English Cathedrals

Lord Bishop of Wakefield Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Wakefield]

My Lords, I cannot hope to come up to the same standards of energy and enthusiasm that we have just had from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. However, I begin by saying that, as with my friend the right reverend Bishop of Worcester, whose excellent maiden speech we have just heard, cathedrals lie very close to my heart, so I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for making this debate possible.

I have spent 15 years of my life working in two very different cathedrals. For seven years I was a residentiary canon at Portsmouth, a parish-church cathedral in an urban setting right next to the great naval dockyard. Then, for eight years, I was dean of Norwich, a magnificent medieval cathedral, to which we have already heard reference, and one of the two greatest Romanesque churches in England. I am not vying for it to be the top one but it is certainly as good as Durham.

Cathedrals offer an extraordinary variety of experience, as I shall note later. There is one brief vignette which focuses something of this and which for me seemed bizarre. During my time at Norwich, we celebrated the 900th anniversary of the diocese and cathedral. Anglia Railways kindly agreed to call one of its locomotives “Norwich Cathedral”. That was very good news, but it was the final denouement of this tale to which I want to advert. At the end of the year, I was invited to Norwich station for the denaming ceremony. That seemed to me quite baffling. Most of the Anglia Railways locomotives took their names from significant places in the north-west of England, where they had previously toiled—names such as “Vulcan Foundry” and “City of Preston”. Here was “Norwich Cathedral”, named after the single greatest focus of tourism in East Anglia, with more than half a million people passing through our doors each year, and we were taking the name off the locomotive. That is an interesting reflection on how people do not always see the significance of these great buildings.

For all the talk of the decline of religion, cathedrals remain enormous magnets for all sorts and conditions of people, as we have already heard. In a recent essay on church growth, it was noted that alongside the growth in the size of congregations, mentioned earlier by my friend the right reverend Bishop of Birmingham, the spend was £91 million in cathedrals alone, and the total impact on the wider localities was more than £150 million. However, church growth just touches the fringes of the impact of these places. They are the contemporary equivalent of common ground. They are open to all who come—all can graze in their pastures, as it were. Indeed, the variety of expressions of their impact is clear in the myriad people who consider themselves to be stakeholders.

Many organisations and individuals ask to use our cathedrals—from civic services to Rotary International, and from local businesses to voluntary sector agencies. However, these stakeholders—and there are myriad others—are matched by the diverse reasons for visits by individuals. Some come as tourists; others as pilgrims. Some come for silence and solace in the face of life’s difficulties and challenges. Many is the conversation I have had in cathedrals with people in places of sadness in their lives. Some come with the explicit hope of talking and meeting up with others, so a guide in a cathedral has to be immensely sensitive, knowing when people might want to speak and when they might not. Of course, some come as aficionados of architecture, while others come simply to celebrate the place, the city in which they live.

I remember being in Norwich Cathedral one morning when a chap who had been thrown out of his house by his wife—probably for very good reasons—came up to me and said, “Ooh, it’s a big place you’ve got here, isn’t it?” It was interesting that he had lived in Norwich all his life and had never been in the building before. What was it that brought him there? Well, I just mentioned that.

In Norwich—to focus there a little longer—it is the cathedral, the university and the football team, of course, that somehow give the city its character, its personality and its status. Cathedrals give a city their soul. Cathedrals belong to everyone. In both Portsmouth and Norwich, people of other religions and people of no religious faith will talk of “our cathedral”.

Often cathedrals work with other agencies to nourish a city’s flourishing. In Norwich we co-operated with Delia Smith, the queen of cookery, in a centenary service for Norwich City football club. By good providence we even had what passed for Canaries robes of yellow and green to match the occasion.

Cathedrals, too, have been the seed-bed for the nourishing of music in our nation. We have heard so much already in this debate about the quality of cathedral music. Most significant as well is that so many of our really talented classical musicians, people now at the top of their tree in their profession—not related particularly to church matters—started their musical careers in cathedral choirs. This essential work needs to continue via proper financial support. I was very pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, say how important this remains, not just for our cathedrals but for the whole heritage and tradition of good music in our country.

For all these reasons, I am acutely aware of the need to respond to any moves that may undermine these great flagships of the spirit. As we have already heard many times, a month or two ago a change in the VAT regulations threatened to undermine the very breadth of what cathedrals offer. It is the alterations, adaptations and modifications of these buildings that make them speak more effectively to our own generation, so I am very thankful that we are being given respite in that area, at least for three years. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, have said, I hope we can be reassured further that that respite will continue well beyond that time; not only do we not get proper funding, but having to pay VAT would actually take funding away from us. Therefore we are grateful for the shift on VAT and for the extra grants available.

Still, however, the issue of adequate state funding for essential maintenance and conservation is crucial. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack; I would not want the situation to be as it is in France. Nevertheless, as we have heard, English Heritage’s budget is always under pressure and now cathedrals are placed alongside other churches in an open market. We are enormously grateful for all that it has done, and I am enormously grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who has been greatly supportive in our diocese. I look forward to welcoming her again in the near future.

Let us go for the £50 million that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, asked for. If you compare it with the amount of money in terms of the fuel excise duty that has been so much in the news in the last few days, or, indeed, the £1.3 billion that will go to the European Union—doubtless for good reasons—£50 million is as nothing.

Like all organisations, as well as facing outside threats, the Church of England is always capable of shooting itself in the foot. The Dioceses Commission needs to be careful not to threaten to undermine the very raison d’être of cathedrals. Merging dioceses easily dissolves important local loyalties and takes away the point of these buildings as the focus of a bishop's ministry and the character and personality of a locality. Present plans in our part of England aim to keep cathedrals for the moment even if the dioceses merge; but what will be the logic, and for how long could two or three cathedrals be justified in one diocese?

Furthermore such changes seem to ignore the essential reason for the existence of cathedrals. They are the home of the cathedra, as we have been reminded—the seat of a bishop. We need smaller, not larger, dioceses, each with one cathedral, the teaching seat of the bishop who is the focus of unity for the church in that place. As others have said, the essential reason for cathedrals is for the worship of Almighty God; that is the beginning and the end of them.

Let me end with one further telling vignette. It relates to that extraordinary outflow of emotion on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. We opened our doors in Norwich—where I was at the time—from dawn until dusk, and I saw one woman enter the building, light a candle and pray for 10 minutes. On her way out of the cathedral she thanked me for making the great church available and said, “I am not religious or anything, but I had to come”. I reckon that 10 minutes of prayer and a lighted candle feels a pretty religious thing to do. Whatever she thought she was doing, such an act and expression of commitment is but one of so many reasons why we must work even harder not only to preserve our cathedrals but to make their ministry and service to a whole community more effective than ever. I, too, look forward to a great statement of confidence in the Government supporting our cathedrals and I hope that they might think carefully about that £50 million.