I haven't told you much about St. Peters Eastern Hill, the church I've been attending. (My housemates don't know: they figured that as a philosopher of religion I must have seen through the pretensions of all religions!) It has a long history, apparently very engagingly described in From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass by Colin Holden, a book I've taken out of the library but haven't yet read. Next year will be its 160th anniversary.Its environs no longer look as they did in the 1850 print above; on Eastern Hill it's been joined by the Catholic Cathedral, a synagogue, a Lutheran church - and Parliament. Old prints on the wall of the parish hall show an unadorned indeed stark Protestant-looking hall, but it has for a long time now been an Anglo-Catholic church, with that perhaps surprising combination of high liturgy and progressive theology characteristic of that movement. The sanctuary is gilt, six tall candles sit atop the altar at the end of the choir, the stations of the cross adorn the walls, and a Lady Chapel is off to the side, with a replica of the reconstructed statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in England. Just this year an icon panel was installed in the rafters - though that's more Orthodox than Catholic.
High Mass (as it's called, feel the Sydney Puritans cringe) has the congregation on its knees a lot, as when the choir sings the "Kyrie" and "Sanctus" from mass settings by Palestrina, Vittoria, Haydn or Mozart. (We stand for the "Gloria," and sing a setting of the Nicene Creed, so don't get to hear the "Credo.") But we start - at least in this season - like monastics, singing at a brisk clip the following lovely Gregorian melody
as the priest sprinkles the congregation with holy water. (Feel the Sydney Puritan's blood boil.)Which reminds me of a time, years ago, when an undergraduate I knew at Princeton was baptized a Catholic. A fellow graduate student friend of mine, an atheist, came to the evening mass in the Princeton University Chapel. The priest sprinkled us, and she was splashed - and freaked out by it. I don't suppose I helped much by remarking that she wasn't going to hell after all...
