Chairman's Blog

Westminster Cathedral: the LMS Annual Requiem

The saga of Westminster Cathedral Choir School claimed a fresh victim last week with the resignation of another senior employee, the Music Administrator Madeleine Smith. Like the Director of Music, Martin Baker, she was unhappy about the sidelining of the choir at England’s premier Catholic Cathedral. Baker resigned late last year, and was absent from Christmas services. There was no official explanation, and he has not been replaced. What is going on?

Westminster Cathedral Choir is served by men and boys, in the ancient Catholic tradition. The boys attend a school set up specially for them by Cardinal Vaughan, the founder of the Cathedral, in 1902. He wanted to have something in his new Cathedral equivalent to the great choirs of the Anglican Cathedrals, which commonly have their own schools—boarding schools—so the boys can be recruited from a wide area and are available to sing on Sundays. Vaughan’s vision was realized, and Westminster Cathedral Choir is famous. It is, or was until recently, at least as good as the best Anglican Cathedral choirs, such as those of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, and in the context of the global melt-down of Catholic sacred music since the 1960s, it was regarded as the best Catholic Cathedral choir in the world. Westminster Cathedral was the only Catholic Cathedral in the world to have a Sung Mass every single day: again, until recently.

Just as Cardinal Vaughan and other Catholic leaders over millennia wanted to build the most beautiful churches possible, and have in them the most moving devotional art, so too they wanted the best sacred music. The greatest achievements of the human spirit should be offered to God, and our acts of worship should be clothed in the best we can offer Him. Art and above all music has the power to touch the heart, to get through to us when words fail, to express our awe, our joy, and our sorrow, and as Pope John Paul II expressed it, can be ‘an echo of the Spirit of God’ (Ecclesia in Europa (2003) 60).

I know this kind of argument confuses some people. If the best we can do is not all that great, it will be acceptable to God: because, yes, He looks at the heart. If the best we can do is reserved for mindless secular entertainment or commercial ends, God will be less impressed. What does it say about us as a society that the best efforts of artists are devoted to making violent and immodest films? What does it say about us as individuals if our home entertainment systems are more expensive than the altar furnishings in our churches?

So what has happened in Westminster Cathedral? As reported in The Times, the key change has been a new Head Teacher of the Choir School, of which the choristers now only represent 10%, who has abolished full-time boarding for choir members. Allowing them to go home on Saturdays may seem uncontroversial, but in fact they are obliged to go home, so the school is no longer able to accept pupils from outside London, and Saturday rehearsals for Sunday services are impossible. As has been pointed out by many distinguished Catholic and non-Catholic musicians, the quality of the singing cannot be maintained under this regime.

Why would the authorities, bequeathed Vaughan’s astonishing legacy, not wish to make the most of it to raise worshippers’ hearts to God in prayer, and to draw non-believers into the Church? Knowing the debate as it has played out on these issues over decades, it is clear that there are two factors in play.

One is the desire of the school’s new leadership to make it a commercially and academically successful school. The emphasis is on getting the pupils, who leave at the age of 13, into elite “Public” (i.e. independent) schools such as Eton, where many of the UK’s Prime Minsters have been educated, including the present one.

The other is that, in the context of this temptation, Church authorities have no strong interest in maintaining the choir’s ability to sing to a world-class standard. Normally they would find the idea of competing with posh private schools a bit embarrassing, but they evidently find the idea of an elite choir even more so. The choir’s unique ability to sing the most complex and sublime pieces of the Catholic patrimony of Sacred Music in the way they were intended to be sung—by boys and men, rather than using adult professional female singers—pushes the Cathedral down a particular liturgical pathway which is not particularly congenial to them. They pay lip-service to the value of the choir but in some ways would be happier with a third-rate choir singing the kind of third-rate modern music which makes many Catholic worshippers flee for the hills. (I’ve written about the love of the mediocre here.)

We can only hope that some sanity returns before the damage to Westminster Cathedral Choir becomes irreversible.

OPEN LETTER OF APPEAL TO DOWNSIDE

On behalf of untold people throughout the world I write to appeal against the monks of Downside surrendering to the current zeitgeist and leaving their monastery. Downside is part of the fabric of English Catholic history. The restoration of the Catholic Church and of monasticism is one of the great victories of Grace after the horrendous rape and interruption by Henry VIII in the 16th Century. We appeal against this decision in the face of a more insidious enemy: that of secularism, relativism and modernism which destroys the Church from within.

Surrendering does not solve the problem. We have faced enemies before and a flight or dispersal to another location(s) is simply the recipe for swift extinction as we have seen previously (Fort Augustus and countless female communities). Have we no faith in the grace of God and the irresistible attraction to the consecrated life and the eternal truth of the Catholic Church? 
Let us look at the success stories in the otherwise devastated vineyard of the modern Church. The French Abbey of Fontgombault have made five successful foundations in the last forty years; Randol, Triors, Pyrenees, Clear Creek in Oklahoma (which after twenty-one years is making moves for its own foundation) Wisques. What is the secret of Fontgombault? Simply - traditional Catholicism from observance to worship to belief. This is true also of the Benedictine Communities of Le Barroux (with its foundation near Toulouse), Norcia in Italy, Silverstream near Dublin and countless other smaller communities in the USA.

I can hear the immediate scornful repudiation that this simply going backwards. In so many fields we have to go back to rediscover the genius of our respective traditions from Education to Architecture to Entertainment. We have to have the humility to admit mistakes in seeking renewal and modernity.

Look at the great Empire of American Catholic University Education. With the infamous “Land of Lakes” Agreement of 1967, Catholic universities in the name of renewal and academic freedom surrendered their distinctive Catholic identity to the forces of modernity and secularism. This resulted in a disastrous cessation of vocations and a complete erosion of the ordinary regular transmission of the practice of the Faith from one generation to the next. Fifty years later the great Catholic Universities are Catholic in name only, often benefiting by federal money but no longer bearing fruit for God’s Church. Starting again from scratch there are five Universities (Ave Maria in Florida, Steubenville, Christendom, Thomas More and Thomas Aquinas). What is the result? The transmission of a confident, orthodox faith to the younger generation and the spawning of Catholic marriages and a huge variety of consecrated and ordained vocations.

If you have an allergy to undiluted Catholic tradition, then distil it slightly. Go for orthodoxy and challenging observance. If you are wedded to the Second Vatican Council, then follow its central and novel precept: ‘The Universal Call to Holiness’. Sanctity and schools of The Lord’s Service are simply irresistible! There are so many dioceses and religious groups (Community of St. Martin in France) which are merely conservative and not traditionalist. If we want to conserve the precious treasure of the Catholic Faith and all of its fruits, we simply have to move towards this direction even if not espousing it completely.

It is said that there is no unity in community today. We have to surrender our differing individual preferences to the Science of The Saints to ensure the hermeneutic of continuity and not of dissipation. We have to unite in order to preserve; we have to surrender our own wills to forestall the disintegration of the Institutions of the Catholic Church.

One example from our otherwise devastating English monastic scenario – Parkminster, our only Charterhouse. In 1990 my dear late friend, Dom Bernard O’ Donavon, then Prior, felt they simply could not go on. They were down to eleven old men. The buildings were crumbling all around them. Continual Postulants and Novices simply came and went with none persevering for almost twenty years. The wisdom was that they were finished and that they would have to move. Thankfully, a higher wisdom intervened, Dom Cyril Pierce took over and as a remarkably successful Master of Novices at The Grand Chartreuse (twelve men to solemn profession) also oversaw a confident formation of new men. In addition to this he oversaw lottery funding to repair the sorry state of the monastery. Thirty years later they have twenty-seven monks. It takes but one man with the vision and determination and grace to succeed.

Why do we have to see our Catholic Church in this country despoiled? Why do we have to despair in the face of secularism, so called modernity and the ugly rotten fruits of the sexual revolution which have infected and corrupted our morals and our minds? Many mistakes have been made. Can we not learn for our mistakes and proceed humbly towards a better future?

Fr Christopher Basden, Parish Priest of Ramsgate and Minster, England