Valletta – Malta (Thursday, 09.25.2014, Gaudium Press) Buckingham Palace has confirmed that Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and second in line to the British throne, attended officially for the first time a Catholic Mass. The Prince attended, on behalf of the British Crown, the official celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Malta’s independence. The Mass took place at St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta.
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| Prince Williams, Duke of Cambridge, has family ties with the Catholic Church Photo: Adam Clarke |
Although this is the first time that Prince Williams attends a Catholic Mass in his official capacity, Buckingham Palace sources say the Prince might have attended Catholic religious celebrations in the past privately.
One of those occasions might have been the funeral Mass, celebrated at the Cathedral of Oban in 2004, for his maternal grandmother, Frances Kydd, who was a Catholic and devoted herself to charitable works the last years of her life, after the death of her daughter, Princess Diana.
A Palace spokesman stated “this was the first public Mass of the Prince” … “there is every possibility that he has attended a Mass in private, although we could not verify it.”
Prince William traveled alone, without the company of his wife Katherine or his son George, 14 months old. Family ties of Prince William to Catholicism include a distant kinship with Father Ignatius Spencer, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism at the age of 31 and joined the community of the Passionist Fathers. Father Spencer worked for the Irish immigrants of very scarce resources and openly expressed his desire to die “in a ditch, unknown and unseen” as did the poor whom he served and. In October 1864, he suffered a stroke when he was alone on a rural road, dying the way he had desired. His cause for canonization is under study at the Holy See. (GPE / EPC)
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