Our Lady of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church

The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory is a Catholic church on Warwick Street in Westminster, central London — the oldest Catholic church in England (excluding those built as Anglican churches and later returned to Catholic use), and the only surviving eighteenth-century Catholic chapel in London. Formerly known as the Royal Bavarian Chapel, it originated, like several Catholic churches in London, as a chapel within a foreign embassy in the days when the Penal Laws made open Catholic worship illegal. Built between 1789 and 1790 to the designs of Joseph Bonomi the Elder, the Grade II* listed church now serves as the central church of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, the British ordinariate for former Anglicans within the Catholic Church.

The church's origins lie in the chapel established in the 1730s at the Portuguese Embassy at 24 Golden Square. With the English Penal Laws in force, most Roman Catholic chapels existed under the protection — and within the precincts — of foreign embassies; the most famous ambassador of this era was the 1st Marquis de Pombal, later the effective ruler of Portugal. Though officially for embassy officials, the chapel was widely used by London's Catholic population, maintaining five chaplains — far more than the ambassador and his staff required. Responsibility passed to the Bavarian embassy in 1747, and the chapel weathered the worst night in English Catholic memory: in the Gordon Riots of 1780 its fixtures, fittings and contents were destroyed by the anti-Catholic mob, Count Haslang claiming £1,300 for the damage, though structurally only the frontage suffered.

The replacement church, designed in 1788 by Joseph Bonomi the Elder — the Italian architect and draughtsman who had come to London in 1767 to work in the practice of Robert and James Adam — was funded by subscriptions from prominent Catholics and placed under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District. Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, wrote: "I am most gratified, Monsieur, that my Chapel, more than any other, has helped to preserve Religion." The Electors of Bavaria continued to pay a yearly donation until 1871, prayers being said for the King of Bavaria and the church styled the Royal Bavarian Chapel until that date. The new church was dedicated on the feast of St Gregory the Great in 1790 — hence its double dedication — and that construction constitutes the main fabric of the present building. Its plain brick exterior of three bays and two storeys was deliberately "unassuming", a direct response to the destruction of the earlier chapel; the brick was stained red in 1952, when the gilded stars and angels that now decorate the façade were added.

Inside, Georgian decoration survives alongside two campaigns of Victorian embellishment. John Erlam's renovations of 1853 installed the bas-relief of the Assumption by John Edward Carew over the altar. From 1874 the work was directed by John Francis Bentley — the future architect of Westminster Cathedral — who designed an entirely new church, of which only part was executed: the Marian side altar, which contains his first-ever work in mosaic of the human figure, and the sanctuary, whose apse with the Coronation of the Virgin Mary is based on that of an early Roman basilica.

Few churches in London have such a roll of worshippers. Mrs Fitzherbert — sacramentally, though not civilly, married to George IV — worshipped here, as did the young John Henry Newman, who later declared: "Were St Athanasius or St Ambrose in London now, they would go to worship not at St Paul's Cathedral but at Warwick Street." The Irish Liberator Daniel O'Connell attended regularly when in London; Queen Maria II da Gloria of Portugal had a requiem Mass said here in 1853, pictured in the Illustrated London News; Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer and translator of the Kama Sutra, was married in the church; Evelyn Waugh had his second wedding here in 1937; and the funeral Mass of the actor Sir Ralph Richardson, a regular worshipper, was held here in 1983. During the abdication crisis of 1936, Queen Mary prayed before the statue of Our Lady of Warwick Street — a life-size copy of Our Lady of the Rue du Bac — and sent a bouquet of flowers every week until her death.

The church's recent history has been eventful. In the early twenty-first century it became home to "one of the most successful LGBT Catholic parishes in the world": for six years the twice-monthly "Soho Masses" offered services "particularly welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Catholics, their parents, friends and families". In 2013, under pressure from the Vatican, the congregation was moved to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street in Mayfair, where Archbishop Vincent Nichols attended their first Mass. Following that move, during Lent 2013 the church was entrusted to the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham — the structure created by Pope Benedict XVI for former Anglicans entering the Catholic Church while retaining elements of their patrimony. Monsignor Keith Newton, the Ordinary, took up residence at the presbytery, and the church has since reinstated its choral tradition with music ranging from early twentieth-century Anglican repertoire to Mozart. The hidden embassy chapel that survived the Gordon Riots now serves as the mother church of Anglican-patrimony Catholicism in Britain — Newman's Warwick Street, still keeping the faith behind its unassuming brick.