holy Communion regularly and by the devoted Alicja. During this time she had lost her dear friend Roly, her brothers John and Brian and her beloved sister Anne.

She lived a full, active, missionary and spiritual life here as a parishioner of Holy Angels. She visited the sick, for example, she gave alms to the poor, she fed the hungry. She also counselled the weak and comforted those in sorrow, and was a witness as a follower of Jesus, radiating his Presence.

So farewell dearest Mary, you have inspired many of us and have gone before us May we continue to remember your loving good example. Pray for us and we shall pray for you and for all our friends that have gone to God, that we may merrily meet in heaven! Amen Amen!! May she rest in Peace! Amen! Amen!

REFLECTION ON MARY by niece and goddaughter CAROLINE BAGNALL

Mary was born in Fallowfield, Manchester in 1924, sandwiched between two elder brothers and two sisters. A good Catholic family.

Her father Vincent was a statistician working in the cotton trade and her mother, Cis, was an accomplished pianist who had sung and played in the first world war. Her mother had a miraculous (literally according to Mary) recovery from stomach cancer which was aided by the family adopting a vegetarian diet.

Mary has always had a great facility with words, so you may be surprised to hear that she did not speak until she was 3 years old, but not so surprised to know that she came out with a whole sentence “I don’t like custard with apple crumble”. (Mary has a great palate and loved food). To her very last she thought deeply and spoke wisely. She also had a secret language with her sisters, a version of which she used in recent years when wanting to opt out of daily life!

She also knew that she could do some things more easily than her brothers (mental arithmetic set by Vincent at the dinner table for example). She had a photographic memory which made her a mine of amazing facts, and fictions!

Like her siblings she attended the Hollies school, after which she worked for the war effort in a munitions factory doing fine precision engineering. She then went on to become an expert short hand typist which earned her a great career in the Bank of England, getting to be the senior female employee and an inspiration to other women joining the workforce, as testamented at her funeral wake. In her day, according to Mary, menopausal women were not welcome on the payroll, so she was retired at age 53. But Mary was not one to sit idle. Her typing also allowed her to work together with the cookery writer Evelyn Rose, typing and trialling her recipes. She had lived with and assisted her parents through their lives until they both died. In the nineteen seventies Mary both became a magistrate and bought her first home, the beautiful welcoming 63 Park Rd in Hale. She was a magistrate for 21 years which rewarded her with the dubious success of becoming a victim of burglars 17 times! She also became an active parishioner or the Holy Angels church.

Mary was a wonderful friend and advisor. She never married and lived alone until she developed dementia. She had a special place in her life for children, who she had an amazing knack of relating directly to, whatever their stage of development. She stepped in to help many friends in crisis, so it is not surprising that she was godmother to so many of us. In her retired years she developed a special relationship with Roly Giddings a widowed former manager of the Bank of England. She was able to find a deep love that intensified her spiritual life as well as bringing a visible spring to her step.
She and her sister Anne were such close confidants and she maintained very regular phone contact with her brother John who shared, and trumped, her love of words. These two siblings died in 2018 leaving Mary as the sole member of her generation.

This may all sound very worthy and serious, but Mary’s wit and sometimes ribald humour, her love of food and sharing of recipes with those that dined at her table, her raconteuring, her knowledge of books, her deep love of music made her a wonderful yet wise and deep thinking friend.

Many of us have had wise words given to us from Mary, that both helped us forward and boosted our confidence in our special talents.

Thank you Mary.