Westminster: a refuge from vice, depravity and crime

Charterhouse Chronicle
Brian Brindley
WHEN, 150 YEARS ago, Nicholas Wiseman was appointed first Archbishop of Westminster, and issued his pastoral letter "From Without the Flaminian Gate", it drew an outraged protest from the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey. In his dignified and conciliatory response he wrote: "This splendid monument, its treasures of art, and its fitting endowments, form not the part of Westminster which will concern me. For there is another part of Westminster which stands in frightful contrast, though in immediate contact, with this magnificence... dose under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms a large and almost countless population, in great measure, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach — dark corners, which no lighting-board can brighten. That is the part of Westminster which alone I covet, and which I shall he glad to claim and to visit, as a blessed pasture in which sheep of holy Church are to be tended, in which a bishop's godly work has to be done, of consoling, converting, and preserving."
In conformity with this pledge, ever since it was opened in 1903 (a centenary in the offing) Westminster Cathedral has been a church for the poor, where drunks and derelicts and vagabonds can come all day, and where the desolate and the lonely can find peace. That is one Westminster Cathedral of which the whole of Catholic England can be proud.
There is another Westminster Cathedral of which we can be proud: Bentley's masterpiece, like a treasure-chest of precious antique jewellery, tarnished silver and faded gold, set with corals and lapis-lazuli, opals and mother-o-pearl, an interior of graceful beauty to be cherished and loved -as it is.
And there is a third Westminster Cathedral — in posse, with its bare brick vaults covered, as Bentley intended, with glinting mosaics, making it, like St Mark's in Venice, a Basilica of Gold: this vision must surely be achieved, though not, perhaps, in my lifetime. There is always, of course, some better cause on which money can be spent — schools, hospitals, missions, churches in new neighbourhoods; but, while the decoration of the Cathedral remains uncompleted, it is a reproach to the Church.
AN IMPORIANT PAR-I of the vocation of the Cathedral is to be a theatre for the great ceremonies of the Catholic religion. It has seen Eucharistic Congresses, once in its lifetime a Papal visit, every generation or so the enthronement of a new Archbishop. Such things must be done well. There is no doubt that Bentley's cathedra!, besides being
luxuriously appointed for the daily celebration of the Mass alid the Office as they were performed a century ago, was designed for the big occasion — though neither he nor Cardinal Vaughan, his patron, can have envisaged the presence of a representative of the Prince of Wales, two members of the royal family in person. and the wife of the Prime Minister.
Nor could they have foreseen the drastic simplification of ceremonial which has taken place since their day — indeed, since the installation of Archbishop Hume a mere 22 years ago. Shorn of much of its elaboration, and with its title dumbed down to "installation", the occasion was made splendid by something else that Vaughan and Bentley could not have imagined: the seemingly endless procession of priests, concelebrants of the Mass in white chasubles — for the rite of concelehration had in their day been in abeyance for centuries. The spectacle of the episcopus surrounded by his presbyters in this way took one back to the early days of Christianity, and indeed to the ideal Church seen by St John in the Revelation. It was left to the visiting representatives of the Church of England in their scarlet chimeres to add a touch of colour to the proceedings, and to one
bishop with the Eastern rite (in communion of the Holy See, of course) in his bejewelled crown to add glitter.
Ft,om THE VERY FIRST, the music of he Cathedral has been maintained to standards that could equal those of the Church of England cathedrals, and indeed those of the Abbey itself. The wisdom of this was apparent last month. The magnificent qualities of the double organ were displayed to the full in a series of pieces by French 20th century composers, beginning most appropriately with Louis Vierne's Carillon de Westminster. The setting of the Gloria to Langlais' Messe Solenelle provided us with a "surprise": the alternation of very quiet a capella singing from the choir at the east end and great blasting chords from the organ at the west; I confess that, seated where I was halfway down the nave, the final chord of the Gloria caused me actual physical pain!
The three hymns were good old Church of England stalwarts, chosen presumably for their cheerful singability — Cardinal Vaughan would not have approved. A musical highlight for me was the singing of the Credo in Latin to the de Angelis setting — something that in former days every Catholic knew by heart — with an opportunity for us all to join in. Sadly this was not
continued for the Sursum Conia and the Paternoster, which were sung in English to melodies that half the congregation did not know. From the end of the Credo onwards there was not (apart from Agnus Del) one word of Latin in the service: as a convert, I am baffled by the hostility displayed by the Holy Catholic Church in England and Wales to the precious inheritance of its Roman origins.
All in all, though, it was a splendid occaskin, and augured well for the episcopate of the benign and gentle Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor, qualities so well displayed in his homily.