Lux Belgraviae
A. N. Wilson
Tracts for Our Times 1833 to 1983 edited by Tom Sutcliffe (St Mary's Bourne Street £2) t Mary's Graham Street (pronounced
Grarm Street to annoy those who wor- ship at Farm Street) has been a haven of light and truth in Belgravia since 1875. And even the malice of the (Jesuit dominated?) LCC who renamed that thoroughfare after a cardinal, has been unable to extinguish the brilliance of St Mary's, its priests, its nuns and its congregation. The hispanic splendour of Martin Travers's High Altar retains all its unabashed `triumphalism'. And standing in the bricky aisles of St Mary's, you could be forgiven for thinking that Pius XII, or even Pius X, was still be- ing fanned with ostrich feathers in his court at the Vatican.
BY an odd freak of history, the present Bishop of London is probably more like the most enlightened prelates of Pius XII's time than any of the bishops now in communion with the Holy See. One of the chapters in Tracts for Our Times is an interview with Graham Leonard. The inspiring thing about him is not so much that he is nearly always right. It is that he knows his job. He speaks like a bishop in the Church of God, rather than like a vacuously conceited life- Peer who happens to be wearing an episcopal rochet. Unlike so many bishops in the House of Lords today, he 'speaks with authority'. His pronouncements on war,
commerce and crime stem from his un- wavering belief in the Incarnation of Christ and the Forgiveness of Sins. It surely should not be a rarity to find a bishop who believes in these things. I liked, for instance, his comment on the `population explosion': `People should consider that the purpose of population is not ultimately peopling earth. It is to fill heaven'.
Tracts for Our Times is, as its title im- plies, a celebratory volume to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Move- ment. As well as the interview with the Bishop of London, it contains 14 articles by friends of St Mary's, Bourne St. There is an excellent piece on the papacy by Hugh Moore; a predictably sound article on `Christians and other religious' by Eric Mascall; there is a very well-balanced essay on the Bomb by Ulrich Simon; and a good account of the musical tradition of St Mary's by Michael Bowden. There are con- tributions from Roman Catholic friends, such as Dom Christopher Butler and Karl Rahner. And there is a `golden oldie': an article by Charles, Viscount Halifax, writ- ten in 1932 and entitled A 1549 Catholic.
Halifax, with Cardinal Mercier, was one of the great pioneers of the reunion of Catholic Christendom, as his memorial at St Mary's reminds us. Tom Sutcliffe, who has edited this lively collection, was right to include a piece by Halifax. For the book emanates from this church, and Halifax is one of its most potent genii loci.
Re-reading Keble's Assize sermon lately made me wonder why one should celebrate it. One thinks of him as a saint in the George Herbert mould, but his famous homily reads as though written by Arch- deacon Grantly. For all that, there is every reason for celebrating St Mary's. Few parishes could have produced a volume as impressive, and as sane as this. At the beginning of this century, when Ronald Knox celebrated his first Mass there, it was thought by Roman Catholics and Pro- testants alike to be a pseudo-catholic sham. Perhaps by the time of the bicentenary of the Oxford Movement, St Mary's will be seen to have been in the forefront of our collective search for unity and truth. In an-
ticipation of the event, why don't the LCC change the name back to Graham Street; this time, not to annoy the Jesuits, but in honour of the Church of England's most enlightened and colourful pontiff?
Tracts for Our Times is obtainable from St Mary's Presbytery, 30 Bourne Street, Lon- don SW1W 8JJ.
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