Is nothing sacred? At the <em>Catholic Herald</em> we have argued in our articles that the Church of England has crossed such a line in allowing the naves of some of the UK’s greatest cathedrals – including Canterbury – to be temporarily <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/silent-disco-at-canterbury-cathedral-draws-more-voluble-protest/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">repurposed for cocktail-fuelled silent discos</mark></a> (in which the revellers dance to music coming through headphones) in a misguided attempt to make such religious spaces appeal to the young.
Canterbury is the sacred place where St Augustine, sent by St Gregory the Great, based his mission to the English at the end of the sixth century. It is also where Thomas Becket was murdered, centuries later, for his stand against Henry II over the rights of the Church. No wonder, then, that over 1,600 people signed a petition protesting about the event and organised a prayer vigil outside the building.
Until its destruction by Henry VIII, Becket’s bejewelled shrine at Canterbury was one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in the world – alongside Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. Even today, some 800 years after his martyrdom, his cathedral continues to possess an invisible quality of “spirit of place”.
I felt this most profoundly a few years ago when a very dear university friend died after a life of luminous excess. After a stellar time at Cambridge and a career in banking, he suffered a reversal of fortune. He drank and smoked too much and ended up dead at 53; his obituary in the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> noted his ebullience and love of life, but also “a pronounced self-sabotaging streak”.
When I heard about his death I dreaded the funeral, as I expected the call-up to a grim crematorium in Golders Green or Margate. But, no; it was held in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, as was his right as a former scholar of the King’s School. We sat yards away from Becket’s first resting place; he was later moved upstairs for ease of access as ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims came to ask for his prayers.
As the coffin of my friend was carried in, I reflected that this was exactly why sacred spaces are divinely consecrated. I remembered Philip Larkin’s poem <em><a href="https://www.thepoetryhour.com/poems/church-going"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Church Going</mark></a></em>, where he worries about the fate of holy buildings when belief dies: “When churches fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into…?” Larkin concluded that even empty churches serve as a source of comfort in recognising a human hunger for gravitas and meaning: “A serious house on serious earth it is / In whose blent air all our compulsions meet…”
It is difficult to imagine the Spanish authorities in Galicia allowing any “dirty dancing” – silent or otherwise – to desecrate Santiago’s pilgrim cathedral today. I was at Mass in <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/pilgrimage-standoff-assisi-versus-santiago-de-compostela-which-comes-out-on-top/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Santiago de Compostela</mark></a> on Ash Wednesday. After the service, a large queue dutifully formed to shuffle down into the crypt where we knelt briefly and prayed at the shrine of St James. Then we mounted another steep staircase and prayed again after hugging the golden image of St James above the altar; a ritual known as the “Embracing the Apostle”.
In a sign of the times, a notice warned us not to take photos and added: “It is recommended not to kiss, and avoid face contact.” Still, it was a deeply moving experience. Any visit to the Vatican these days is made depressing by the human sea of tourists armed with iPhones and selfie-sticks. We have journeyed some way from less-squeamish medieval believers. At Becket’s shrine, a <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/why-did-they-move-thomas-beckets-bones"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">protective marble case had to be placed over his relics</mark></a> so that pilgrims could kiss his holy tomb but not walk off with a souvenir chip.<br><br>Because of the way Easter falls this year, on the last day of the month, the March edition of our magazine serves as the Lent issue. As its cover suggests, we make the Lenten journey towards the Cross with the whole Church. We may give up chocolate, booze or Netflix, but we are also called to almsgiving and self-examination.
We might well follow the advice of the Bishop of Shrewsbury, the Rt Revd Mark Davies, who, reflecting on the Gospel for the Third Sunday in Lent, makes the connection between the Lord’s dramatic cleansing of the Temple from all the noisy disorder of traders and money lenders – surely that would also include expelling any raves in the naves – to the Lenten call “to purify our own hearts from everything which does not serve and worship God”.
Bishop Davies adds the comment of one of his sixth-century predecessors in the episcopate that “we must desire that our souls are as clean and ordered as we would wish to find our churches". Of course, in this holy season we must turn our minds to putting our own house in order, but perhaps the Dean of Canterbury should also take note.<br><br><em>Photo: The <a href="https://www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk/becket-shrine-trinity-chapel">shrine of Thomas Becket</a>, marked today by a simple burning candle in Canterbury Cathedral.</em><br><br><strong>This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">here</mark></a>.</strong>
