The ‘gathered’ parish of St Edmund’s Bungay and Harleston covers a large area of north Suffolk and south Norfolk, with the two main towns and some 44 villages. By the end of the second decade of the 21st century the population of Harleston had already outweighed that of Bungay, and by the late 2030s will be twice its size because of large new estates currently being built or planned. Up till 2021 the parish had been served by Benedictines from Downside, but between 2021 and the beginning of this year a long and tortuous process of handover of the parish to the Diocese of East Anglia took place.
Parishioners at the western (Harleston) end of the parish used to worship until the 1990s in a former Baptist chapel in the small village of Wortwell, when Dom Edward Crouzet, then parish priest, oversaw the purchase from Norfolk County Council of a former community centre at Jay’s Green in Harleston, in order to create a more central Mass centre for that geographical area, but also with the vision that this should be the Church at the service of, and integrated in, the local community. Parishioners redecorated and furnished the former games room as a chapel and it was opened and dedicated to St Thomas More by Bishop Alan Clark on 21 June 1999. A former classroom at right angles to the chapel was later refurbished and opened as much-needed extra congregational space in 2004-05.
The worshipping community at Jay’s Green had doubled since Covid until a temporary closure in 2024, and included all ages from new-borns to late octogenarians. It is now rebuilding, and has a string community spirit. It is, perhaps unusually, a community where people were happy to volunteer, to take on both managerial and liturgical tasks, as witnessed by the large proportion of adult members figuring on rotas for readers, Eucharistic ministers, writers of bidding prayers and welcomers. Newcomers, trying out various Catholic churches in the area, said they opted to be part of St Thomas More because of the welcome. To many this is a family, where real practical love exists.
