ADVISORY PANEL

Sophie Andreae has been the Vice Chair of the Patrimony Committee of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales since 2002. 

This Committee provides advice and guidance on all aspects of Catholic heritage as well as acting at the link between the Catholic Church in England and Wales and public bodies such as Historic England and Cadw.

Sophie is an architectural historian who has spent her career helping to protect historic buildings and promote them to a wider public. She has served on a number of heritage bodies, including as a Trustee of Historic Royal Palaces, as an elected Council Member of the National Trust and as member of the Fabric Advisory Committee for St Paul’s Cathedral. 

Leonora Butau is a Catholic theologian, educator and speaker based in San Antonio, Texas. 

Prior to moving to the USA in 2018, Leonora worked at St. Mary's University in London, England, where she spent eight years teaching courses in Catholic Ethics and Catholic Spirituality and where she organised national and international theological formation events. 

She also worked for Caritas Social Action Network, the charitable agency of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. 

While in the USA, she has worked as a Program Director for the St. John Paul II Foundation and has presented national talks in the areas of spiritual life, marriage and family, and the Theology of the Body. 

Leonora, with her husband Rufaro, lead and direct the School of Mary in the USA. She also serves Natural Womanhood, a non-profit that focuses on women's healthcare, as a Board of Director. 

She earned a BA in Theology and Religious Studies and an MA in Bioethics from St. Mary's University, London, and has a PhD in Theology from the University of Surrey, England.

Gavin D'Costa is Emeritus Professor of Catholic Theology, University of Bristol and Visiting Professor of Interreligious Dialogue, Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Rome   

Gavin’s research interests include modern Roman Catholic theology, systematic theology, theology of religions, aspects of philosophical theology related to religious pluralism. He teaches on modern theology, Catholic theology, theology of religions, interfaith dialogue, Christians and Muslims, and methods and approaches to religion. 

Gavin has taught at Bristol since 1991. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya and completed his education in England. He studied English and Theology (BA) at Birmingham University with John Hick as his dissertation tutor and then completed his doctoral work at Cambridge University. He taught in London until moving to Bristol and was also Joseph McCarthy Professor at the Gregorian University, Rome. 

He acts as an advisor to the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales and the Anglican Church on matters of interreligious dialogue and theology. He also advises the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Vatican City.  

John Eade is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Roehampton and Visiting Professor at Toronto University. 

After research in Kolkata (Calcutta) on the social identity of the educated Bengali Muslim middle class, he completed his PhD in 1986 on Bangladeshi community politics in Tower Hamlets. 

Since then he has researched cultural diversity and the global city, British Bangladeshi identity politics, the Islamisation of urban space and pilgrimage. 

He co-founded the Routledge Studies on Religion, Travel and Tourism and is a co-editor of the Bloomsbury Religion, Space and Place series. In 2018 he co-founded the European Association of Social Anthropologists Pilgrimage Network (PilNet).

TJ Guile has had a long-term fascination with pilgrimage and shrines having completed Student Cross (now Pilgrim Cross) Essex Leg twice in his twenties. 

He is a teacher, speaker and writer and Chairman of the English Catholic History Association and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

He has published articles in several publications both online and in print form. His publications include Three Marian Shrines in Sixteenth Century England and The Beauty of Welsh Holy Places and the Lure of Modern Pilgrimages. 

He has a particular interest in Catholic recusancy both locally in Oxfordshire and nationally. He has done online and in person talks on this subject. 

He is a graduate of two universities and lives in Oxfordshire. His interests encompass hiking and medieval ecclesiastical heritage. 

Rowan Morton-Gledhill is Director of Communications for the Diocese of Leeds. 

She was brought up in the countryside near Holmfirth in West Yorkshire. Studying first Law and then History of Architecture at Cambridge, her main published work is in the History of Astronomy. 

Rowan's career has included diverse roles in music, from being a professional jazz, swing and blues singer to six years as a trustee and member of the Royal School of Church Music's strategic planning group. 

An award-winning writer and broadcaster, for 25 years she was a BBC journalist, mostly working in TV as a producer and director of BBC One's Songs of Praise series and latterly as a producer of religion & ethics, music and documentary programmes for BBC Radio 4, 3 and 2. 

She has been Director of Communications for the Diocese of Leeds since 2016, which is where she first spotted a fellow Catholic parishioner's excellent route booklet for a Year of Mercy Camino between Leeds Cathedral and Ripon and re-branded it as the diocese's annual walking pilgrimage, 'St Wilfrid's Way'. 

When not working from home or 'in training' for St Wilfrid's Way by walking the hills of North Northumberland where she now lives, her interests include enjoying - and trying to emulate - the charitable cheerfulness to be found in the works of GK Chesterton.  

Jan Nowotnik is the Director of Mission and National Ecumenical Officer of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales. 

He is a priest of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. He studied for the priesthood at the Royal English College in Valladolid (Spain) and was ordained in November 1998. 

After serving as an assistant priest in two parishes he became parish priest at St Augustine’s in Stoke-on-Trent and then St Brigid’s Northfield, Birmingham. 

He then went to Rome to study for a Licence in Theology, specialising in Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue. He completed his Phd in Ecclesiology in 2022 focusing on the relationship between the local and universal Church with regards to the synodal pathway. 

Josephine Warren is Historic Churches Adviser to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England Wales since 2018, working with the Patrimony Committee to support dioceses in how they manage their heritage. 

Josephine has a background in archaeology having studied at University College London, followed by a MPhil in Medieval Archaeology from the University of Cambridge. For the past two years she has managed Culture Recovery Fund grants to the value of £6.6 million, for outstanding historic Catholic churches in England. 

She is an associate of the Institute of Historic Buildings Conservation, a member of the Historic Churches Committee for the Archdiocese of Westminster, and a member of the Management Committee for Harvington Hall, the Elizabethan recusant moated manor house in Worcestershire which is open to the public.