8

Devotion

The devotional functions of churches were frequently important in their design and remained significant throughout the period studied here. The emphasis on the liturgical movement in writing on church architecture at the time and since has tended to obscure this feature of post-war church architecture, a highly distinctive aspect of Roman Catholic culture in post-war Britain. The liturgical movement contrasted the liturgy with popular devotions, which were viewed as motivated by individual piety and sentiment more than reason or doctrine. For Guardini, the liturgy’s ‘sense of restraint’ and rich symbolic world made it a higher form of worship than pious devotions.¹ Yet Guardini argued that devotions were still important, even necessary, and could be improved through the influence of liturgy. Later, the emphasis on liturgy in church architecture marginalised devotional features in churches, as the ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ implied:

The practice of placing sacred images in churches so that they may be venerated by the faithful is to be firmly maintained. Nevertheless, their number should be moderate and their relative location should reflect right order. Otherwise they may create confusion among the Christian people and promote a faulty sense of devotion.²

Liturgical movement writers could be scathing about the proliferation of statues in churches, doubting their efficacy in inspiring devotion.³ Decades later, however, a perceived loss of devotional imagery and ritual began to be felt with nostalgia, becoming a frequent criticism of the Second Vatican Council. There had been, it was thought, a ‘widespread collapse of the older devotional system’, as distinctive Catholic iconography had been replaced by banal and generic images.⁴

By the 1970s, many clergy were cautious with statuary. St Aidan in Coulsdon, south London, by Burles, Newton & Partners, for example, was spartan and lacked conventional imagery or indeed any special place for it. A small figurative crucifix by Dunsten Prudens was suspended in the Blessed Sacrament chapel, and a processional cross was placed behind the altar, the only image canonically required in a Catholic church. On a side wall towards the rear of the nave was the only other figure besides the discreet Stations of the Cross, a sculpture of the Virgin and Child. Beneath it was the stand for placing candles to accompany prayer; but the statue was attached high up on the wall, precluding the pious intimacy of private prayer in a conventional side chapel. Moreover the figure itself was unfamiliar, primitive in feeling and made of black bronze by a Swiss Benedictine artist, Xaver Ruckstuhl, in the style of the altar and other furnishings he designed for the church and its reform-minded parish priest, Kenneth Allan (Figure 8.1).⁵ Coulsdon was unusually ascetic for a parish church, however; most had at least a separate Lady chapel.

8.1 St Aidan, Coulsdon, London, by Burles, Newton & Partners, 1966. Sculpture of the Virgin and Child by Xaver Ruckstuhl. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010

8.2 St Clare, Blackley, Manchester, by Weightman & Bullen, 1956–58. Mosaic of St Clare by George Mayer Martin; Stations of the Cross by David John. By permission of David John. Photo: Ambrose Gillick, 2012

Before the Second Vatican Council, churches normally had chapels or niches along the sides of the nave containing statue shrines; side altars were placed at the heads of each aisle dedicated to the Virgin Mary, St Joseph or the Sacred Heart, while statues of lesser saints were placed elsewhere. At Weightman & Bullen’s St Clare in Blackley, for example, the Lady altar was placed at the front to the left of the sanctuary, the Sacred Heart to the right, and three side chapels along one side contained statues of St Francis and associated saints, since this church was run by Franciscans (Figure 8.2). Architects would often design spaces in anticipation of an accumulation of statues: at St Paschal Baylon in Liverpool, architect Sydney Bolland incorporated shelved niches for statues framed from the nave with plain columns, and designed bare panels above each column to receive the Stations of the Cross, all acquired later rather than designed for the church. Church buildings were populated with familiar figures that supplemented worshippers’ experience of divine transcendence with more accessible intercessors with God.

The Church often intervened to approve, moderate or condemn popular devotional practices.⁶ The arrangement of images in the church was also a method of constraining the laity’s enthusiastic devotions within an authorised and co-ordinated space. Nevertheless clergy and dioceses in Britain were often active in promoting non-liturgical devotions. Many devotional events took place in and around church buildings built by clergy specifically to accommodate them and formed an important part of the architect’s brief.

EUCHARISTIC DEVOTIONS

Despite the liturgical movement’s emphasis on the sacramental action of the Eucharist, the Vatican also affirmed the importance of non-liturgical devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle, maintaining its significance even after the Second Vatican Council. The ‘Instruction on the Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery’ advised that ‘devotion, both private and public, toward the sacrament of the altar even outside Mass … is strongly advocated by the Church, since the eucharistic sacrifice is the source and summit of the whole Christian life’.⁷ Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, its display outside the tabernacle in a monstrance for public veneration, was encouraged, provided it was separate from the Mass, which now could not take place with the sacrament exposed.⁸ For Catholics in Britain, devotion to the reserved sacrament was one of the most important activities outside the Mass and required specific architectural forms. It was also a characteristic aspect of Catholicism in relation to other denominations, contributing to a Catholic sense of identity. Bishop Beck warned that liturgical developments should not weaken devotion to the sacrament: ‘The frequent reception of Holy Communion, as well as public and private visits to the Blessed Sacrament, form part of the Catholic way of life’, he wrote, cautioning architects against excluding this important custom.⁹

One form of this devotion was private prayer in view of the tabernacle. The view was important: as David Morgan observes, devotional images are used for their effects of concentrating the mind and stimulating profound internal engagement with their object.¹⁰ The tabernacle with its veil and lamp was such a focal point for meditation, a recognisable sign of the ‘real presence’ of God within the church. Prayers could be said anywhere, but in front of the tabernacle they had a focused character, and the sense of divine presence was more keenly felt. Catholics who passed a church would doff a hat or make the sign of the cross, but would also feel an urge to enter, to ‘visit’ the Blessed Sacrament.

Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament could be an argument for having a church in the first place. The liturgy did not require a church – it could take place in a room in a house or a rented hall; reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, however, did require a dedicated space. At the new parish of the Holy Family at Pontefract in Leeds, parish priest John Hudson began by saying Mass in a school, but urged Bishop Dwyer to allow him to build a church, hoping not to have to begin with a temporary church hall:

A Church-Hall never seems to be regarded as more than a glorified Mass-Centre, and it seems almost impossible to prevail upon parishioners to pay visits to the Blessed Sacrament etc. For the sake of all the Catholics in the Parish, but especially the children, I feel that a Church is a necessity.¹¹

Hudson’s wish was soon granted, and one of the most striking modern churches of the diocese opened in 1964, designed by Derek Walker with liturgical movement principles in mind. On the opening of the church, Dwyer was keen to emphasise its primary function of accommodating the liturgy, but he also acknowledged its devotional use:

The Parish of the Holy Family is rightly delighted that a permanent home for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is now in its midst. … We have the great privilege of His abiding presence in the tabernacle. Make it your practice to visit the Blessed Sacrament as often as you can.¹²

With the altar set forward for Mass facing the people, the tabernacle was set into the reredos, but it remained a strong visual feature of the interior, set at the foot of Robert Brumby’s ceramic mosaic figure of Christ in Majesty (Figure 8.3).¹³

Dual-purpose church halls were often designed to allow visits to the Blessed Sacrament while the building was otherwise closed or in use: in some, folding partitions across the sanctuary enclosed a permanent worship space with separate access to one side. When architect Lionel Prichard & Son presented plans for such a building in Widnes, the Archdiocese of Liverpool requested more room between altar and screen ‘to enable people to make private visits whilst the hall was in use’.¹⁴ Even when separate Blessed Sacrament chapels were planned in churches after Vatican II, devotional visits were used as justification, perhaps pre-empting criticism of any weakening of this devotion, an explanation given at St Mary, Leyland, for example.¹⁵ If it was expected that a church would be locked, the visual aspect of devotion to the sacrament could be satisfied by a glazed screen or window in an unlocked vestibule, an arrangement built into many small churches, such as that of St Pius X at New Malden by Francis Broadbent.¹⁶ Visibility could also be problematic. The parish priest of St Alexander in Bootle, a church by Velarde, removed its glazed narthex screen in 1964 and replaced it with a wall to block the view from the street when the doors were open. When questioned by the diocese, he argued that the wall ‘ensured protection and reverence for the Blessed Sacrament’, presumably from being ignored or mocked by passers-by during Mass. The diocese, however, insisted that he insert a window.¹⁷ Looking into a church and seeing the tabernacle when passing was an important custom for Catholics and one that clergy aimed to sustain.

Public forms of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament also had architectural requirements. The most common was Benediction, a service of prayers and hymns to accompany the display of the host in a monstrance. The monstrance was often placed on a temporary ‘throne’ or pedestal on or behind the altar, sometimes sheltered with a canopy. A pedestal could be built into the reredos behind the altar, a common arrangement in pre-war churches, also employed by Adrian Gilbert Scott at Sts Mary and Joseph, Poplar, where the crucifix would be removed and replaced by the monstrance, steps behind the altar giving access. Bishop Dwyer of Leeds complained that modern altars, lacking suitable structures behind them, had unworthy arrangements for exposition, and asked all parishes to ensure they at least used temporary thrones.¹⁸ Even in the late 1960s, the use of a high throne was still expected, though the hierarchy preferred it only for ‘solemn annual occasions’.¹⁹ Of these occasions the most important was Quarant’Ore, consisting of exposition for a continuous period of 40 hours with processions of the monstrance through the church, often co-ordinated across parishes so that there was continual, or at least frequent, exposition throughout each diocese.²⁰ During this period parishes would compete in the lavishness of their ephemeral church decorations, loading altars with flowers and candles.²¹

8.3 Holy Family, Pontefract, Leeds, by Derek Walker, 1964. Reredos of Christ in Majesty, candlesticks, altar sculpture and tabernacle by Robert Brumby. By permission of Robert Brumby. Photo: J. Roberts & Co., 1964. Source: Leeds Diocesan Archives

In some churches, exposition was not just regular but permanent, the building accommodating this distinctive requirement. Two religious orders made permanent exposition a feature of their rule. The Blessed Sacrament Fathers arrived from branches of the order in America, settling in Liverpool, where Lionel Prichard converted a cinema into a chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, and in Leicester, where they ran the parish of the Blessed Sacrament at Braunstone and commissioned a new church from Bower Norris.²² The exterior of Norris’s Byzantine-Romanesque brick building had a ‘monastic simplicity’ suited to the order but a ‘grand scale in keeping with the noble purpose of perpetual adoration’, in the architect’s words; symbols of the monstrance on its gateposts were the only decoration. Inside there was a substantial reredos with the monstrance throne high up at the rear of the sanctuary under a framing arch.²³ In London, the convent chapel of the Sisters of the Adoration Réparatrice in Chelsea served a similar function. The order came from France in 1898, and, following war damage, its new chapel of 1959 was designed in a modern, Perret-influenced style by Corfiato. The nuns occupied a screened section of the nave near the sanctuary, while the laity occupied the area behind them. An unusually tall reredos had a high platform to which the monstrance was permanently fixed so that it was visible beyond the screen and dominated the interior.²⁴

Meanwhile every parish church celebrated one liturgical event that included formal devotion to the Blessed Sacrament: the feast of Corpus Christi, on a variable date in spring. The monstrance was carried in procession by the celebrant, attended by clergy and servers and followed by the congregation. In many parishes, such processions took place around the grounds of the church or in the streets immediately outside, and so sufficient outdoor space around the building was needed. By the 1950s, public processions reached a peak of enthusiasm and parishes would combine for processions of the Blessed Sacrament through their towns. An article in the Catholic Herald in 1951 contrasted the processions of 20,000 people in Middlesbrough, the streets lined with onlookers, with the equally zealous procession of a hundred faithful through the streets of the rural town of Machynlleth.²⁵ Processions would pause at makeshift altars decorated to receive the monstrance; hymns were sung and Benediction given, often at civic landmarks and private houses.²⁶ The feast of Corpus Christi was not just a popular devotion but a liturgical one following Sunday Mass, instituted by the Vatican and especially promoted at the Counter Reformation, cultivated by the clergy in Britain and fervently celebrated by the faithful.

Despite the perception of a decline in devotion to the Blessed Sacrament after the Second Vatican Council, it continued to thrive throughout the 1960s with the support of the hierarchy: Cardinal Heenan, writing in 1966, urged Catholics not to abandon devotions as a consequence of the liturgical revival, though the urgency of his appeal suggests they were already beginning to wane.²⁷

MARIAN DEVOTIONS

The next most important and frequent devotion was to the Virgin Mary. If a Catholic church had only one shrine or statue outside the sanctuary, it would invariably be dedicated to the Virgin. Separate Lady chapels continued to be common into the 1960s and could be used to celebrate Mass on weekdays. They would often be used for private prayer to the Virgin, such as the recitation of the rosary, accompanied by the lighting of candles. There were many more public forms of devotion, however, with implications for architecture.

Many churches were dedicated to the Virgin Mary, using different titles – Our Lady of Lourdes and of Fatima celebrated her apparitions; Our Lady Help of Christians, Queen of Peace, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary were associated with set devotions or prayers. Parishes often acknowledged their dedication in decorating churches. One of the most extravagant was St Mary at Failsworth in Manchester, designed by Tadeusz Lesisz of Greenhalgh & Williams and opened in 1964. Lesisz moved his firm’s church architecture away from its earlier modernism towards a Romanesque basilican style, and though designed around 1961 this church ignored the NCRG’s ideas about liturgy and architecture and the growing demand to limit the devotional aspects of churches. The artworks at Failsworth were conventional in style (though nothing was mass-produced) and depicted a cycle of Catholic beliefs about the Virgin. Dominating the interior was the mosaic reredos, designed by a young parishioner, B. Nolan, and made by an Italian mosaicist (Figure 8.4). Its image of the Virgin was based on the ‘Miraculous Medal’, worn by many Catholics as part of a Vatican-approved devotion following the visions of a nineteenth-century French nun, St Catherine Labouré. Over the church’s mosaic figure, angels holding a crown indicated the Coronation of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, recently accepted into Catholic doctrine by Pius XII. This figure dwarfed every other element of the sanctuary, even dominating a frieze of Eucharistic symbols: liturgy was effectively made secondary to the presentation of Marian devotion.

Similar images were scattered throughout the church. Hanging in the entrance arch was a figure of the Virgin in aluminium by E. & J. Blackwell to Lesisz’s design depicting the Immaculate Conception – the doctrine of the Virgin’s freedom from original sin declared by Pius IX in 1854, a subject of St Catherine’s visions and, it was believed, further confirmed by the apparitions at Lourdes. The figure at Failsworth evoked the Lourdes apparitions, the church’s surrounding arch recalling the famous grotto (Figure 8.5). In a stone frieze above the windows, also by Blackwell, were depictions of the rosary meditations, suggesting that parishioners might have gathered to recite its prayers in procession around the church. Inside, the Lady chapel contained a statue described as a vision of St Catherine of Mary as Queen of the Universe, while stained-glass windows depicted further Marian attributes. The west window, finally, had been rescued and adapted from the demolished Victorian church and showed the Assumption, the ascension of Mary into heaven, also established as doctrine by Pius XII. Other devotional images were also present: a side chapel to the Sacred Heart containing a reredos from the Victorian church; a chapel to Saint Anthony; the Stations of the Cross.²⁸ The parish of Failsworth conceived of its church as a devotional shrine, its architecture organising and framing a coherent iconography.²⁹

Even when the liturgical movement was accepted, Marian devotions could still be cultivated as one aspect of a participatory parish culture. Gerard Goalen’s plan for Our Lady of Fatima at Harlow, for example, may have aimed at a congregational focus on the central altar, but his elevations were intended as a field for devotional imagery. Charles Norris’s dalle de verre windows illustrated the apparitions at Fatima in the nave and progressed to the rosary scenes in the transepts (Plate 12).³⁰ The parish priest, Francis Burgess, was a member of the order of the Canons Regular of Mary Immaculate and encouraged Marian devotions at Harlow. These revolved around two statues of Our Lady of Fatima, circulated between parishioners’ houses where they would become the focus for family prayers including the recitation of the rosary, strongly advocated by Pius XII.³¹ The church building was undoubtedly also used for such devotional activities, and its stained glass embodied this parish community’s cultivation of devotion, especially through the prayers of the rosary. Liturgy and devotion were not so much in tension as complementary to each other in the religious practices of the faithful.

8.4 St Mary, Failsworth, Manchester, by Greenhalgh & Williams, 1961–64. Reredos mosaic of Our Lady of All Graces designed by B. Nolan. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2012

Many parishes in Britain held annual May processions at least until the end of the 1960s, usually in the grounds of the church and sometimes in the streets around it. The May devotions were a Catholic variant of a custom in many British towns of crowning a local girl as the May Queen and holding a procession: Catholics instead channelled this form into a devotional event. The May Queen, chosen from a parish’s schoolchildren, led a procession to place a crown of flowers on the statue of the Virgin brought out from the Lady chapel for the occasion. A temporary shrine decorated with flowers would be made, sometimes outdoors, sometimes inside the church: at St Stephen, Droylsden, for example, the statue was taken from its chapel and placed in front of the opening (Figure 8.6). In some places these events even took place in the sanctuary: ‘There is not much edification nor encouragement to piety and reverence, to see May Queens and retinue strutting about the High Altar to the accompaniment of clicking cameras and craning necks’, wrote one correspondent to a Catholic newspaper; yet it remained a popular practice, approved by parish priests (Figure 8.7).³² With such events in mind, Catholic churches were designed with prominent chapels for the statue of the Virgin and ample external space.

8.5 St Mary, Failsworth, Manchester, by Greenhalgh & Williams, 1961–64. External sculpture of the Immaculate Conception and Mysteries of the Rosary by E. & J. Blackwell. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2012

8.6 St Stephen, Droylsden, Manchester, by Greenhalgh & Williams, 1958–59. May devotions, 1960s. Photographer unknown. Source: parish archive. Courtesy of the Diocese of Salford

An important feature of Marian devotion was the pilgrimage to a shrine associated with her apparitions. Pilgrimages to Lourdes featured strongly in post-war Catholic life in Britain thanks to an ever-increasing ease of travel. Devotion to St Bernadette and the Lourdes apparitions also entered British churches. Many were dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, St Bernadette or the Immaculate Conception, the doctrine that resulted from the apparitions, and many more churches had images and shrines associated with this devotion. Sometimes such shrines were built outside the church, and some were extravagant facsimiles of the famous grotto. This practice had persisted since the nineteenth century: