St Wilfrid's Church

St Wilfrid's Church is a Roman Catholic church serving the town of Hailsham in the Wealden district of East Sussex, England. The present building was completed in 2015 and is the third church to serve the town; it stands between its predecessors, a small hall opened in 1922 and a larger church of 1955, on a site which had belonged to a Catholic family since the 19th century. The Hailsham area was historically supportive of Protestant Nonconformist beliefs and had few Catholics, and for many years worshippers had to attend Mass in basic premises: rooms in private houses and, from 1917, a subdivided loft in the stables of a brewery. Numbers grew rapidly after the first permanent church opened, and after six decades of being served from Our Lady of Ransom Church, Eastbourne, Hailsham became an independent parish in 1957. The town's rapid postwar growth and an increasing Catholic population prompted the construction of the larger new church.

When created in 1957, Hailsham's parish covered an extensive, mostly rural area of East Sussex, and it was extended again in the early 21st century when nearby Polegate was included. The parish is now formally known as "Hailsham and Polegate" and is served by St Wilfrid's Church—at which there are two Sunday Masses each week—and St George's Church at Polegate. Both are part of the Eastbourne Deanery within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton. Masses were also celebrated up to once a week at a chapel at Hellingly Hospital, a large psychiatric hospital within the parish, for about 50 years until the late 1980s.

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