A five-star guide
VENUE: Metropolitan Cathedral Church of St George, Southwark
CELEBRANT: Fr Addison Okpeh
ARCHITECTURE: The original cathedral designed by A. W. Pugin was severely bombed during the Blitz and was rebuilt and reopened in 1958. Look out for the unusual statue of St George: a dragon’s head slides up the saint’s leg
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HISTORY: Initially the continuation of the parish of St George’s located in the quaintly named “Bandyleg Walk”, the cathedral was first made up of Irish immigrants, now largely replaced by Africans and South Americans. Southwark has a long, if occasionally troubled, connection to Roman Catholicism: there was once an abbey in Bermondsey and after the Reformation several Catholic priests died on the gallows for exercising their ministry
AFTER-SERVICE CARE: Scanty breakfast. The Mass sheets remind us that today is an official Cafod fast day when Catholics are asked to eat lightly and give the money saved to the Catholic charity
SEVEN-THIRTY am, St George’s Cathedral, Southwark. Not the crack of dawn, but for me it might as well be.
I am rarely at Mass this early, preferring usually to opt for services timed at a civilised midday.
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However, this is Lent, time for extra effort — though a quick glance at my twenty-odd fellow worshippers gives me a sneaking feeling they are regulars, here before work.
They include businessmen in pin-striped suits, a nurse wrapped in a long coat, and women in padded winter jackets.
Mass is in a sidechapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Behind the altar is an 18th-century image of Mary, wearing a crown set on a head of long flowing hair.
This unusual image was once paraded publicly through the Southwark streets by Fr Thomas Doyle, the cathedral founder, just years after the repeal of the penal laws suppressing Catholicism. Forty years before Fr Doyle became chaplain of the original parish of St George’s, London mobs had laid waste to Catholic-owned shops and houses during the Gordon riots. which were said to have begun in 1780. These are on the fields on which the cathedral now stands.
When his congregation doubled in less than a decade from 7,000 to 15,000 in the 1820s Doyle began fundraising for the cathedral. It was no easy task: an “ordeal severe and humiliating” was how Fr Doyle described it and to judge by the carving of him on his tomb, he was exhausted: the sculpture shows deep lines etched in his face.
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But his achievement was extraordinary: to build London’s first post-Reformation Catholic Cathedral, completed nearly 50 years before the Cathedral of the Most Precious Blood in Westminster. When the Catholic bishops were reinstated in England in 1850, Rome declared St George’s the cathedral for the new diocese of Southwark, an area then stretching over all Southern England.
St George’s may lack Westminster’s gilded opulence, but instead boasts a quiet elegant beauty: Gothic arches frame striking stained glass set in walls of pale limestone. On entering the eye is instantly drawn to a large window behind the altar showing Christ on the Cross.
Turning left from the main altar brings you to another window showing John Paul II amid a sea of bed-bound invalids, a reference to the papal visit to the Cathedral in 1982 where he met the sick of the diocese. As Mass ends, the businessmen pay a visit to the Blessed Sacrament chapel nearby, a remnant of Pugin’s ornate fluted stonework, a fantasy of Gothic steeples and angels.
Others drift to pray before the large black cross near the entrance, taken from Napoleon’s chateau near Paris.
This devotion bears out a comment on the cathedral website: St George’s may not be a “cultural” or “fashion-able church” but it is very much a parish.