I always enjoy the motto:
He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower. As with great art, faith that lasts is faith that answers to higher standards than today’s trends.
—attributed to Dean Inge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
This was visually demonstrated years ago when I took a wrong turn when driving in Mill Hill in north London. While passing the rows of ordinary houses in this very ordinary suburban road I saw a building which made me slam on the brakes and pull over immediately.
I had never seen a church, or indeed any other structure, quite like
John Keble Church.There can't be many churches named in honour of one of the leading lights in the 19th century Oxford Movement within Anglicanism which spawned Cardinal John Henry Newman. (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keble). But it was not its name which was so arresting; its design was eye-popping. It was a church which had been designed to be ultra modern for the 1930s. The London sprawl and the electric railway had just reached out to nearby Edgware and created the need for new Anglican parishes.
The architect had obviously chosen a style which he conceived as fitting for the 1930s, as much of its time as the new railway stations on the line up from Central London or the semi-detached houses with their state-of-the-art radios and electric light all around it. A few very affluent families in the area would have had a car and, who knows, one or two might even have had a TV. The BBC started the first regular high-definition (405 line) transmissions in 1936, the same year John Keble was completed, and Mill Hill was within range of the only hi-def transmitter in the world.
Plainly any old-fashioned notions of church design were as ridiculous in 1930s suburban London as a horse and buggy. I don't know to what extent the clergy aided and abetted the design, or if it was done over their dead bodies.
As a result John Keble Church is now almost grotesquely dated and somehow much more old-fashioned than the thousands of beautiful older churches throughout the land. These ancient buildings, whether Gothic, Victorian or Norman in style, have a timeless quality while John Keble merely looks very odd. Hardly any other English churches in the interwar period were built in this style, which makes it even more of a curiosity.
The only remotely comparable church I have seen anywhere is the Sacred Heart in Prague, built a few years earlier. That is also one of a kind, but the boldness of its conception and detailing, especially the enormous clock, works far better than its London contemporary and it has aged very well.
I first saw the Sacred Heart from the top of the nearby TV tower. This started construction as a Communist era prestige project but by the the time it was completed in 1992 the old regime had been swept away. The TV tower's restaurant was decorated in a strange mixture of darkish blue materials; this was probably some local designer's idea of what was ultra-chic in 1980s terms, but it now looked as passe as John Keble.
John Keble Church is a terrific metaphor for the religious and secular fashions which now look even more dated and bizarre. At the time, of course, the 1936 Olympics were in full swing and the great and the good were queuing up to praise the wondrous things Herr Hitler was doing in Germany: eliminating unemployment, building a nation wide freeway system 20 years before the USA got started, launching the first public TV broadcasts in the world (in Berlin in 1935), promoting technological advances of every kind. The first jet aircraft in the world would be German and take to the air three years later.
As a recent article pointed out, the 1936 Olympics were the first truely "modern" Olympics in many ways: the first to be televised, as well as the first to have mass commercial sponsorship and the hokey "torch marathon" from the original Olympic site (this latter spectacle was invented by Hitler's propaganda geniuses).
If Herr Hitler was not quite your cup of tea, there were astonishing reports of Comrade Stalin's successes in boosting Soviet GNP, building a whole new egalitarian society and abolishing poverty. The Western parliamentary democracies with their mass unemployment and social injustice were plainly on their way out.
By the 1960s both Stalin and Hitler were SO five minutes ago, almost as dated as John Keble's architecture, and their erstwhile advocates were widowers indeed. The surviving Hitlerites and Stalinists had mostly either reinvented themselves as devote democrats or retreated into embarrassed silence, though a few faithful followers still preached the discredited "gospels." All popular opinion (as interpreted by the noisier media pundits) was now allegedly on the side of a new revolution in church and secular life: for the Mass in the vernacular, sexual liberation, overthrow of traditional authority (in favour of liberating politicians such as Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao), the worship of youth and the denigration of traditional culture in favour of new music, art, etc.
All these trends have either been abandoned, savagely ridiculed or produced horribly sour grapes. So we have yet another generation of widows and widowers. As I noted in a recent posting, you can tell the 1968 party is over when even "Le Monde" is willing to see the dark side of Fidel Castro.
Of course a few aging rebels still preach the liberationist gospel, most hilariously our own Polly Toynbee who only recently was vigorously defending the Permissive Society of her long-ago youth in the 1960s. Even Members of Parliament in her beloved Labour Party are unhappy at the fruits of the Swinging Sixties, if only because they are so horribly expensive at a time when the country is nearly bankrupt. It was all very well squeezing responsible families to support the feckless in the good times, but now in 2009 one parent families are a luxury we can't afford and can't get rid of.
And the vernacular Mass, the most visible relic of the 1960s turmoil in the Church? It is still surviving, but the liturgical revolution has never produced the great results anticipated 40 years ago - certainly not in terms of church attendance, which has been going downhill like an Olympic ski run. The English translations varied from banal to crass, and like the one parent families, proved horribly expensive as the one approved translator had monopoly rights. No one adopted the dignified existing translations by scholars such as Ronald Knox; these had the serious disadvantage that there was no money to be screwed out of a faithful congregation.
For a while the religious revoltionaries assumed that the Latin Mass would fade away with the aging generation still devoted to it. But who is turning up at the Latin Mass in our own St William of York? Certainly a few of the pre-Vatican 2 parishioners, but an astonishing number of mini-vans full of young families, plus students from the adjacent University. The future of the Latin oddly looks more assured than the vernacular.
Also an exclusive revelation on what happened when the Obamas met the Royals - though the real life antics of the Royal family are much funnier. See Kitty Kelly's book on "The Royals". If you add up all the rumours, Prince Charles has at least one brother and sister who are not related to each other.
