On Why Big Shiny Candlesticks are A Good Thing

Categories: life-and-musings, faith

Date: 19 November 2009 16:18:33

I’m having an interesting discussion at the moment on whether the Church (as an entity, Holy Mother Rome) should be seen to be poor, or whether it is acceptable for churches (a particular building, The Church of Our Lady and St Painful Martyrdom) to have fine and beautiful things.

(This is just over three pages long. I shan’t be offended if you say “TL;DR*” and wait for my normal insane (and short) ravings to resume).

The Eucharistic Shrine at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Alabama was paid for by some rich benefactors. Should Mother Angelica have turned down their gifts because they were “unsuitable”? Should she have said to these people, who wanted only the best for God, that their desire was wrong and the King of Kings should be enthroned in concrete and steel? There were places where Mother Angelica wanted to use tile, but was told “no, it will be marble, here’s the money,” because if you truly believe that God is present in the Eucharist, He should have a throne worthy of a King. I don’t know. It’s not my place to say. But I was brought up to believe that you smiled and said thank you for a jumper that was four sizes too big and made you look terminally ill because bottle-green wasn’t your colour. You don’t start setting limits on other people’s generosity.

Needless to say, the public areas of the Shrine are far richer than the private, community areas behind the cloister wall.

Yes, there is an argument that the Church should sell its wealth and give the money to the poor. In my opinion, which is worth exactly what you paid for it, this argument is rubbish. Fine, sell the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s Pieta and all the rest of it, and the world’s richest people will hide these things away in their private vaults and maybe take them out once a year to go “my precious, look what I’ve got and you haven’t, mwahahahaha.” But all the money in the world will only go so far, and what happens when it runs out?

And I am not saying that a church should have solid gold candlesticks whilst ignoring the starving huddled outside. It is not, or should not be, a choice between feeding the hungry and having a nice church. It should be both/and, not either/or. A goldsmith’s gift is working with gold – should that gift be valued less than the person with a gift for feeding the hungry? People need beauty, things to feed the mind, as well as food for the body in order to live as fully alive human beings.

It is no accident that the Anglo-Catholic churches in London are found in what used to be the slum areas. The Kingdom of Heaven has gates of pearl and pavements of gold and walls of precious stones, and our worship is a foretaste of this. The gold candlesticks may be painted wood, but people put effort into creating something that brought the heart and mind to the things not of this world, and who are we to say that it’s not important?

The Anglican Shrine at Walsingham is mostly gilded wood and painted plaster. They could have done it in bare plaster and wood, because that would have been cheaper, but they didn’t, because they wanted it to look nice, and to inspire people. It probably cost a bit more, but it was a sign of their love and devotion that they chose to spend that extra money on God’s House.

We are an Incarnational people, and all our senses should be reached when we worship God.

At the moment, people can walk into any church in the world and see the most stunning examples of art (and some terrible rubbish, hologram Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, I’m looking at you – well, I’m not, because I might be sick). I know of a church which has a Crucifixion painted by one of the Old Masters hanging behind the altar. Anyone can walk in and see it. Put it on the open market and it will end up locked away in some private owner’s collection and you might be lucky if you ever see it again. Sell the riches of the Church and the poor will still be there, and they’ll have nothing but breeze-blocks and polyester to look at. Blech.

They may be bought by art galleries to put on display, but the wealth of art galleries is in their art. They are generally quite cash poor. If an important piece of art comes on the market, or 2,000 years-worth of important art comes on the market at once, they have to beg and scramble to raise the cash to buy it, occasionally with the semi-connivance of the government, who will refuse a piece of art an export licence if it is “of significance to the nation” and there is a realistic chance of a museum or gallery raising the money in the time frame allowed by the vendor.

But art galleries aren’t as rich as private individuals can be, and if the metaphorical “you” is saying “sell that El Greco and give the money to the poor,” then the Church is under an obligation to get the best price it can, so it can help more poor people. So it goes to a private individual, and is locked up in a vault or on their private walls, maybe to appear in a gallery a few years down the line in lieu of a swingeing inheritance tax bill.

Art in churches is placed there as a window into Heaven, part of our worship of God and an aid to devotion. By taking the art from the church, you are breaking that link between the earthly and the spiritual. Art in church should inspire us to deeper devotion to God, and by taking a painting out of context and hanging it on a gallery wall with none of the history around it, its full relevance is lost.

I think one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen is a collection of old sepia photographs, clearly with no links to each other, which had been stuck together in an album. The people in the photographs were not related, they had been put together in the album because they looked pretty. Taking church art out of churches is a bit like that – the original “why” of the painting or sculpture is lost if you take it out of its original milieu.

I think it depends how you see the material wealth of the Church. Do you see it as signs of someone’s devotion, that they wanted to give God of the most beautiful and best, and the Church holds that in trust for the future, or not? As the Body of Christ, the Church’s wealth belongs to us all, and I don’t believe that we have the right to flog it off to the highest bidder and deprive future generations of the chance to see it.

As someone once said, trying to explain the difference between property held by the Crown, and property held by the person, Elizabeth Windsor, “The Queen, as Mrs. Windsor, does not own The Crown Estate, but Mrs. Windsor, as The Queen, does own The Crown Estate.” In other words, she “owns” Buckingham Palace and the rest of the Crown Estate because of who and what she is, but she doesn’t “own” it in the sense that she can’t sell Windsor Castle because she fancies buying a nice bungalow in Barton-on-Sea. (I don’t want to get into a “rights and wrongs of the monarchy,” debate, here, but there is an equivalence, I think).

In much the same way, the Church “owns” great material wealth, but it holds it in trust for the real wealth of the church, which is its people, the Body of Christ, its spiritual wealth, if you will. And by selling that which brings beauty into the world, and saying “the Church, in her worship and her life, must do everything plainly, cheaply, carelessly and shoddily,” we deprive the Body of Christ of the opportunity to rejoice in beauty, and see therein a foretaste, a ghost, a shadow of the life that is to come. It behoves us to drag people up to the heights, rather than shove them down to the depths.

Jesus didn’t say “the Temple should be torn down, its wealth sold, the money raised used to feed the poor.” What he did object to was exploiting the poor, so extorting shiny gold candlesticks out of the poor with the promise of a happy ever afterlife is bad and evil, but accepting a gift, freely given, out of someone's plenty, is not. He didn’t criticise the widow for giving her last mite to the Temple, He praised her.

When the Temple was built in Jerusalem, King Solomon spent a fortune on gold and silver and cedars of Lebanon and fine linens. He didn’t go down to the equivalent of Ikea and buy a couple of Billy bookcases and a paper lampshade.

Additionally, things have sometimes only become valuable over time. There are churches and convents which were built in the middle of a slum, because that’s where the need was. Over time, there has been redevelopment, and many changes, and now the building is on a piece of land which is worth millions, and whilst there is still a need for mission, the nature of the mission has changed.

Should we demolish the church, sell the land, spend the money on the Church’s outreach programme? Maybe. Except without the church there to act as a base, its mission in the area disappears, and the people it ministers to will no longer have that example of the things which are not of this world before them as a reminder that there is more to life than this, whether “this” is grinding material poverty, or the spiritual poverty which so often replaces it as an area goes “up in the world.”

Here, I’m thinking of a church in London which is in the middle of an area which is at the same time the red light district, has many homeless people, and is also extremely wealthy because it is a popular place for media companies to be based. There is great material poverty cheek by jowl with great spiritual poverty, and the church has a mission to both the spiritually and materially poor. If the church were to disappear, and be replaced by another office block, then the materially poor would have nowhere to go to be physically fed, and the spiritually poor would have nowhere to go to be spiritually fed.

And, from a practical point of view, expensive things are often cheaper in the long run. It’s known as the “Boots Theory” of economics. A rich man can afford to spend £200 on a pair of shoes. A poor man can afford to spend £20. The rich man buys one pair of shoes in twenty years, and they last all that time. He incurs no further expense, apart from possibly re-soling every so often. The cheap shoes fall apart and need replacing every year, so, in that same twenty years, the poor man has spent £400 on shoes and he still has wet feet.

*”Too Long; Didn’t Read.” And I made you scroll all the way down to the bottom to find that out. I am puerile and childish, sorry.