NOT SO MANY MANSIONS
Daniel Johnson says the continuing arguments
over whether to rebuild St Ethelburga's reflect a doctrinal split in the Church of England
WHEN THEY decided to explode a bomb at Bishopsgate one Saturday morning last April, the IRA were indifferent to the peo- ple who were killed or injured; their main aim was to cause maximum disruption in the City. However, by placing their enor- mous bomb where they did, the terrorists made certain that the little church of St Ethelburga the Virgin would catch the full force of the blast.
On the Monday after the bomb, 1 argued in the Times that the ruins of St Ethelburga's should be rebuilt as faithfully as possible, and suggested that the church should have a new additional function as a shrine to all victims of terrorism. Local radio and other newspapers took up the cause. The feasibility of rebuilding was dis- cussed by Anthony Symondson in The Spectator (Puritanism and politics', 15 May). The cost of rebuilding is estimated at about £2 million. Offers of cash from City firms and individuals have poured Into the Times. Any such appeal would require the support of the Anglican authorities. In the last few days, however, in the face of this campaign, a group of clerics opposed to rebuilding have become more vocal. The Archdeacon of London, the Venerable George Cassidy, said some time ago that the idea was absurd.
This dour roundhead is now supported by some of the City clergy. At the magnifi- cent St Stephen Walbrook, the Rector, Chad Varah (founder of the Samaritans), has demanded that the whole issue of rebuilding be shelved until Lord Temple- man's commission on the City churches has reported. 'Instant pundits wishing instead to make a "gesture of defiance" to terrorists will, I am sure, not impress Lord Templeman or the bishop.'
Another opponent of rebuilding is Prebendary Richard Lucas, Rector of St Helen Bishopsgate, within whose parish St Ethelburga's now stands. St Helen's is another mediaeval church which was dam- aged in the Baltic Exchange bomb. There are plans for Quinlan Terry to redesign its interior; traditionalist opponents shudder at the thought. The man holding the ring between rebuilders and demolishers is the Anglo- Catholic Bishop of London, Dr David Hope. His view is that the competent authority is the parish of St Helen's, and he knows that to overrule the Rector of St Helen's would stir up trouble among the evangelical clergy within his diocese. Hence he is temporising: no appeal for rebuilding can go ahead without his bless- ing, and he is inclined to give that blessing to a compromise solution, possibly the least attractive option of all: a 'memorial garden or space'. This would, as Simon Jenkins has point- ed out, 'answer the IRA's dream: a gaping hole in a line of restored buildings, a 30- foot patch of grimy grass in perpetual memorial to the terrorists' cruelty'. It is unclear whether the bishop has failed to grasp this point, or whether he is deliber- ately turning a blind eye for reasons of ecclesiastical politics. With each day that passes, public generosity ebbs away; nobody can blame the man in the street for shrugging his shoulders if the Anglican church itself does so too.
The rebuilding of St Ethelburga's has unleashed a debate within the Church of England which, perhaps more clearly than that over the ordination of women, has illuminated the condition of Christianity in our time. England has an established church which only rarely behaves as though it had a responsibility to the whole nation, and not merely to its active mem- bers. Pre-Reformation churches such as St Ethelburga's, of which the Church of Eng- land ought properly to act as custodian, are seen even by some of the highest Anglican ecclesiastics as luxuries primarily for pampered aesthetes, as irksome charges upon church funds rather than beacons of the faith.
The Archbishop of London speaks in a guarded, banal language which still betrays `It's to save the President's face.' his true convictions: 'It is over-emotional to isolate St Ethelburga's . . . We should also remember that the City is about people not buildings.' Gavin Stamp speaks more poeti- cally of 'a poignant relic and a quaint sym- bol of faith in the heart of Mammon'. The contrast extends beyond the matter in hand: it is a confrontation between two doctrines.
They are very ancient: St Augustine would have been quite at home with this battle. It has been fought throughout the history of Christianity between spiritual descendants of the gnostics, who believed in their own privileged wisdom and in an invisible church made up of a self-appoint- ed elect, and those (including hitherto most Anglicans) who accept the traditional Catholic view that the church must be a vis- ible order embracing the whole of humani- ty, a practical institution whose spirituality is embodied in its sacred buildings. This conflict resurfaced in the Reformation over the question of iconoclasm; the ruined abbeys of Europe bear witness to the destructive power of gnosticism. Gnostics believe that churches are mere functional necessities; Catholics that they are intrinsi- cally precious.
In the past, the Church of England sided with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches in rejecting the gnostic attitude to church buildings, even if it has been demol- ishing City churches since 1781. Catholics, too, are not always true to their ecclesiolo- gy: in Northampton there are plans to turn St John's, a mediaeval chapel bought by the Catholic church last century, into a restau- rant. But, like all the great Catholic churches of Europe, the surviving glories of Anglican architecture in the City of Lon- don are living refutations of gnostic icono- clasm. St Ethelburga's should have a special importance for Catholics and Methodists, too: St Thomas More wor- shipped there for many years, and his friend the Blessed John Larke was Rector before Henry VIII executed them both. John Wesley also preached there.
In 'The Gospel Palaces', one of John Henry Newman's parochial sermons given when he was still the Anglican Vicar of St Mary's Oxford, there is a passage in which he reconciles the two rival doctrines. He warns against treating churches as no more than works of art, condemning those who `count their stones, and measure their spaces, but discern in them no tokens of the invisible, no canons of truth, no lessons of wisdom, to guide them forward in the way heavenward'. But for Newman, as indeed for every true Christian, 'we have not lost all, while we have the dwelling- places of our forefathers'. If the Bishop of London will not listen to mere journalists, let him listen to the man who, before he became a great Catholic, was perhaps the greatest Anglican.
Daniel Johnson is literary editor of the Times.
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