I first got to know the late Mgr Mark Langham in March 2013, half a year before he began working at Cambridge as the university’s Catholic chaplain. At the time I was a PhD student spending a few months in Rome to look at manuscripts in various libraries.
That spring, I went daily to the station Masses organised by the Pontifical North American College: 200 or so seminarians, clergy and religious would gather for 7am mass at a different ancient church every morning. On the first Wednesday in Lent, we were all locked out of Santa Maria Maggiore, and ended up waiting over half an hour for the sacristan to arrive and open the building. The priests and seminarians milled around with varying degrees of patience. Some of us laymen got fed up and left; others began lighting cigarettes.
