Angela Tilby: Cathedrals’ enchantment is just not about ‘fun’

IN 2018, Archbishop Welby, a former Canon of Coventry and Dean of Liverpool, declared that cathedrals ought to be “places of celebration and joy and good news”. He additionally mentioned that they need to be “fun”. Cue a nine-hole loopy golf course in Rochester Cathedral, designed to “build bridges”; a helter-skelter in Norwich; Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon, which visited cathedrals in 2022-23; the sound-and-light present Lux Muralis; and, extra usually, using cathedral areas for company dinners and hospitality, movies, and pop concert events.

The 42 cathedrals in England are amongst our most visited vacationer points of interest, and but lots of them wrestle to maintain financially afloat. It is inevitable that they’re pushed to market themselves as hospitality and leisure venues. Those who agreed with Archbishop Welby that there ought to be no incompatibility between enjoyable and sacred house even argued that offering “fun” ought to rightly be seen as a part of mission: those that had crossed the brink to see a movie, or play loopy golf, can be extra more likely to return for worship or religious exploration.

The current Theos report on cathedrals, Living Stones (News, 22 May), means that there isn’t any proof to help this. It argues, as an alternative, and maybe somewhat uncomfortably, that the true enchantment of cathedrals is exactly that they provide sacred house, enabling the informal and the curious to have an expertise that they’d be much less more likely to have by visiting, say, a stately residence or a zoo.

It appears apparent to me that the enchantment of such huge constructions as St Albans, Durham, Ely, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Winchester is that they provide perspective. Our self-preoccupations are questioned by dimension and historical past. To stand on the west finish of an unlimited cathedral and gaze by a forest of carved stone is to be confronted by our personal limitations. This is just not mere “fun”: it’s meant to impress marvel and humility.

The Theos report is necessary as a result of it invitations us to affirm the worth of the sacred in itself — one thing that our society is just not all the time ready to do. It strikes me as ironic that secular France, the place the boundaries between sacred and secular are extra clear-cut, requires the State to keep up and restore its sacred buildings: consider the speedy restoration of Notre-Dame after the devastating hearth in 2019 (News, 13 December 2024).

English cathedrals, however, are sometimes pushed to place extra employees, time, and power into fund-raising than into sustaining worship and welcome. Many of them are in deficit. There are present makes an attempt to boost the query of cathedral financing amongst MPs, within the hope that, in time, at the least a few of the price of upkeep is likely to be born by the State. If that had been to occur, it could carry its challenges; nevertheless it may liberate our cathedrals to level in direction of the thriller on the coronary heart of issues — the thriller that they had been designed to have fun.