None Will Remain

This is the title of a two-volume publication by the Anglo-Catholic History Society which I much enjoyed reading a couple of weeks ago. Richard McEwan, a retired head teacher and school inspector, comes from the milieu of Anglo-Catholicism in the Diocese of Manchester and writes about five pioneer churches of the Catholic Movement in that part of the world, adding to the growing corpus of historical writing on Northern Anglo-Catholicism, which ten years ago was barely mentioned anywhere.

Manchester was even more resolutely Protestant a diocese than most, supervised by bishops who vigorously defended that tradition against the inroads of Tractarian clergy and laypeople, meaning that some of these churches faced the most remarkable bigotry – as it looks to us now. Most generously interpreted, it’s astonishing what some Christians felt they had to do to defend that strange nexus of values that was English Protestantism (both words are equally important), an ideology now all but dead.

None Will Remain describes at some length the sad and well-known case of the Revd Sidney Faithorn Green of St John’s Miles Platting, imprisoned under the 1874 Public Worship Regulation Act and, thanks to the intransigence of his opponents (and Bishop Fraser of Manchester), in gaol for well over a year while his family was made homeless. Even the president of the tribunal under the Act, Lord Penzance, described the case as ‘a public misfortune’. But there are other, slightly less dark if no more edifying instances.

At St Alban’s Cheetwood the church remained unconsecrated for some years until finally Bishop Fraser was persuaded to carry out the ceremony in 1874, though only after making a series of demands for alterations to its structure (insisting that the steps up into the chancel were changed, for instance) and decoration. At the service, all went well until the communion, when, upon taking the chalice into his hands, the Bishop noticed its inscription inviting prayers for its (unnamed) donor. The Bishop halted proceedings and asked Fr Harris, the vicar, whether the donor was alive. The person in question was the saintly former incumbent of St Alban's, Fr Sedgwick, who despite having substantial private means lived in a small unheated room in the church tower, and who was indeed still alive and living in Bournemouth. Bishop Fraser retorted that Fr Sedgwick would be dead one day, at which point the chalice would become illegal, and refused to carry on with the service until another one was found.

In 1913 one of the curates at St Gabriel’s, Hulme, Fr Charles Raw Thomas, was persuaded to apply for and was appointed to the church of St Mary, Rochdale, an outcome which puzzled him and others as it was a very Low church whose patron was that venerable Evangelical organisation, the Church Pastoral Aid Society. Fr Thomas returned from the interview remarking that the patrons seemed less interested in his churchmanship than in the fact that he’d been a rowing blue at Oxford. The CPAS were soon made aware of their mistake but by then, in the days of the ‘parson’s freehold’, there was nothing they could do about it. Fr Thomas swiftly introduced the full Catholic system to St Mary’s and being a flamboyant and charismatic personality had an extremely successful time there, building up an active, thriving church (lamenting that the building ‘could only seat 600’) until developing a brain tumour in 1941 – in fact collapsing and dying while at the altar. Immediately he was gone, the CPAS swung into action, and ordered the verger and churchwardens to gather up all the Catholic paraphernalia introduced to the church over the previous 30 years – the candlesticks, thurible, vestments, even the service books – and not only get rid of them, but bury them in an unmarked part of the churchyard. They were clearly so dangerous they had to be ‘put beyond use’!

The saddest story is that of the way the people of St John’s Miles Platting were treated after their parish was amalgamated with others in the area in 1972. The building remained in use, serving an area previously divided between three churches, and the vicar of the new united benefice was the very Evangelical Canon Stanley Meadows, incumbent of the other two churches. Within a couple of weeks, Canon Meadows received complaints that, despite having agreed to wear Eucharistic vestments, he was not doing so, and answered that by ‘vestments’ he had meant a surplice and stole, and expressed a ‘dislike for those clergymen that minced about in vestments’. He then cancelled the annual meetings of the Guild of the Servants of the Sanctuary that had always been held at St John’s, stating that ‘the church was no place for histrionics and effeminacy’. The following year the diocese received permission to pull the church down, despite a City Council engineer’s report stating that the building was sound; the architects of the new church replacing it, St Cuthbert’s, were the same firm that had condemned the old one. Anglo-Catholic clergy and organisations in the area asked that they might be allowed to remove some of the fixtures from St John’s, such as the 18^th-century Italian sanctuary lamp that had been given as a memorial to Fr Green, requests which Canon Meadows, as Richard McEwan acidly puts it, ‘for reasons best known to him, firmly refused’. The Diocese brought forward the demolition date to pre-empt an appeal by a local conservation group. Alerted to this, Fr Graney of Cheetwood arrived to find the church already a heap of rubble. He and the contractor picked over the remains and eventually found the antique sanctuary lamp, crushed flat.

There are, therefore, tales of almost unfathomable vitriol and hate in these pages as well as stories of heroic (and occasionally somewhat odd) clergy working tirelessly to bring souls to God in circumstances that were sometimes hard going indeed. But very strikingly Richard McEwan does not exempt the Anglo-Catholic movement from blame for its decline – few even of its sternest critics could write passages as scarifying as this:

[From the 1980s onwards] The leaders of Anglo-Catholicism spoke in a voice which was shrill, hysterical and often un-Christian, and many of its priests joined in because they seemed to believe that such defensiveness and aggression would win the day. In fact, its unpleasant outpourings, irrational behaviour and prevailing attitudes lost it many friends and it became an entrenched, unattractive and pessimistic presence in the Church. It spoke disapprovingly of every development, and the issues of equality, social justice and the status of minorities, including sexual minorities, were ignored. Many churches fell into a pattern of misogyny coupled with hostility to outsiders and enquirers.

The book ends with a note of thankfulness for the positive legacy of the five churches it examines, and a recognition that (as Christians might expect) ways of doing things must die so that the new can be born. And it is, here and there.