The dissolution of the Church of England during our times was an inevitability. That Church had originated in a time when its Erastian claims had known only one serious challenger, the Church of Rome, which had been seen off by the Penal Laws, which existed until 1829. While it tolerated the existence of Protestant sects, the central reason for the Church of England’s existence was that any other religious body in England was superfluous. To be English was to be a member of the Church of England, unless one opted out. Hence the fact that nearly all primary schools were, throughout our times, Church schools. They were different in status from ‘faith schools’, run by Jews, Muslims or Catholics. Though–because–attached to the Church of England, they were also, ipso facto, state schools. The Church was part of the state. The Church of England was the religion of the monarch, and of the two older universities. It had periodic moments of spiritual revival, sometimes ‘high’, sometimes ‘low’ church, but its life had been bound up with the organism of the post-1660 nation state. That state was now unravelling. The aristocracy still existed, but they were no longer the ‘governing class’. There was all but no squirarchy left, so that in those parishes where the living still had a patron–often the lord of the manor, who had been associated with the same area of England since the Norman Conquest–it seemed to many anomalous that a landowner, rather than a bishop, together with the church wardens, should choose the parson. The very word ‘parson’, familiar term for the parish priest since Chaucer, went out of use. Few quite realised it in the 1960s, but the last generation of literate parsons had been ordained. Those clerical families, such as had given birth to Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, John Cowper Powys, etc, were a thing of the past. The large, draughty rectories–one in every parish, rural or urban–were also a vanished thing, as the Church began a policy of selling off its parsonage-houses, and rehousing the clergy in small, modern dwellings, which reflected the character and class of the new ordinands: no room for books, no room for eight children, all dressed in hand-me-downs; in short, they were no longer gentlemen’s houses, and those gentlemen who would in a previous generation have taken orders were now drawn to other ways of life.
The organic unity of the Church of England, then, was threatened even before it had an Archbishop of Canterbury–Michael Ramsey–who candidly hated it, and who, by giving it its own parliament, the Synod, and cutting it loose from the Parliament, had sawn off one of its vital limbs. Hitherto, as has been stated already, there was a new sect, ‘Anglicanism’, which attracted fewer and fewer adherents.
Those who believed in Christianity as some ecstatic personal experience were drawn more and more to the Billy Graham religion, which had first been manifest in Britain in 1954, and which grew apace, until in many quarters it was seen as the only plausible version of Protestantism, sometimes flourishing in buildings belonging to the Church of England, but having little in common with the worship or beliefs of that organisation. Those who believed in an institutional form of Christianity looked, perhaps, to the parent Church from which the Church of England had broken away in the sixteenth century, namely that of Rome.
Those who had been drawn to the Roman Catholic Church in the past had often been under the impression that, unlike any other human institution, it was unchangeable. In fact, the Church of Rome had undergone many changes since the nineteenth century, when first the temporal power of the popes had been curtailed by the political unification of Italy, and then the Church had been shaken within by the crisis known as modernism, in which many so-called modernists–tentative believers in modern science, scholars prepared to accept some of the findings of textual scholars of the Bible, and others–were ruthlessly silenced or driven from the Church in the years before the First World War.
Though the liturgy appeared to be unchanging, even that had undergone some alterations in the twentieth century, with Pius X (Pope from 1903 to 1914), that great persecutor of modernism, introducing the custom of frequent Communion, for example, and Pius XII (Pope from 1939 to 1958) making a number of changes to the Mass. They were minor, and would not have been noticed by any but faddists. His successor, the Patriarch of Venice, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was crowned in a magnificent ceremony on 4 November 1958, with ostrich feathers waved before him in the incense clouds, as a great medieval triple-crown was placed upon his head. No wonder Catholics the world over believed that the Church was the one rock in a changing world which would never alter.
In fact, the Roman Church was plunged, during and after the pontificate of Roncalli (he ruled as Pope John XXIII), into a crisis every much as divisive and bitter as those which in our time shook other institutions such as political parties and nation states. In 1962, Roncalli increased the number of cardinals to eighty-seven, making the Sacred College more international, and in the same year he opened the Second Vatican Council, on 11 October. The First Vatican Council (1869–70) had been a remarkable piece of backwoodsmanship, declaring the Pope himself to be infallible, and gallantly banging the drum of papal triumphalism as Garibaldi, Bismarck and others reduced the reality of the Pope’s political power in Europe.
Some Roman Catholics, especially the converts, felt that the Catholic claim was of its essence Against the World. Not to have espoused the spirit of our, or of any, age, was one of the hallmark’s of the faith’s authenticity. That was certainly how Evelyn Waugh thought, for example. Other Catholics were troubled. Was it really appropriate to forbid Catholics to read works of literature merely because, like Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, or Voltaire’s Candide, they had found themselves on the lengthy Index Librorum of forbidden books? Was there not something a little crazy about the fact that you could not buy the Dublin masterpiece, Ulysses, in Dublin? (Until the Index was abolished, Catholics who went to university had to acquire special dispensations from their bishops to read books which were sometimes set texts for their examinations.) Were the Protestants, and others, who had studied the Bible in the spirit of textual criticism applied to other ancient texts–were they really at fault? Was the Roman Catholic teaching about the origin of human life, which was largely based on the trials and errors of Aristotle, who died in 322 bc, not to allow any more modern medical research to affect its thinking? Aristotle, for example, believed that the man who planted seed in a woman thereby planted the whole soul of a new being; he did not know that the seed on its own could not produce a baby, and therefore it made no sense to speak of the soul existing in the seed alone. Yet much of the Church’s teaching on why some forms of sexual activity were allowable, others not, were posited on the idea that male masturbators, or homosexuals, for example, were wasting potential souls. (In its cruder form, as dished out in the confessionals, the belief existed that such ‘impure’ behaviour was spilling actual souls.)
More important than these esoteric questions, many Catholics questioned the right of the clergy to be asking them. Many had experienced in childhood abuse at the hands of priests and nuns–either sexual abuse or casual, systematic bullying. Though the full extent of this–surely the single greatest cause of the decline of the Roman Catholic Church in the West–would take some time to be acknowledged, it was part of the psychological story of why many men and women in the 1960s no longer felt inclined to accept everything which their parish priest or their Reverend Mother told them.
The Roman Catholic Church was, in fact, a seething cauldron of human grievance, waiting to bubble over. There were priests, and male and female members of religious orders who wondered how much, if anything, of the old doctrines they still believed, or whether they believed in the old way. The post-war world, as it reconstructed itself in Western Europe and the United States, discovered that it had lost, or discarded, the hierarchical, deferential way of viewing human society. Concepts of authority and obedience were changed, or abandoned. Inevitably, these changes in the secular sphere percolated to the Church. How possible was it, for a Roman Catholic of the 1960s, to accept teachings and practices simply on the authority of a bishop or an abbot or a pope? As Catholics became better informed about their own history, they came to realise that there had been hundreds of years, for example, when celibacy was not enjoined upon the priesthood. Was it still necessary to insist upon a married clergy? What of the struggles of the poor in Latin America, often against regimes which were brutal and unjust? Was it not part of the Church’s mission to identify the Gospel with their aspirations? What of the Mass? Roman Catholic liturgical practice had evolved over many years. Viewed from the perspective of an historical scholar, as well as from that of a pastor trying to teach the faith in a parish, how could the bishops continue to justify, for example, the custom of giving Communion in one kind only (i.e., just the wafer)–a custom dating from a medieval fear of the Plague–if the congregation were allowed to sip together from one chalice? The old Mass, sometimes named after the Council of Trent (‘Tridentine’) but in substance a much, much older liturgy, was in Latin, and the more sacred parts of the texts were not recited audibly by the priest, but muttered rapidly at the level of a whisper. What opportunity did this give to the congregation to ‘hear, mark and inwardly digest’ God’s word?
Questions which had been asked in the sixteenth century by the Protestant reformers were now asked by Catholic theologians. There is not much evidence that Pope John XXIII, an avuncular figure who kept an excellent tabl.1 ever imagined that his Second Vatican Council would answer many of these questions. He spoke metaphorically of throwing open the Church’s windows. He was a basically conservative figure. He continued to insist, for example, that seminarians were taught in Latin. It would seem likely that he merely intended, by initiating the Council, to institute minor liturgical changes, to remove some of the more obviously offensive or anomalous elements in Catholic teaching and practice, to reform the Breviary (the prayer book used in religious houses and said privately by priests), and above all to improve, if not actually to heal, broken relations with the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. He died in 1963, while the Council was still in progress, and was replaced by a very different man, Giovanni Battista Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, who ruled (1963–78) as Paul VI. Pope John referred to Montini as a bit like Hamlet (‘un po’ Amletico’) and there must have been many moments during his fifteen-year pontificate when Pope Paul could have echoed the Danish Prince’s exclamation–‘O cursed spite–That ever I was born to set it right!’ Montini was an intelligent man, the son of a liberal-minded, prosperous lawyer from Brescia who had got into trouble with the Fascists for his work as a political editor and parliamentary deputy. An Anglophile, Montini had English friends, and during the latter days of the Second World War had enjoyed nipping backwards and forwards between the Vatican (where he was secretary of state to Pius XII) to meet English friends in Rome, and swap talk with them about what was going on. He was the only Pope of modern times to have visited England in his youth, and as Pope he would receive the Archbishop of Canterbury, spontaneously giving Michael Ramsey his ring in a gesture which excited many of the High Church party into the belief that corporate reunion between the two Churches was imminent.
Paul VI it was who brought the Council to its conclusion in 1965, proclaiming an Extraordinary Jubilee (1 January–29 May 1966) to give the Church time to rejoice and meditate upon the very many decrees and deliberations which had been promulgated by the Council Fathers–archbishops, cardinals, monks and friars who had by then jetted back to their separate countries.
Apart from the multiplicity of difficult questions raised by a Church in a state of flux–what to do about the all but Marxist Social Gospel Catholics of South America or the all but fascist liturgical die-hard followers of Archbishop Lefebvre in France; what to do about the question of priestly celibacy; how to heal the breach with the Churches of the East and how to stop the flood of monks and nuns abandoning their vows–Paul VI was faced with two major questions: the questions with which the poor Hamlet-like Pope, with his bush-baby eyes and his worried, thin face, will forever by history be associated. One was how to interpret the Council’s recommendations about changes to the Mass. The other was how to interpret the advice given him by a pontifical commission on the question of contraception, especially in the light of the invention of a contraceptive pill.
Die-hard conservatives could see that the answer to these questions was simple: change neither the liturgy nor the moral teaching of the Church. Aesthetes might call for relaxation of arcane sexual teaching, while retaining the liturgy for which Lassus, Palestrina, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven had written their sublimest chords. Christians, of whom there were more and more among the ranks of the clergy, burned with the zeal which had once animated Luther and Zwingli, to share with their congregations the words of Scripture translated into the Jerusalem Bible. They longed for simpler forms of worship in which the laity could partake more fully. They were also aware, through their pastoral work, of the very great difficulties faced by the Catholic faithful who were trying to be loyal to the Church while surviving the strains and trials of married life.
Pope Hamlet agonised, and he knew that whatever he decreed, in either direction, would be greeted with dismay by some section of the Church or another. What he could not know, even though he was much more in touch with the world, and much more intelligent, than his predecessor, was the extent to which the collapse of the whole concept of authority in the Western world would lead to outright rebellion against him, not merely by the disgruntled laity, but also by the religious orders and the clergy. He opted to modernise the liturgy, and to be a conservative over the matter of contraception. His encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reasserted the impropriety of artificial birth control, made him an object of hatred throughout the world, with many who were Catholics, and an even larger number who were not, laying at his door Malthusian denunciations of callousness. The Pope was made responsible in the eyes of such critics for all the problems of overpopulation, including those felt in such areas as Muslim Nigeria or Communist China, which did not recognise his authority. Many felt there was some illogicality in the Humanae Vitae encyclical, since it repeated the traditional Catholic belief that it was allowable for couples to make love during the ‘safe period’. This gave the lie to the notion that a purely Catholic sexual act must always be performed with the intention of procreation, or at least with the knowledge that procreation might result. How did such careful use of the safe period differ from taking a contraceptive pill? The lack of a good answer to this question drove many from the Church and caused others, gradually, to abandon any attempt to follow the specific guidelines of papal teaching about sexual morality. If it was possible for popes to make such muddled and irresponsible pronouncements, it was felt that there was no longer any need to heed what they said about, say, homosexuality or divorce, or sleeping with your steady partner before marriage. Catholics, in short, began slowly during our times to behave like everyone else, when it came to sex, and this would lead many to forsake, wholly or in part, the ways of behaviour which separated Catholics from others. ‘They seem just like other people,’ said Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Catholic masterpiece Brideshead Revisited (first published 1945, revised 1959). ‘My dear Charles,’ replied Sebastian Flyte, ‘that’s exactly what they’re not–particularly in this country where they’re so few’… ‘Everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.2
For Catholics in Britain, as in the rest of the world, the HumanaeVitae encyclical was a moment of crisis. One MP of a primarily Catholic constituency in Liverpool said, ‘It was hoped in particular, that the novel biochemical function of the Pill, with its regulation of the natural menstrual cycle upon which the doctrine of the safe period had been founded, would enable the theological impasse to be circumvented without betraying the categories of traditionalist reasoning. For such Catholics, the crisis of faith was not provoked by those urging a comprehensive State family planning service, but by Humanae Vitae itself.’3 One distinguished Catholic theologian, Charles Davis, felt this was the moment of truth, when he must leave the Church. ‘The Roman Catholic Church contradicts my Christian faith because I experience it as a zone of untruth, pervaded by a disregard for truth.’4 Once again, it was the encyclical which prompted him. ‘One who claims to be the moral leader of the church should not tell lies,’ he wrote in the Observer. Like many priests, Davis had his sympathies broadened by the experience of falling in love–in his case with a woman called Florence. ‘I myself as well as other people have asked whether I should have left the church if I had not loved Florence or if Florence had been unable to follow me in my decision.’ It prompted the limerick:
Said Charles Davis, ‘I view with abhorrence
A Church without Biblical warrants.
With Vatican II
I’ll have nothing to do.
I stick to the Council/Counsel of Florence.’
Other priests remained, but they would not be silenced. A kindly Carmelite friar, Father Brocard Sewell, an expert on the 1890s and the personal friend of, among others, Christine Keeler and Sir Oswald Mosley, wrote to The Times to say that the encyclical had only intensified the distrust of the papacy which had been felt by the orthodox churches since the time of the Great Schism. He called upon the Pope to imitate the example of his thirteenth-century predecessor Celestine V and resign. Sewell was temporarily suspended, forbidden to say Mass or hear confessions, and sent as a punishment to Nova Scotia, where he continued his gentle researches into the by-ways of English literature. Other priests were not so fortunate, and of the fifty-seven who wrote to The Times to support him, many were sacked by their bishops and never reinstated.5
At the moment the Church was being disrupted by the row over Humanae Vitae, a young Liberal MP in Britain, David Steel–a future leader of his party–was introducing the Abortion Bill into the House of Commons. Up to fifty women a year in Britain were dying as a result of ‘septic or incomplete abortions’, and it was obviously quite wrong for the law not to recognise in some cases the medical need, and in all cases the woman’s desire, to terminate pregnancy. In 1966–67 as the bill was passing through Parliament and becoming law, the current state of medical opinion was that twenty-eight weeks was the time when a foetus became viable. As midwifery and obstetric skills developed, this began to seem very late. Many children were born prematurely at this stage of the mother’s pregnancy and survived to live healthily. There were survivals at twenty-two weeks, just as, more disturbingly, ‘botched abortions’, when the nature of the operation became clear: that it was the killing of a child.
Steel in later life came to feel that the law should be changed to limit abortion to the twenty-week period. He admitted that he had no notion, when bringing in the legislation, how many women would avail themselves of the chance to abort their babies, though he also noted the statistical fact that ‘the rate of abortions in Britain is slightly lower than in Catholic France, Spain and Italy, and substantially lower in the U.S. where the subject is much more of a hot potato.’6 The annual rate of abortions in Britain in the twenty-first century stands at over 180,000 per year.7
The abortion issue remained, perhaps, one of the few where Roman Catholics, together with some others for religious motives, differed from the majority. Most Britons came to feel that, even though the life inside the womb was one which could grow into a child, it was not quite of the same status as a child. They might mock Catholic explanations, based upon St Thomas Aquinas, of when a foetus develops a soul, but they would actually themselves be just as hazy about when (as David Steel showed with his shifting from twenty-eight to twenty weeks as the ideal cut-off point for abortions) a foetus became ‘viable’. No one pretended this was an easy question. The Roman Catholic Church continued to hold a position which, until the Second World War, had been not only the majority view in Britain, but also the law of the land.
The matter of birth control was only the catalyst which hastened the process of disillusionment for many British Catholics. The Archbishop of Westminster, John Carmel Heenan, an uninspiring, conservative-minded man, was wholly unequipped, both intellectually and pastorally, to deal with the crisis, but it is doubtful whether anyone else could have prevented what happened–namely that the Roman Catholic Church lost about half its practising membership in England, Wales and Scotland, and that in Ireland, where many other factors needed to be taken into account, it would in many areas of life suffer almost complete wipeout.
It was a feature of our times that institutions began to question the very reason for their existence. Political parties and trades unions all underwent deep changes, and loss of active membership. Colleges and clubs which had continued for decades, sometimes for centuries, more or less unchanged asked themselves by what justification they limited their membership on grounds of gender, class or race. It is against this general background of institutional dissolution that the story of the Roman Catholic Church in our times must be read. Even when allowance has been made, however, for the fact that it was a period of change and upheaval in every sphere, the story of the Church’s numerical decline, especially in Britain, is difficult to ignore. From 1965 to 1996, these are the statistics in England and Wales–Sunday Mass attendance fell from 1.9 million to 1.1 million. The number of priests fell from 7,808 to 5,732. Even more devastating are the statistics which reveal that the dogged 1.1 million who continued to attend Mass towards the end of our times were themselves ageing rapidly. The number of child baptisms over the period halved–134,055 to 74,848–and the number of Roman Catholic marriages fell from 46,480 (in 1960) to a mere 17,294 in the 1990s.8 Then again, the statistics relating to Roman Catholic schools in England and Wales would not be encouraging to anyone intent upon the propagation of the faith. ‘Faith’ schools during our times retained their popularity among parents who wanted a disciplined and old-fashioned structure for the education of their children, regardless of theological observance. This would explain why the decline in attendance in Catholic schools, from 870,430 in 1980 to 808,774 in 1996, was comparatively small. The percentage of non-Catholic pupils in Catholic schools reflects this fact–only 3.5 percent of non-Catholics in state secondary schools in 1980 but 17.7 percent in 1996; and in the Independent Catholic schools, 50.4 percent of non-Catholic pupils and 45.1 percent of non-Catholic teachers.9 It is clear that in this situation the extent to which the schools really are propagating Roman Catholicism is merely notional. There will be fluctuations in these statistics as more and more Eastern European Catholics, especially Poles, come to live in England, but the key statistic is little over 17,000 Catholic marriages per year.
The new Mass caused as much pain to some Catholics as the Pope’s views on the safe period. ‘The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me’, Evelyn Waugh told a friend in March 1966. A month later, on Easter Day, he heard Mass for the last time, celebrated according to the old rite by his friend Father Philip Caraman SJ. Waugh then returned to his house at Combe Florey in Somerset and had a heart attack on the lavatory, where he died at luncheon-time. It was only one of the many instances of the ineluctable tendency of our times to deprive human beings of their dignity, and to turn potentially sad events into comedy.
Religions cohere on two levels, the ritual and the moral. In the 1960s, the words of the Roman Mass, which had been unchanged since the sixteenth century, and in effect unchanged for centuries longer, were rendered into the vernacular with the upsetting consequences which we observed at the opening of this chapter. At the same time, as the novels of David Lodge made wittily and abundantly clear, Roman Catholics began to ask themselves how much of their religion they had ever really believed. In the days of the Old Mass, the faithful at a small tin tabernacle, or in the largest cathedrals, could attend the ceremonies and know that they were at one, in word and action, with their Church throughout the world. Rather in the same way that Muslims, abasing themselves for prayer at the regulated intervals, continued to hear the same words, until the end of our times and beyond. For Catholics, however, the experience of churchgoing in our times became divisive, even for those who accepted the new liturgies; some congregations rejoiced in the chance to imitate the American Protestant tradition, with songs, handshaking, electric guitars and liturgical dance, while others felt that the past had been sold and yearned for the old ways.
Instead of being a focus of unity, the liturgy became a source of animosity and division. Institutions, secular as well as religious, need repetitious rituals to retain their sense of identity, which is why for many non-military-minded people there is still a virtue in the annual ceremonies of Trooping the Colour and laying wreaths at the Cenotaph at Armistice. Institutions also need to believe at least a substantial percentage of what they claim to believe. No adherent to a Church or a political party can ever have truly subscribed to every word of the manifesto, but when the discrepancy between aspirant and actual belief becomes too glaring, then institutions break up.
The destructive paradox of the Catholic civil war was that it was the most extreme conservatives who, in their hatred of the chummy new Eucharistic rite, were least willing to toe the new line. ‘Let us offer one another the sign of peace,’ said a Catholic priest in London at the moment in the rite when he hoped the congregation would shake hands. Jennifer Paterson, the cookery writer, visibly raised two fingers towards the altar.
Father Oswald Baker, in 1975, became the focus of recusancy when he refused to stop using the Tridentine Rite in his church at Downham Market, in Norfolk. The Bishop of Northampton, his diocesan, attempted to remove him, which had the effect of making Downham Market a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of disaffected Catholics. Baker made barbed comments about Masses which were enlivened by pop music and ‘sensuous dancing girls’. He referred in one sermon to St John of the Cross, who was jailed by his superiors in the sixteenth century, and eventually released to become the Vicar General of Andalusia. ‘These bishops,’ said Baker, to an appreciative congregation, ‘they will have their little joke.’ His bishop appointed a new parish priest, who was obliged (since Baker and friends continued to occupy the church) to say Mass to a small congregation in the town hall. Baker was a devotee of the teaching of St Robert Bellarmine’s teaching that a heretical Pope automatically loses his office. He therefore believed that the See of Peter, though apparently occupied in succession by Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, was in fact empty. In 1984, he surprised a visitor by telling him, that the Pope ‘is no more a Catholic than Ian Paisley–and no more Pope than Billy Graham’. Baker was in a minority, but it was a vociferous and numerous minority, which believed that ‘the new Mass is a sacrilegious parody of the true Mass; it is sinful to take part in it.10
To see the extent of Roman Catholic decline in England, however, it would have been necessary, not to visit the remote parishes of Norfolk, but to go to Liverpool. Liverpool, more than London, was the British Catholic capital. It was to Liverpool in the nineteenth century that the Irish Catholics had fled from the famine, and although many passed through Liverpool on their way to other sources of work, many stayed. The docklands of Liverpool remained for many travellers, until the 1960s, the natural point of departure for America.
Between 1968 and 1996, five docklands parishes closed.11 Mass attendance sank to a fraction of what it was in the proud old days of Archbishop Richard Downey (Archbishop of Liverpool 1928–53), known as ‘the ruler of the North’, a hard-faced bigot who encouraged his clergy, preaching for the Catholic Evidence Guild, to stand on street corners and pour scorn on the Church of England. The Church of England bishop, Dr David, frequently complained to his RC counterpart that priests had ‘terrorised’ the non-Catholic wives of ‘mixed marriages’, ‘using foul language, to tell them that their marriages were invalid and their children illegitimate; in one case a priest was said to have told a Catholic husband that he was quite free to leave his wife because they were not validly married’.12
Both Churches, the Church of Rome and the Church of England, doomed in our times to shrink in numbers, spent time and money constructing cathedrals.
The Protestant building was begun during the time of the second Bishop of Liverpool, Francis James Chavasse, a man whose anti-popish bigotry would have been a match for the anti-Protestantism of Archbishop Downey. As Rector of St Peter-le-Baily in Oxford, Chavasse was responsible for founding St Peter’s Hall, a specifically evangelical college, designed to counteract the unmanly and Romish tendencies of Pusey House. The parish church, later the college chapel, had a memorial window to Chavasse fils, also a Bishop (of Rochester), celebrating in emblematic form his career as an Olympic athlete and as a chain-smoker–he had an Episcopal ring which doubled as a cigarette-holder. Giles Gilbert Scott, a very young architect, was the grandson of George Gilbert Scott, who designed the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station. His vast cathedral on St James’s Mount, begun in 1901, was consecrated on 19 July 1924, but it was not completed until 1978, when the Daily Telegraph wrote:
In such a setting, does not her Anglican Cathedral look like a huge anachronism? Even some of the devout seem inclined to apologize for it, on the grounds that money (all of it raised by private subscription be it noted) might have been better spent on works of mercy or on some more utilitarian place of worship.
Such sentiments are wholly out of place. The Church proclaims her message by striving, as the architects of Liverpool Cathedral did, to build for as near to eternity as is humanly possible. We should surely by now have learned the error of supposing that Christian virtues will continue to flourish in a society which fails to nourish the faith from which they spring, and great ecclesiastical architecture is one of the most fertile sources of such nourishment. This Cathedral will stand, even to the eyes of the unbelieving, as a symbol of what patience and devotion can achieve in the face of endless difficulties and some catastrophes. It is a triumph and proclamation of hope.
The cathedral is in fact built at one end of Hope Street, at the other end of which the RCs erected a very different structure.
Liverpool itself, under the reforms of Peter Walker and Heath, became a questionable entity. As one social historian of the city put it, ‘Inner urban decay and suburban sprawl melted Liverpool with Merseyside. In April 1974 the new metropolitan County Council of Merseyside was born, governing over 1. 1/2 million in an area of 250 square miles. Where once it was hard to define Merseyside, now it was hard to distinguish Liverpool.’13
Anyone who turned their back on the Protestant cathedral and walked towards the Roman Catholic one will have time, in their procession between the two buildings, to meditate on what had happened, not only to Liverpool, but to Britain since the older of the two structures was conceived. When the foundation stone of the Protestant cathedral was laid, Mr Gladstone had been dead for only three years. The fine Georgian terraced house in which he was born in Rodney Street still stands. When the cathedral was conceived, the great thriving industrial port of Liverpool stood at the centre of the British Empire. Riddled with poverty as Liverpool was in its dockland slums and elsewhere, Liverpudlians were ‘universal merchants’, bringing in American cotton, colonial tobacco, sugar, Midlands metals, Cheshire salt, Lancashire coal and textiles. It had founded its fortune, as Gladstone would guiltily remind himself, on the slave trade. It was the hub of commerce, and of the relentless efficient machine of manufacture and trade which made Britain tower over all its rivals in the world. In spite of the extreme poverty of the Irish working class here, it was a city of enormous pride. The great Mersey was overlooked by the majestic Exchange and Town Hall, and in the nineteenth century it had acquired a superb art gallery, an excellent university, all paid for by the voluntary donations of the rich, who lived here in some splendour.
Shipping went. By the time HeathCo had submerged Liverpool into ‘Merseyside’, the great old days of the Anchor Line, Brocklebank, Cunard, Lamport and Holt and the Ocean Steam Ship Company were over. Twenty-five thousand men worked in Liverpool Docks in 1963, compared, by the end of our times, with fewer than a thousand who, by means of improved technology, actually shift a bigger tonnage and make more profits.14 Lancashire barely made any textiles any more, nor did Cheshire produce salt. Liverpool’s reason for existence had been removed, partly by politicians, partly by circumstance. It was not surprising perhaps that the Militant Tendency (Trotskyite infiltrators into the ranks of the Labour Party) should have begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s, long before their destructive significance dawned on the minds of the National Executive of the Labour Party, to take seats on Liverpool City Council.15 But at this date, the power of the Catholic Church in working-class Liverpool was greater than that of the Trotskyites. ‘Caucusing for support within the Labour Group [on the Council] had long been a feature of city politics in Liverpool. In the 1950s and 1960s Jack Braddock and his allies formed one caucus, whilst “the left” and “Catholic Action” formed two others.’16 The Protestant cathedral by the end of our times appeared as if it had been built in a ruin, and at the end of the twentieth century it symbolised something of which the Daily Telegraph might be expected to have approved, a defiant gesture of old values, which had been left behind by all around. Its mountainous height, its grandiose claims to be taken seriously, rose up in the surrounding wasteland, impressive but rather mad. Around its walls, as the faithful few gathered for the evening service, swarmed teenaged prostitutes, plying their trade.
Make the twenty-first-century pilgrimage through the desolation and dissolution which lies between the two buildings, however, leave behind the self-confidence of Edwardian England and you are confronted with an emblem not only of poverty-stricken, wrecked Liverpool Roman Catholicism but of the late 1960s in which it was finished. The original architect for the RC scheme was none other than the great Sir Edwin Lutyens, architect of Imperial New Delhi and of the Cenotaph in London. He had estimated the cost at £3 million. In 1955, the RC authorities authorised Adrian Scott to ‘scale down the Lutyens design’, but it was still too expensive. In the event, they chose Frederick Gibberd.17 to produce a completely different design, the gimcrack vulgarity known as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’, which was built on the cheap and within decades was showing severe signs of structural strain. This frail concrete eyesore, which lasted such a short time, was an architectural parable of the 1960s, and of the attempt of the Roman Catholic Church to move with the times.
Anthony Kenny, philosopher-priest, who was laicised and became the Master of Balliol, was only one of many who left the Church. He was laicised in 1963, and by 1970 Cardinal Heenan was ruefully remarking to another priest, ‘The path which Tony trod has now become a high road.’ Kenny was more eloquent than most, not least because he was so restrained in his account of loss of faith in the supernatural claims of the RC Church. ‘It is true that many of the things which I objected to in Catholic practice have altered since the Vatican Council, and it is true that many priests will now cheerfully deny in the pulpit doctrines which I could only doubt in solitary guilt. But I am old-fashioned enough to believe that if the Church has been wrong in the past on so many topics as forward-looking clergy believe, then her claims to impose belief and obedience on others are, in the form in which they have been traditionally made, mere impudence.’18