Thoughts After Easter

Guildford, 30 miles south-east of Reading, is a town I have driven past on numerous occasions, but never visited. I finally got round to it on Easter Monday. What has it got to offer? Well, there is an enormous cathedral, started in 1936 and finished in 1961 after countless interruptions due to WW2 and shortage of funds. By the time it was finished it was only 2 years to go to the "Honest to God" debacle and the on-going crisis of Anglicanism which continues to this day. So maybe it is the one of the last Anglican cathedrals to be built in England, or anywhere else. Like the John Keble church in North London, which I mentioned in a recent post, it has a very distinctive (or unfortunate) 1930s architecture which some have applauded and some have compared to a power station.

The Christian heritage of Guildford overflows in every corner. There is the huge "Friary" shopping mall. In the middle ages there was a friary on the site, which was destroyed under that thieving, murdering, adulterous scoundrel Henry VIII. (Though for the Day: Was he even worse than Tony B Liar? Probably not as Tony is responsible for far more deaths in Iraq and even Henry, whatever his countless shortcomings, was not keen on sodomy or abortion. And both had the brass neck to set themselves up as heads of religious foundations.). Then there was a large house called The Friary. Then, in the 19th century, there was the Friary Brewery. Now commercial change has brought a mall whose interior can hardly be distinguished from a hundred others the length and breadth of Britain.

Further up the picturesque High Street, past the coffee shops and mobile phone retailers, there are the almhouses, founded by a local man who went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury. They are still used 400 years later to house the elderly and still are called a "hospital", in the archaic sense of a place of refuge for the elderly rather than a medical centre. A short distance away there is a very prominent statue of this Archbishop.


Across the road from the almhouses there is Holy Trinity church. The signs outside advertised the multitude of Holy Week activities, including a dramatic reenactment of the Passion around the streets of Guildford on Good Friday. It was performed by a local theatrical group, founded by Peter Hutley, a fervent Catholic convert. They also produce a colossal outdoor play of the Life of Christ in beautiful countryside at nearby Wintershall. It is the nearest we have to the Oberammergau Passion Play. But Oberrammergau is performed only every ten years, while Wintershall happens every summer. See
Recreating the Life of Christ.

Back in Reading it had been a similarly crowded schedule at the much smaller church of St William of York. But it was not the long-time worshippers who were doing all the work. The Latin Mass Society used the church nearly every day for the two weeks before Easter. On some days they were there all day for multiple acts of worship or activities, such as a family picnic on the day before Palm Sunday. Services such "Tenebrae" which I had seen only on obscure websites suddenly appeared on the parish noticeboard for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Suddenly we mainstream Catholics using the English rite were starting to feel marginalised in our own church.

We ought to feel grateful. For years St William has not had a priest of its own and has been served by the parish priest at St James. But the poor man is horribly over-stretched with multiple duties such as the prison chaplaincy and the diocesan marriage tribunal. If the diocese was going to close any churches, we knew that St William had to be the first for the chop in the Reading area. Its special selling point was its closeness to the University campus, but there is another, larger church, Our Lady of Peace, barely 100 yards from the north-east gate of the campus. St Williams, with only two Masses per week, was grossly underused and was barely more than a dispensable "chapel of ease", despite its devoted congregation.

Now there is at least one Latin Mass every day and at least three Masses on Sunday, plus any number of other services and social activities. There is a fourth Sunday Mass if the Hungarian priest is in town. And the LMS are buying a property for their priest in the area so they are settling in seriously for the long term. And they are advertising for a confessional structure to fit into the "crying room" at the rear of the church. How much longer before they re-convert the sanctuary to the pre-Vatican 2 style, purely for Mass with the priest facing the altar, his back to the congregation? If they are visibly the most active users of the premises, it would be hard to refuse them.

We pray for re-birth and renewal of the Church, but sometimes our prayers are answered in very unexpected ways. The future belongs to the fervent and, to judge from the length of their Holy Week services, the LMS worshippers are fervent. One of our congregation who checked out their Good Friday service in 2008 left well before the end because of the heroic length. She should be grateful we have not adopted the Russian Orthodox style of standing throughout services. One English traveler to old Russia recorded the rigours of Holy Week in a pewless Moscow church: "May God grant us His special help to get through this week! As for the Muscovites, their feet must be made of iron".