For most British Catholics, God and man agree to meet somewhere rather more out of the way, away from the centre of things: perhaps where a town’s Victorian outskirts would have been, down a side-street or at an awkwardly-angled street corner, in the church of dark brick which, however handsomely built, would originally have have been marked obstinately on town plans as an ‘R. C. Chapel’. Or perhaps down a suburban avenue, under confident inter-war eaves, still in brick but lent a daring freshness by clean Art Deco lines. Or maybe a futuristic Sixties concrete marquee awaits, with buckets placed here and there to catch the rainwater dripping through the ceiling. Some parishes, of course, enjoy the legacies of fantastically wealthy Victorian benefactors trying to chalk one up against the Church of England, as at St John’s Cathedral in Norwich, Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, Sacred Heart at Wimbledon, or St Giles’ at Cheadle in Staffordshire. The fifteenth Duke of Norfolk, seeking a suitable commemoration of his twenty-first birthday in 1868, sold his estates in Sheffield — which meant most of land on which the city was built — and put the proceeds straight towards the construction of Arundel Cathedral in Sussex. But apart from these glittering heirlooms, most of the fabric of the Catholic Church in Britain has a home-made, slightly scruffy feel to it — a well-worn, well-loved unkemptness.
That fabric, even over only two centuries of emancipation, has grown rich with detail and cherished associations. For instance, every diocese is a tapestry of dedications, which have their occasional quirks. That St Peter and the Guardian Angels, Paradise Street, should be found among London’s brickish former Docklands in Rotherhithe, or that the church of Our Lady of Sorrows should serve the Sussex seaside resort of Bognor Regis (with its Butlin’s holiday camp and all!) seem to me paradoxes in the best Chestertonian tradition.
They say we are a religion of ‘smells and bells’ — of sense and taste and touch — and so we are, but these are not confined to the liturgy. A Catholic church is a mingling of many things. The smells, for example, begin at the door, each church having its distinctive mixture of stale incense, of the reek of must, of faint flowers, of long use. The other senses swiftly follow: the shock of holy water cold on the fingers and forehead, the tiles unyielding to the genuflecting kneebone, the soft crinklings of the hymn-books. The muted seething of traffic may seep faintly in from outside, or in winter be displaced by the vainglorious bluster of the electric heating. The echoes may be gloopy or desiccated according to whether the congregation numbers five on a weekday morning, or is wedged in to the gunwales on Good Friday.
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Arundel Cathedral, W. Sussex
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If Mass is about to begin, somebody will be pottering around here and there, and pairs of shoulders hunched in prayer will be dotted about in the pews or in the Lady Chapel. Bars of music might float from the choir loft, or one or two mild emergencies may break out, in a flurry of stage whispers, about who is or is not down on which rota. There are the same old practical problems: misprints lurking in the hymn book, going up for Communion in the right order so as to return to the pew in the same configuration, the stowage, once the heaters at last have accomplished their labours, of heavy coats in winter so that they will not slither onto the floor, and one in particular which must have been going on for centuries and which we seemingly still cannot sort out: how to ensure the preservation of one’s nose when one is kneeling in prayer and the person directly in front sits back in their pew. All the while, though, that quiet signal of salvation, the sanctuary lamp, burns unblinkingly at the altar, stilling the great blustering headwinds against our lives.
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Saint Martin, Meudon, Île-de-France
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And who are we; who are the People of God? At Mass you will see the whole of life. The tiny fierce stares of babies all agape at the world; the gleefully wrigglingly irrepressible squirmings of toddlers; teenagers pained with overcorrected gaucheness; students and young adults in greater numbers than the BBC would care to admit; newlyweds and new mothers and fathers; middle-aged stewards and parish stalwarts; the gingerly manoeuvrings of the elderly, many long into widow- or widowerhoods; the twinkling, in the depths of ancient faces, of eyes that have seen everything. There are the well-turned-out and the down-at-heel; the healthy and the afflicted; the upright and the downtrodden. There are all manners and ranks of professions or trades; lifelong parishioners and occasional visitors; those firm in faith and those haunted by doubt or listless with indifference. There are the hidden unborn. From peers and parliamentarians to the hard-up and homeless, from millionaires to migrants, baronets to binmen, ‘Christ doth call one and all’.
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Arundel Cathedral, south aisle
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And, perhaps in London especially, you will see the whole world. In my home parish, deep in the capital’s southern boroughs, I can immediately think of fellow parishioners from Italy, Uganda, Spain, the Philippines, Nigeria, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Goa (and elsewhere in India), Mexico, Poland, South Africa, France and Finland, along with an older generation of Irish Londoners — the Murphys, the Quinns, the Connollys — and their descendants. You will hear earthy Wandle Valley talk, or crisp Eastern European consonants, or rich West African speech with its clean vowels. And just when I think the list is complete, I remember the occasional but disarmingly determined presence of Irish Travellers. But in all this there is cause neither for fraughtness — providing we remember that our dignity comes from the one God who made us all — nor, pleasing as it is to see the name of Jesus Christ outperforming the sum total of the world’s divisions of Diversity Officers, for self-congratulation. We are simply the people whom God has entrusted to each other in this particular time and place: a motley bunch to be sure, mumbling the responses and droning the hymns — or ‘praising God with our silence’, as a Nigerian priest once teased me and the rest of his reticent, undemonstrative congregation — all struggling, all knowing ourselves to be less than saints, but all, at least, aboard.
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| Pugin’s cathedral of St. Chad, Birmingham |
Sense and touch are, of course, by no means the whole story. We do not depend upon them — ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is not food and drink’ — and the privations of the pandemic did not diminish anything of the fundamental truth or validity of the faith. After all, the Eucharist that dwells at its heart asks for a momentary suspense of our senses. As Hopkins put it in his translation of the Tantum Ergo —
Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.
Still, this means that sense and sensation are transcended, not rejected outright, when we meet God. The physical world is not simply to be purged. After all, He not only made it, and saw that it was good, but saw to it that our very bodies are one day to be incorporated — in a more literal sense than we can know — into Truth Himself, the author of ‘all things, visible and invisible’. Consequently I rejoice to see the accidentals once again; I taste and see that the Lord is good.
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The then-newly-cast bells of Notre-Dame de Paris on display in the cathedral nave, February 2013
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