WESTMINSTER Cathedral's Millennium Cross, a potent symbol of Christianity in the Jubilee Year, has been moved to its permanent home at Ampleforth Abbey.
The 50ft high metal cross was conceived by the late Cardinal Basil Hume as an outward sign of faith in a secular city. The cross now stands at his beloved Ampleforth as an imposing monument to his memory.
For the last two years, the cross stood on a wooden plinth on the piazza at Westminster. Earlier this month 24 Royal Engineers dismantled the fourton structure. It was airlifted last Monday by RAF chinook hospital to its present location on a steep hillside beneath St Thomas's House — one of the boarding houses of Ampleforth College.
Basil Hume was pupil, monk, teacher and Abbot at the Benedictine monastery in North Yorkshire.
The Abbot of Ampleforth, Dom Tunothy Wright said: "The community had a particular stake in his commemoration, and an important part of the reasoning behind siting the cross so prominently has been to give expression to the strong sense felt by people in the locality that this exceptional man belonged to each of us in a personal way."