At Mass on Wednesday Canon Peter introduced into the penitential rite something I had never heard a priest say before. He encouraged us to repent of "the times we have not valued our heritage". In a week when we celebrate the feasts of St Anselm (Wednesday) and St George (today) that struck a chord.

Catholics are notoriously bad at valuing their heritage. I don't just mean all the senseless destruction of Victorian Gothic which followed in the wake of Vatican II nor the equally senseless destruction of good contemporary design in favour of soulless pastiche which is sometimes a problem today (Digitalnun can be quite as severe about the Fusty and Musty school of church art as she is about the Brutal and Ugly: a pox on both their houses!) Heritage means more than that. It is art and architecture, language and music, of course, but also, and importantly, traditions of place and prayer, a whole way of being. Yes, Mass can be celebrated in a cowshed or a cathedral with great beauty and fervour; the Divine Office can be sung in a fine basilica or in the open air with devotion and skill. We know that. We give time and resources to our buildings, our liturgies, our vestments and so on and so forth, but sometimes we forget or undervalue our history. That's where the traditions of place and prayer come in.

This morning we attended Mass in the private chapel of the Eyston family at Hendred House. It has been in Catholic hands since 1256 and one certainly gets a feeling of generations of Berkshire Catholics praying there through the centuries. There are other places where one has a sense of fading glory, of abandonment, loss and ruin. One thinks of some of the splendid Victorian Gothic churches of the north. Monastic communities in this country have not always given a lead. A Jewish visitor to a Benedictine monastery once remarked that he had a sense of the Shekinah fading over the nearby city (where a community of monks had lived in the middle ages) but still being bright over the village where the nuns were then living. Today he might feel it fading there, too, for the nuns have gone and with them a Catholic presence which stretched back beyond Penal Times. Ichabod.

Heritage is not to be equated with mere conservation, a preservation of the status quo. Like Tradition, it must be alive and active. That is why traditions of place and prayer are worth cherishing, because they help us to a sense of the numinous, of God present, here and now. We look back and we look forward; but we can only know God in the present.

Our next web conference is scheduled to take place on Thursday, 6 May at 7.30 p.m. London time (13.30 EST 14.30 EDT and 18.30 UTC). We shall be looking at how to reconcile the interiority of Christianity with mission. Plenty of time afterwards to catch up on the Election results!