If you want Gothic, go Down Under

Aidan Bellenger
Notebook
My home, Downside Abbey, is a vast Gothic rabbit warren in Somerset, not far from Bath, dominated by a cathedral-size abbey church of wonderful beauty.
Such places carry with them enormous financial burdens, but I delight in our good fortune in having such a truly sacred space. It is a strong cultural statement about the abiding presence of the Christian message in the land and a place for encountering God in prayer.
I was delighted to see Downside on the cover of the recent beautifully illustrated Glimpse of Heaven, a welltimed celebration of our Catholic-built patrimony, published by English Heritage and the bishops' confeience.
The Catholic Church in England and Wales is fast becoming the principal witness to Christianity in a society which is militantly secular. Sometimes Catholics feel beleaguered— but many outside the Catholic community look to us to provide a clear, prophetic alternative to the culture of death which surrounds us.
It is up to Christians to keep beautiful churches as places of prayer and worship when so often they appear to be becoming mere ;museums. It would be good, too, if we Catholics could make more extensive use of our splendid musical and liturgical heritage within the buildings.
Wen the Italian monk Augustine of Canterbury was sent by St Gregory the Great to evangelise the English people at the end of the sixth century, he was aware both of the beauty of holiness and of the way in which by establishing a religious community the faith can radiate and spread. So was the remarkable Downside Benedictine, Bede Polding — the Augustine of Australia — who went to New South Wales in the 1830s and became first Archbishop of Sydney in 1842. His cathedral, St Mary's, built in honey-coloured sandstone to the designs of William Wardell, an English Gothic revivalist architect who made his reputation in Australia, is on a vast scale and now stands proudly in the centre of what has become a great city. It is a symbol of faith and a memorial to Polding's dream for a Benedictine diocese in an Australia which was in his time an unlikely cross between arcadia and an open prison. Wardell also designed the core of St John's College (another Polding foundation), now part of the University of Sydney, which celebrates its 150th birthday this year. Like St Mary's (and many other of the finest Australian Catholic buildings) it is a Gothic feast, what is sometimes called a real "gem".
This Victorian inheritance may surprise some who think of Australia as the land of the great outdoors. I visited both St Mary's and St John's in February when celebrating another of this year's 150th anniversaries — that of the Good Samaritan Sisters.
Polding's Gothic Benedictine dream faltered but his apostolic Benedictine sisters (still some 300-strong) flourish. —The Good Sams", founded by Polding to work with the dispossessed and the "fallen" became great educationalists and some two million Australian women have owed their schooling to them. I am proud that one of my community facilitated this work.
Cardinal George Pell, the present Archbishop of Sydney, well-known as a fearless defender of the Church. presided at Mass in his cathedral to celebrate the Good Samaritans on Candlemas.
/wasinvited by Cardinal Pell to a one-day cricket match (England versus Australia), which I was warned would be a walkover by the home team. It turned out, on the contrary, as a signal victory for England and the beginning of a revival of fortune. I was not the only Porn there, but I somehow thought that the shade of Polding was smiling on me as I attempted to leave the ground unseen.
The Rt Rev Dom Aldan Bellenger is the Abbot of Downside