reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches
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Baroque London Churches
St George’s Bloomsbury
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertypicturegalleries/8570159/London-Baroque-churches-tour-the-1711-walk.html?image=3Baroque London Churches
St. George’s hanover Square
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertypicturegalleries/8570159/London-Baroque-churches-tour-the-1711-walk.html?image=4Baroque London Churches
St. George’s-in-the-East
London Baroque Churches
St John’s, Smith’s Square
London baroque Churches
St Mary le Strand
London Baroque Churches
St. Luke’s, Spittalfield
London Baroque Churches
St Mary’s, Woolnoth
London Baroque Churches
St Paul’s, Deptford
From the Guardian:
St Patrick’s Catholic church in Soho to reopen after £3.5m restoration
A former bordello and music hall owned by one of Casanova’s mistresses is perhaps an unlikely site for one of Britain’s oldest Roman Catholic churches, St Patrick’s, which sits amid the bright lights and fleshpots of London’s Soho.
“It is not a conventional parish,” observes Father Alexander Sherbrooke, who has overseen a 14-month, £3.5m project to restore the church and rid it of the damage caused by damp, dry rot, urban pollution, incense and candlelight. It reopens this week with a specially composed Magnificat from James MacMillan and a mass from Cardinal George Pell, who is flying in from Rome for the occasion.
The traditional nature of the celebrations – vespers and canticles – highlights the contrast between the orthodoxy of St Patrick’s and what lies outside it.
Sherbrooke says: “You get a knock on the door and it can be someone who is successful in business, someone who wants a sandwich or someone caught up in the sex industry. We leave our SOS prayer line calling cards in telephone boxes – where you might see other services advertised.
“One man who called said he was a pimp and wanted to break out of his occupation but that it was too lucrative for him to leave. Do we just accept the way people are? People get into ruts they find it difficult to break out of. We can say, as Christians, that God can and does intervene.”
He is honest, however, about the extent to which the Catholic faith can appeal and transform. St Patrick’s is near Old Compton Street, a hub for gay men and lesbians in that part of London. When asked what kind of relationship he has with business owners he is tactful. “The most important thing is we keep our door open. Church teaching on homosexuality is very clear. But it’s a very polite relationship. As they wouldn’t want to convert me, I don’t go round looking to convert them. There is a respect, agreeing to disagree.”
There are some gay men that attend mass, but the main constituency for St Patrick’s is the capital’s migrant population.
The restoration work includes the creation of a crypt, classrooms and a cafe. St Patrick’s and a team of volunteers feed 80 to 90 homeless people a week with the Groucho – a private members’ club – supplying the puddings.
The work to the church will allow the team to cook and serve food from one location instead of having to prepare the meals in their own kitchens and drive them into central London.
Space will also be provided for alcohol and drug counselling. St Patrick’s will be the only Roman Catholic church offering this service in London.
Inside – despite the scaffolding – the church is airy, clean and light. It is the vision of the Spanish architect Javier Castañón, who is more familiar with designing conference centres, halls of residence and high-end apartments.
St Patrick’s was built on the site of Carlisle House, a mansion bought by Casanova’s mistress Teresa Cornelys, who went bankrupt running a music hall and allegedly a brothel there.
It was one of the first Roman Catholic churches to be built after the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791, which brought freedom of teaching and worship, and ministered to Irish people in the area.
The Irish have gone but migrant communities continue to be the lifeblood of the parish. On a typical Sunday St Patrick’s – or rather its temporary location at the House of St Barnabas – will attract around 700 people to five services, two in English, one in Spanish, one in Portuguese and one in Cantonese.
Alexander says: “In this part of London you don’t have resident parishioners. There are tourists who know we are here and workers. It is a place where they can rest their weary feet. There is a little bit of bucking the trend going on. The loneliness of this city is more intense than you can imagine. Soho has a darkness as well as the bright lights.”
Parishioners believe the church is important to Soho and to London. Pauline Stuart, who has been part of St Patrick’s for nine years, says: “We’re not the establishment – we can do things that Westminster Cathedral can’t. I do get comments sometimes – you know, ‘what’s a nice girl like you believing in all that mumbo jumbo’. But for me it’s true. I don’t care whether they convert or not. That’s God’s problem.”
From the Telegraph:
Maurice Craig
Maurice Craig, who died on May 11 aged 91, was a distinguished Irish architectural historian, writer and poet, and one of the first people to argue that Dublin’s historic buildings were of national importance and should be saved from demolition.
Almost a lone voice in the wilderness, his masterly, comprehensive and elegant book, Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City, was published in 1952. It took 13 years to sell the first 2,000 copies of the first edition, by which time many buildings had been pulled down without comment or protest. As Craig wrote: “Architecture is the most accessible of the arts; yet paradoxically it is the least noticed by people at large and is commonly thought by them to be arcane mystery.”
Maurice James Craig was born in Belfast on October 25 1919, the son of a successful ophthalmic surgeon, and was educated at Shrewsbury. He won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he lived in the rooms once inhabited by Charles Stewart Parnell.
After graduating, Craig went to live in Dublin, and decided to write a book on the poet Walter Savage Landor; but he was persuaded by the poet Patrick Kavanagh to make it the subject of a doctorate at Trinity College, Dublin.
In 1952 Craig joined the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments in England. He once called at 10 Downing Street on the trifling matter of door knobs. Having made his case, he emerged from the front door, stood for a few seconds so that the curious crowd could speculate on his identity, and then put on his bicycle clips and pedalled off.
He left the Inspectorate in 1969 and was appointed full-time executive secretary of An Taisce (the Irish National Trust). This organisation was widening its remit as Charles Haughey, the minister of finance, had requested a survey of country houses, towns and provincial museums.
Craig wrote a number of books, among them The Volunteer Earl (1948) a biography of James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont, who in the 18th century built The Casino, a fine, neo-Classical structure on his estate at Marino, Dublin, which Craig described as “small and perfect and great fun, even if it is not much use.”
Craig’s Irish Bookbinding 1600-1800 came out in 1954. It was followed by, among others, Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size (1976) which was widely acclaimed (though it was sometimes mischievously renamed “Country Houses for the Middle-Class”); and The Architecture of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1880 (1982).
Away from his writing Maurice Craig was also an exceptionally fine builder of large ship-models, and made a magnificent working model of the Guinness vessel Clarecastle.
Maurice Craig was thrice married, to Beatrix Hurst, Jeanne Edwards and to the actress and singer, Agnes Bernelle. He is survived by a son and daughter of his first marriage.
Churches in Early Medieval Ireland
Architecture, Ritual and Memory
Tomás Ó CarragáinThis is the first book devoted to churches in Ireland dating from the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century to the early stages of the Romanesque around 1100, including those built to house treasures of the golden age of Irish art, such as the Book of Kells and the Ardagh chalice. Ó Carragáin’s comprehensive survey of the surviving examples forms the basis for a far-reaching analysis of why these buildings looked as they did, and what they meant in the context of early Irish society. Ó Carragáin also identifies a clear political and ideological context for the first Romanesque churches in Ireland and shows that, to a considerable extent, the Irish Romanesque represents the perpetuation of a long-established architectural tradition.
Tomás Ó Carragáin lectures in the Department of Archaeology, University College Cork.
Yale University Press
Jan 24, 2011
400 p., 9 1/2 x 11 1/4
200 b/w + 100 color illus.
ISBN: 9780300154443
Cloth: $100.00 scReviews
“Here at last is a book that spells out the conceptual sophistication of our early churches, a book that draws the mind away from the old reductive and essentialist generalisations towards a new appreciation of a remarkable corpus of building.”—Tadhg O’Keeffe, Irish Arts Review“Scholarly and subtle it might be, but this is also a bold, myth busting book…. O’Carragain does a splendid job.”—Jonathon Wright, Catholic Herald
Church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours, St. Lawrence Valley, Isolet-sur-Mer, Quebeque
The extraordinary 18th century plate of this country church:
http://www.silversocietyofcanada.ca/sites/default/files/Villeneuve.pdf
Lawrence Lee
Lawrence Lee, who died on April 25 aged 101, was an eminent designer of stained glass and led the small team which created the 10 windows in the nave of the new Coventry Cathedral, consecrated in 1962 .
Although never afraid to explore the shores of modernism, and always alive to the possibilities offered by new techniques, such as improvements in modern adhesives, Lee never lost his veneration for the traditions of his craft.
He drew his inspiration from the great medieval artists in stained glass — particularly John Thornton, the 15th-century master glazier famous for his Great East Window at York Minster. As head of the stained glass department at the Royal College of Art (RCA) for 20 years , Lee sought to ensure that the finest traditions of stained glass were passed down to future generations of craftsmen.
Lawrence Stanley Lee was born on September 18 1909 at Weybridge, Surrey, where his father owned a garage near Brooklands racetrack. From his deeply religious mother Lawrence absorbed the biblical symbolism that would become so important in his work. Although he left school at 14, he was able to go on a scholarship to Kingston School of Art before winning another award, in 1927, to attend the RCA, where he studied stained glass under Martin Travers.
Lee then taught part-time at Bromley School of Art while producing a range of craft and art work at Southside Studios in Clapham, south London. He then spent a year at the Anglican Franciscan Friary near Cerne Abbas, Dorset, but when war broke out he forsook the monastic life to fight fascism.
Serving with the Royal Artillery in North Africa and Italy, he fought at the battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943 and in the Allied landings at Salerno later that year. He then transferred to the Army Educational Service, running courses in art and culture. Throughout the war he sketched and painted, and there are examples of his work in the Imperial War Museum and the Ashmolean.
The war over, Lee embarked on his career in stained glass as assistant to Martin Travers. When Travers died suddenly in 1948, he took over many unfinished commissions as well as the post of head of stained glass at the RCA. Meanwhile, he set up his own studio, first at Sutton in Surrey, and later, in 1963, at Penshurst in Kent.
The immediate postwar years saw a huge demand for the replacement of church windows destroyed by enemy bombing . Churches tended to be conservative in their commissioning, not wishing to experiment with anything that smacked of “modernism”.
At the RCA, however, Lee encouraged his students to explore modernist and abstract styles, and it was examples of such work in the college’s 1951 End of Year Show that inspired Basil Spence, architect of the new cathedral at Coventry, to invite Lee and wo of his former students — Keith New and Geoffrey Clarke — to design the windows for the nave. Lee and his colleagues came up with a series of 10 spectacular 70ft-high windows, some entirely abstract, some “semi-abstract” and symbolic, conceived around the theme of “Man’s progress from birth to death and from death to resurrection and transfiguration”. The windows, set at angles, face away from the congregation and can be seen in their entirety only from the altar.
The three craftsmen designed three windows each, and collaborated on the 10th, in a project which took them six years. Their designs had a significant effect on British stained glass as people began to look beyond the traditionally acceptable styles.
Thereafter Lee cast his net wide, creating windows from the entirely abstract (particularly in the Sixties) to the figurative and symbolic, depending on the commission. Over the course of his long career he designed and made windows for churches of all denominations and for other buildings throughout Britain and the Commonwealth .
Fine examples of his work can be seen at Tunbridge Wells, Swanley and Penshurst in Kent; Belmont (Sutton) and Croydon in Greater London; Matlock in Derbyshire; Sutton-in-Ely and Elvedon in East Anglia; Attleborough and Solihull in the Midlands; and in the Royal Military Academy Chapel at Sandhurst, where he also created small heraldic windows commemorating the field marshals of the Second World War.
His largest commission after Coventry — 10 large clerestory windows — was for the Church of St Andrew and St Paul in Montreal. But he was equally at home with less grandiose projects, for example the little Church of the Holy Cross at Binstead on the Isle of Wight, with its pair of small west windows featuring a phoenix and a peacock, as well as a vitally alive fluttering dove near the altar. The dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, was a recurring device in Lee’s work.
Lee occasionally accepted secular commissions, examples being the windows he created for the Royal Society of Chemistry at Burlington House, and for Montreal General Hospital.
Always working with at least one assistant, Lee ensured that their work was acknowledged by including their initials alongside his own signature. Many of these assistants went on to practise successfully in their own right: apart from Keith New and Geoffrey Clarke, they included Jane Grey (the first woman admitted to the Glaziers Company), Alan Younger, Steve Taylor, Lydia Marouf and Pippa Martin.
He was the author of Stained Glass (1967) and The Appreciation of Stained Glass (1977). He also co-wrote, with George Seddon and Francis Stephens, Stained Glass, An Illustrated Guide to the World of Stained Glass (1976). He was Master of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers in 1976.
Lawrence Lee married, in 1940, Dorothy Tucker. She died in 1994, and he is survived by their two sons.
From the Daily Telegraph
When they put a shell on the Abbey
Sacred mysteries: Christopher Howse discovers how Westminster Abbey had a narrow escape
George Gilbert Scott was excited to find that an ancient door at Westminster Abbey was covered with tanned human skin. This was shortly after he was appointed Surveyor of the Fabric of the Abbey in 1849.
The door was old all right. It is now thought to be the oldest in the country, dating from the 1050s, but the human pelt turned out to be innocent cowhide. The detail tells us quite a bit about the attitude of one of the greatest Victorian architects to his medieval predecessors.
Scott loved the Abbey and had a vast knowledge of the medieval cathedrals of England. When he took up the almost unpaid position of Surveyor, he wrote to the clerk to the Chapter quoting a description of the Abbey from 1683 that spoke of the effects on its stonework of “continual smoaks of Sea-Coal which are of a corroding and fretting quality”.
Acid smoke was eating the fabric more rapidly in the 19th century. As anyone will remember who was alive in London 50 years ago, all stonework was black, with streaks of white where the prevailing winds blew the rain on to it. Scott thought he had the answer: shellac.
This had nothing to do with the “shellacking” that President Obama spoke of last year. It was a lacquer made from a gum secreted by oriental insects. Scott had it dissolved in “spirits of wine” and sprayed on stonework as a protective carapace. In 1857, he was busy with the “induration” of the Abbey’s royal monuments, beginning with that of Richard II.
No one knew that shellac induration would have two disastrous effects. First, it darkened over time, giving stone inside the Abbey a gloomy hue. Worse, it formed a hard skin behind which water built up until patches of the surface sloughed off.
By 1876, when Scott was a knight and had but two years to live, he defended himself to the Dean. “I fear that there is an impression that because the hardening process is not absolutely perfect, it is no use at all,” he wrote. “The fact is the reverse. It has been the saving of the Abbey.”
A successor as Surveyor, John Thomas Micklethwaite, knew better. “The varnish applied to part of the work,” he wrote in 1898, “has failed to protect it, and has done much mischief by forming a superficial crust, which after a time falls off, bringing the face of the stone with it.”
Micklethwaite favoured instead a coating of lime wash. The Chapter gave permission where the whitewash would not be generally visible. A coat was given to the “well” between the East end of the Abbey and Henry VII’s chapel.
Apart from this, Micklethwaite, reasonably enough to modern eyes, argued that there was little point cutting out ancient stone and “restoring” it, unless for structural reasons. He proposed that the old masonry of the cloisters, for example, should be left to moulder while it lasted.
The energy of these Victorian architects is a strong theme in a newly published collection of letters edited by Christine Reynolds, the assistant Keeper of Muniments (a rather magnificent job title).
It is called Surveyors of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey, 1827-1906, (Boydell, £50). I am only sorry about the price, for it is a book of surprisingly gripping narrative force
to anyone who enjoys Westminster Abbey.Not the surface alone of the building proved troublesome. At one stage it was feared that ringing the bells might bring down one of the West towers.
As for shellac, the remnant inside the Abbey was taken off during restoration of the interior in the 1950s. Some apparently survives on the monuments. Scrubbing is as controversial as coating, as the authorities at St Paul’s have found. Some say they have removed the warm internal wash intended by Sir Christopher Wren. In church preservation you can’t win.
Christopher Howse’s ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’ is published by Continuum (£16.99)
From the Daily Telegraph
Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum, preview
The Telegraph has an exclusive first look around the British Museum’s Treasures of Heaven exhibition.
The British Museum’s enlightening and sinister summer exhibition will show an extraordinary collection of relics and explore the mythical and political power they held over medieval culture.
Among the treasured objects is a delicate glass cylinder said to contain the reliquary of a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. The object was gifted to Mary, Queen of Scotts by King Henry II. There is also a relic of the True Cross collected from the First Crusade.
Among other items on display are reliquary cases that the faithful believed held the bones of Sant Peter and Saint Paul, crystal bottles that containing the hair of the Virgin Mary, the umbilical cord of the baby Jesus, and the arm of Saint Luke holding his pen.
There is also a silver badge believed to have been owned by a pilgrim, which was found in Lancashire by a metal detector a few weeks ago.
Great to see the removal of that kind of crud from the church . .
Would I be right to assume that the replacement altar is a salvaged piece?
I must enquire. I have the suspicion that it is because it is disproportionate to the size of the sanctuary which requires a much larger altar piece. However, the idea is quite correct and appropriate for this kind of church. Interesting, there also appears to be the makings of two side altars to flank it. Again, this is correct but together all three will not fill the height of the church.
It is interesting to note that the iconoclast who went to work on the original sanctuary was not only content to demolish the entire sanctuary but also abandoned it. A brazen example of dated soixanthuitard ideological fascism.
From The Yorkshire Post:
Catholics launch £1m bid to save prize church
DECADES of smoke, incense and candles have finally taken their toll – but now historic St Charles Borromeo Church, a hidden gem in the centre of Hull, is embarking on a £1m restoration project.
The 19th century building – the mother church of the Catholic community in the city – withstood the aerial bombardment of two World Wars, but is now in dire need of repair and redecoration.
Walls are crumbling where blocked guttering some years back caused water to cascade into the church and 200-year-old paintings are sagging off their canvases.
The painted angels that peer out from all corners of the building – no-one has ever counted them all – should be rosy-pink and the Saints could do with a brush up, the glorious technicolour of the church’s Baroque interior having been muted by the accumulated grime of half a century.
Canon Michael Loughlin said: “Many people who come to see it for the first time are amazed by it.
“One of the English Heritage books described it as ‘one of the most astonishing interiors of any 19th century church’ and we want to make it as lovely as it should be.
“Some of the walls have crumbled and the plasterwork has deteriorated quite badly and generally the interior needs total cleaning or repainting.
“The water used to pour down the walls.
“Over the six years I have been here we’ve plugged most of the holes but as the damp has dried out, the plaster has started coming off the walls – and I think the children at Mass have been pressing the plaster back to brick in some places.
“We have all got fed up with the state of the place.
“Thankfully it is not a situation where the church is going to fall down. We are not saving a building in that sense”
The congregation has raised £50,000 so far and a probable bid of £1m will be made to the Heritage Lottery Fund for most of the remainder.
However, there will still be a funding gap and the Rt Rev Bishop Terence Drainey of Middlesbrough will be launching an appeal next Friday, July 8.
The hope is that churchgoers – their numbers have been swelled by the recent influx of immigrants – will each be willing to make monthly donations of £10 for the next four years.
Unlike many churches, St Charles is open during daylight hours and Canon Loughlin hopes more people will come and enjoy its unique interior.
“On the special Heritage open days we get quite a crowd, but I don’t think so many people realise the place is open or don’t think they can come in,” he said.
The church was the first major Catholic church to be built in Hull following centuries of persecution and its grandeur is in striking contrast to the modest chapels it replaced.
Money to build the church came from an emigre priest who escaped the French Revolution and came to Hull, laden with the paintings that now adorn the walls, and which still bear the tears made by Revolutionaries’ bayonets checking for hidden treasure.
Although the church dates back to the 19th century, the bones of Friars uncovered during a dig on what is now the site of the city’s magistrates courts were reburied within the crypt beneath the church, which also holds the bricked-up remains of Catholics who died from 1829 to 1846.
In a sloping hand written in concrete on one of the two underground “streets” is the message: “Full – not to be opened.”
Monsignor David Hogan, who is handling the funding application, said: “On one site the church represents a time capsule of history of Hull from the 12th century as there is the burial underground of the remains of Mediaeval Friars while the church itself owes its inception to the Napoleonic Wars.
“We have had every encouragement from the Heritage Lottery to pursue this, so we are hopeful.
“We are very anxious that this is seen as part of the heritage of Hull, it isn’t just a preoccupation within the Catholic community.
“This is an architectural treasure of Hull, that has much to tell you about the history of Hull.”
The appeal will be launched at the church in Jarratt Street, near the Hull New Theatre, in the presence of Lord Mayor Councillor Colin Inglis and other civic dignitaries and representatives of Catholic organisations from the city and the East Riding.
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