The US Metropolitan Museum of Art is touring an exhibition, ‘The Tudors: Art and Majesty', from 3rd Oct 2022 to 24th September 2023. The exhibition will be on display in New York, Cleveland and San Francisco, and will feature important Catholic artefacts from the British Province of Jesuits.

Tour dates - New York (2 October 2022 - 8 January 2023), Cleveland (21 February - 14 May 2023), San Francisco (26 June - 24 September 2023)

Working with the Met Museum, Jesuits in Britain have brought to the US a collection of rare Catholic artifacts of immense beauty and historical value which sit at the heart of a stunning new exhibition - The Tudors: Art and Majesty.

The centrepiece is a Tudor cope (liturgical vestment worn by Roman Catholic clergy) which was commissioned by Henry VII for use in Westminster Abbey. It has been described by experts as "one of the most expensive and prestigious commissions in the early Tudor dynasty". During the iconoclasm of the English Reformation, when many Catholic artefacts were destroyed, the cope was smuggled abroad and kept safe by Jesuits in the Spanish Netherlands. Alongside the cope, the Jesuits have lent St Thomas More's crucifix, and St Edmund Campion's book, Decem Rationes, of which only six survive.

Alongside the three museum exhibitions, we are planning a parallel tour in two of the cities - New York and San Francisco - consisting of lectures and events to bring alive the faith these artefacts represent and what their legacy is today. This legacy will focus on the institutions of Stonyhurst College and Campion Hall, Oxford, places where faith and human flourishing is nurtured by the Jesuits in those who will take this mission forward in the twenty-first century.

This tour seeks not only to preserve the memory of faith under persecution, but also to inspire faith in those who will visit the exhibits and introduce them to the mission of the Jesuits today.

For more info, please email Suzanne Wheeler, Head of Development at Stonyhurst College, below.