Ancient churches are the greatest glory of Europe’s cities, and a headache for those trying to look after them
THE CATHEDRAL of Notre Dame in Paris, and the vast outpouring of sorrow over its semi-destruction by fire on April 15th, epitomises the power of great houses of prayer to touch and inspire people. More palpably than any other kind of monument, they connect visitors with another world: one in which the finest composers, singers, sculptors, glass-makers, embroiderers and craft-workers of a given era joyfully mixed their energies in a vast, disinterested enterprise.
The Church of England likes to call the cathedrals one of its “success stories” with rising numbers of worshippers and visitors, and growing revenue. But as a recent report led by a bishop delicately put it, “recent failures of governance and management within a small number of cathedrals have highlighted vulnerabilities across the sector…” In plain language, at least two cathedrals have run into severe financial difficulties, which better stewardship might have avoided.
But a massive fund-raising effort, drawing in generous private-sector donors and ordinary well-wishers in Germany and Britain, was needed for one of the biggest church reconstruction projects of modern times: the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche in Dresden. In church-state relations, France is an outlier. Under the regime of laïcité, or strict secularism, municipalities took over formal responsibility for Catholic churches; clerics and their congregations are merely users. And clerics, in particular, are thin on the ground. In rural France, it is common for a priest to look after 30 old churches.
But a diametrically opposing trend is at work further east in Europe. Perhaps the most spectacular act of church reconstruction of recent times was the re-erection of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was dynamited by Stalin in 1931 and thrown back up over five years starting in 1995. It was rebuilt in about a tenth of the time needed for the original construction.
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