Sixty years after he died far from home, two hundred pilgrims sang in the Leicestershire rain in honour of Blessed Cyprian Tansi.
She had come to the pilgrimage worn out, and new to it. “I came here feeling so exhausted,” she said, “but right now the joy of the Lord is my strength.” A first-timer from St Peter’s in Leicester, she had found something in the day she hadn’t come expecting.
The day gave little sign of it. The sky was low and grey, with rain drifting across the fields. Yet the colours of the pilgrims’ clothes burned bright against the damp Leicestershire green, and around two hundred people stood and sang at the Annual National Pilgrimage in Honour of Blessed Cyprian Tansi. Families had come with children and folding chairs, some still arriving with bags and suitcases in hand.
The choir’s voices rose over the walls of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey and drifted out to passers-by, who stopped mid-walk just to listen. They had come, many from far beyond the diocese, for a man most of England has never heard of.
Blessed Cyprian Tansi was a Nigerian priest who, in 1950, left thriving parishes and a people who loved him to become a monk near Coalville. The Cistercian community he joined was given to silence and prayer. He lived here for fourteen years and died in a Leicester hospital in 1964, never seeing home again. One of the many people he had baptised in Nigeria grew up to be Cardinal Francis Arinze.
Bishop Patrick McKinney stood where Tansi once rose before dawn to sing God’s praises, and told the pilgrims a story from the priest’s childhood. Tansi’s parents were not Christians, and when he was born his father made him a charm to keep him safe. After his father died, it became one of the most precious things the boy owned. Preparing him for baptism, a priest said it had to go, and at nine years old the boy destroyed it.
“One’s whole heart has to be given to Christ Jesus alone,” the Bishop said. “What we hold back is very often the very thing that has to go.”
The day’s Gospel was about the man who finds treasure hidden in a field, and joyfully sells all he owns to buy it. The Bishop pointed to something easy to miss. “Notice where the joy comes,” he said. “It comes before the selling.” The boy who gave up his charm had already found the treasure worth everything.
Others carried that joy too. One man had come from Manchester for the fifth year running. “I am here today because I’m Nigerian,” he said, “and I’ve heard of Father Tansi for many years.” The day had been “joyous and light hearted, and loving in a sense,” and what still surprised him, five years on, was “the love among the people who’ve come for the pilgrimage, and the monks here and everyone.”
At the point of consecration- the heart of the Mass, when the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ- the clouds broke and the sun came out.
Tansi never built the monastery he had dreamed of founding back in Nigeria; his health failed first. “What could to some look like failure is, from our perspective, far from being failure,” the Bishop said. Sixty years on, the people singing in the rain, and then the sun, were the answer.
If Blessed Cyprian’s story connects with you, why not make a mini pilgrimage to Coalville yourself? You could even walk The Way of Blessed Cyprian Tansi which runs from Nottingham Cathedral to his shrine at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. Find out more by visiting pilgrimways.org.uk.
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