Some Reflections on the Church and the Arts

Extract

A lecturer at a study week-end on the arts recently caused a mild sensation among his hearers by attributing what he regarded as the negligible contemporary impact of English Catholics on the arts to the fact that the parish clergy (he made it clear that he didn’t altogether hold it against them) were largely drawn from the lower middle classes.

This equation—lower-middle class clergy, ‘people’s’ parishes, sentimentality, vulgarity, lack of taste—has come to be largely accepted, whether defiantly or with a resigned shrug. Like many similar commonplaces, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny unshaken. Sentimentality, vulgarity and lack of taste were unfortunately part of the climate in which the Church revived and expanded rapidly after emancipation, and all classes and creeds were affected. In casual conversation of the seminary common-room type, one still hears Anglicanism equated with good taste: yet half our English medieval churches are scarred by the fury of the antiquarian wreckers of the last century. These came in two styles: the strippers, who reduced churches to barns, and the titivators who made them look like repository showrooms. On the whole, considering our limited financial and other resources, Catholics come better out of the architectural history of the past 150 years than most other corporations. Admittedly this is not saying much, but at least we were spared all that dreadful watered-down pre-Raphaelite stuff one finds in children’s corners of Anglican cathedrals.