Well you don’t see that everyday

I was standing at a bus stop near an Anglican Church in the centre of town here, it is going to be closed and probably turned into an hotel. An older woman, presuming I was connected to the Church was saying how sad she thought the closure of this Church was, she was a lapsed Catholic, she was going to catch the No 6, to Whitehawk, one of those not very nice working class estates built on the edge of Brighton. “I don’t go now, it is just not the same, I loved the processions through the streets, I crowned the statue of Mary one year”.

Then on the opposite side of the road was a crocodile of nuns; well six, going two by two. She said, “Well! You don’t see that everyday, do you? They are all the brides of Christ you know. I was brought up by nuns, they were lovely.” Then turning to a young woman, she said, “They spend all their day in prayer you know, they would need to, to live that life”. Then she began to talk about the rigours of the life of “her nuns” andd their kindness too.

Well, then my bus came; I know, I should have stayed to hear the rest of the conversation.

What was important in this woman’s mind was signs, the sign of the Church, you have to pass it get into centre Brighton, it would be the last Church I would close if I was the Anglican bishop. The processions that used to take place were important to her, and indeed to many lapsed Catholics. The sister in their veils were important. I was impressed by her feeling of expertise on the life of veiled nuns, I suspect it would be less certain with the unveiled type. The Benedictine Sister of Grace and Compassion still wear the habit, though most of their postulants come from India nowadays.
When I was being taught liturgy, I remember that we were taught that liturgy “was about signs and symbols which were perceptible to the senses”. A few years ago a document came out from the bishops of England and Wales entitled “The Sign We Give”, I can’t remember any of its contents, but signs are important, a Church building, a street procession, a statue, a group of sisters in habits.
I asked a bishop once to take part in Eucharistic Procession, he found all types of excuses not to do so, all basically focussed on “it’s not my style”.
In a way liberalism is marked by an almost Puritanical or Iconoclastic hatred of signs and symbols, Churches that look like shopping centres, sisters, priests, bishops even in lay clothes. There is a Puritanism here, and like 17th century English Puritanism it is essentially a petit bourgeois movement. I cannot help but think that so much of the rise of liberalism in the Catholic Church was almost a class struggle, a way of casting off the working classes. One of the most significant losses to the Church in this country from 1960 onwards has been working people, people from our housing estates, people who would never dream of standing up and reading in Church. People, who couldn’t necessarily explain their faith, people who want to escape from the mundane, people who need hope.