A series of four illustrated articles by Jonathan Louth with textual contributions from articles by Julian Filochowski
Sentir con la Iglesia: conserving spirituality in a busy space
Jonathan Louth ArConsulting, 70 Cowcross Street, Farringdon, London EC1M 6EJ
Abstract
Drawing on the inspiration of Archbishop Romero’s episcopal motto “Sentir con la Iglesia”1, Jonathan Louth completes his series of articles on “conserving spiritual places through the saints and relics”2: each saint, each relic and each devotional object has a specific meaning for differing communities of worshippers and pilgrims.
Reporting on the latter half of a 24 year association with St George’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Southwark3, Louth has initially expounded the significance of ecclesiastical, terrestrial ‘mansions’4, the locus of shrines for saints, and the meaning of relics for ordering and conserving great churches. He then introduced a focus on one shrine to St Oscar Romero, describing so far the context, the conceptual intentions, and underlying objectives at each moment of the process.5
This fourth, final article presents the shrine’s detailed development, through technical design & installation to its point of dedication & blessing in 2013 by Archbishop Peter Smith in the presence of Romero’s brother, Gaspar, Monsignor Ricardo Urioste6, and Fernado Llort from San Salvador. Louth then brings the series full circle to its opening considerations.
Presenting the saint
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s “cause” for sainthood had been championed across the globe by many at a time when Romero was neither beatified nor sainted; notably by Julian Filowchowski7. The Archbishop Romero Trust’s gift to the Archdiocese of two relics, a fragment of blood stained alb from Romero’s martyrdom and one of Romero’s skullcaps, generated a completely new devotional prayer space in cathedral with my substantial reliquary cross, commissioned by the Trust and sponsored by CAFOD8 finding its place in what transpired - from archives - was previously intended for a Relics Chapel.9
Such a new shrine is but one droplet along a shining path of witness. Each artist’s work sits within a continuum of artists & craftspeople active throughout the ages in the great church. ‘Naïve’ or ‘Indigenous’ - depending on one’s cultural stand-point - the art of El Salvador fathered by Fernando Llort is a bright and personal tribute to this significant Central American pastor, assassinated at the altar while celebrating a liturgy.
Fernando Llort’s colourful, glossy artwork cross-references Romero’s Cross to other glass-art windows, as if it were “solid stained glass”10. Llort’s panels were designed by his own hand - the “Resurrection” face showing Romero enfolded in the robe of Christus rex, the “Ministry” face evoking Jesus’s teaching at the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper.
Transcribed onto computer by Llort’s studio11, we generated CAD images of the cross in its finished appearance, in colour and in 3-d. John Jones12, our collaborative design visualiser, prepared illustrations demonstrating that the cross seemed fitting for the place, containing the two relics, Romero's sacramental, sacerdotal ‘Presence’ presented to the Most High, at the feet of his Christ.
Making the details
With the design concept agreed, the task in hand becomes one of technical detail and constructional installation: it reverts from the artists and protagonists and clergy into the hands of the architect and cathedral works department. Llort’s artwork was designed to the gross dimensions of my design: the panels were painted in El Salvador, transported then hung on a double-skin plywood structure detailed & built in the UK.
The technical team should then ask, “is this shrine now permanently in this place?”. Cuthbert has moved, Swithun has been translated, Beckett reverted for a time from an altar to a candle: ‘how will the new shrine fare if re-sited, and how will the space that it leaves evolve during some future iteration of the Faith?’ We proposed a mutable, reversible installation.
A 12mm baseplate of mild-steel was let into the post-War Granwood floor, forming a base plate with a 600mm high steel spigot bolted in place, from which the plywood structure is vertically cantilevered. A 2mm stainless steel ‘presence circle’ carries an incised, dedicatory, inscription to Archbishop Romero & Bishop Michael Evans13. This spigotted detail proved literally pivotal in 2023.
To an ever-increasing extent, shrines and relics get ‘touched’, are ‘kissed’, have ‘adornments’ & ‘prayer requests’ added: so some protection, both environmental and physical, becomes an additional consideration. A laminated glass panel is UV protective to minimise degradation of the relics with silicate bags inside, to even out fluctuations in relative humidity.
Meeting Romero
Then also, at this point, wordsmiths, interpreters, communicators will have given thought to what surrounds the visible shrine: how many words, in what format, with what amount of explanation, to interpret the meaning of this place of prayer.
I wrote previously of a ‘likeness’; an icon or image of a long-dead saint or a true portrait of a modern saint. Each pilgrim stores that visual connection and takes it away on leaving. A resin-cast bust by the American sculptor Lado V. Goudjabidze was presented to cathedral by the Romero Trust.14
One wants to ask, ‘how is the likeness to be displayed, how does it relate to other likenesses in the great church, and how does it contribute uniquely to the new place of prayer?’ I mounted the bust on a Trinitarian stand, three mirror-polished blades in one inter-reflective pillar, Romero’s signature etched below the resin bronze likeness. And I located it on the diagonal, akin to Harry Youngman’s lively statue of St George slaying the Dragon set on the diagonal by my predecessor, Austin Winkley, when he reordered the Sanctuary in 1989.
Following Romero
The space has adapted already alongside Romero’s increasing status. The shrine, rising in significance for an expanding fellowship of pilgrims to this new saint, will not be static; further artefacts and new followers may well arrive over time. Indeed, soon after installation of his relics, Romero was blessed and beatified in San Salvador on 23rd May 2015 and then canonised & sainted in Rome on 14th November 2018. What started as a “Romero Space” for the martyr became a diocesan “Shrine” on beatification, then since 2023 a national shrine for the saint. In response, the character of my bust stand were referenced already in 2019 with an additional scheme of shrine gates, dividing St Patrick’s Chapel from St Oscar Romero’s Shrine, albeit not irrevocably.
Initially the cross stood in a reticent relationship to the cathedral’s nave, its arms forming an architectonic narthex within St Patrick’s chapel. In 2023 the spigot detail was rotated, the reliquary cross turned and Romero’s bust relocated to address the nave with greater presence across the devotional aisle.15
Reconciliation & Succour
Since Romero’s devotion arrived in this region of England, the world has plunged deeper into strife and conflict, generating more migration and modern forms of slavery among the community of the dispossessed. Already during the current decade, one part of St Joseph’s chapel, the part where the destruction of WWII is displayed, has been a place of prayer during the pandemic, then for peace in the conflict in Ukraine, and a wall of solace for survivors of abuse in the church. And so Joseph, the worker parent of the Christ child, has come to share his chapel with a newly designated chapel of Peace & Reconciliation16, for the oppressed, for those who toil and labour, for those who come to find rest.
There was an unclaimed artefact in the, now closed, Seminary of St John at Wonersh: Canon Pritchard’s17 gift in 1922/23 of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, an icon copy from the Redemptorist’s church of St Alphonsus in Rome in a marble frame by FA Walters. Marking the centenary, the clergy had the icon set up outside the priests’ sacristy in 2024 in the 19th Century corridor that AWN Pugin originally designated as a Cloister.
Closing
These then are the principal shrines, which I have had the honour to incorporate into the spiritual life of the cathedral. Suffusing the cathedral’s perimeter with a plenitude of new devotions, they embody spirituality for generations yet to come.
What is achieved by this re-ordering towards “Equilibrium between Conservation and Spirituality”?
In her Letter to Louise and Francis Norcross, Emily Dickinson writes “I believe in some manner we shall be cherished by our Maker- that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence.”18
Hers is a beautiful, noble sentiment. Silence has a major part to play in our search for spirituality amid the business of conserving the churches we have and hold. Conservation is a sign of stability, preserving our places of worship as places of sustenance.
In my first article, I quoted from the essay Stability, Continuity, Place about Downside Abbey. Richard Irvine continues, ‘It is in this context that the counterfactual architecture of the monastery comes into its own; … with its insistence on household, stability and place19. As one of the monks, a teacher…, explained to me, “I think what we demonstrate is the value of staying put. Modern society is so full of people rushing from one place to the next, one job to the next, even one family to the next. But we’re able to stay put, and I think there’s something that’s attractive about that because so many people are rootless.” 20
Irvine concludes, ‘… stability is placed in contrast to the life of the gyrovague 21. An architecture that demonstrates the importance of place invites a contrast with the world around it. In this context, the deliberately constructed medievalism [of Downside Abbey] is not simply an architectural anachronism, it is a fixed point in the English landscape that invites comparison. It shows a possibility of what could be.’ 22
Mark Dowd remarks during a visit to a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, that ‘The Samarkee temple had been an example of unconditional aid’. “Unconditional aid”23 implies a further question for our churches in a modern society.
Can a care and a concern, a having and a keeping of our valued treasured places & artefacts be compatible with an unconditional offering, a welcome to all comers?
The second Song of Ascents indicates our basis for this concern: “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”24 For those in our communities who do not sleep - our homeless, our dispossessed - in the dead of night, in the dread hours of darkness, our churches, these havens of peace, these sanctuaries of rest go dark and bar their doors against the very neediest of our Maker’s flock at the very hour of their need.
Endpiece
Our places of prayer – our many mansions - must speak to many, varied places in the hearts of the congregation of the faithful. For me as architect, ‘Design’ is a tool that enables concepts to fit the user’s intention. Design is nothing unless it fits that intention. I have tried to make places in the cathedral that resonate with differing members of the worshipping community, most specifically to honour Romero’s work in Central America and his legacy throughout the Americas ‘the voice of the voiceless poor’. Thus I hope to have passed on a legible plan of spirituality, of many mansions for many prayers, a plan that warrants its keeping and its conservation by my successors in this work of the ‘church architectural’.
Then, all-in-all, “surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses”, we must acknowledge and record all collaborators and makers, whose roles should enter the annals and archives of the great church. For, the psalmist tells us,
“Except the Lord build the House, their labour is but lost that build it”
A.M.D.G.
Bibliography
Verkaaik, Oscar. ed., Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives. Amsterdam (2013 Amsterdam University Press)
Irvine, Richard D.G., ‘Stability, Continuity, Place: An English Benedictine Monastery as a Case Study in Counterfactual Architecture.’ (in Verkaaik, Oscar. ed., 2013 as above: p.25)
Dowd, Mark, My Tsunami Journey: The Quest for God in a Broken World. Eugene, Oregon (2022 Wipf and Stock)
Client: Archbishop Romero Trust
website: www.romerotrust.org.uk email: romerotrust@gmail.com
Designer: Jonathan Louth, Cathedral Architect
Artist: Fernando Llort, friend of Oscar Romero
Artist’s Studio: El Árbol de Dios, El Salvador
Sculptor: Lado V. Goudjabidze, USA
Design Visualisation: John Jones, Karl Keighley,
Henry Bird
Principal Constructor: Trent Shopfitters Ltd
Metalworker: Control Fabrications Ltd
Masons: Universal Stone Ltd
Builder: G F Stocker
Lighting: James Morse Lighting Design
Electrician: C D Earl Ltd
2024 Installation: Cliveden Conservation Workshop
References
1. The motto’s meaning ‘to be of one mind and heart with the Church’
2. The term ‘relics’ encompasses not just physical corporeal remains but also objects of apparel and appurtenances directly associated with the saint
3. Louth served on the cathedral fabric advisory committee from 2000 until succeeding Brian Anderson [Purcell Miller Tritton] as cathedral architect in 2003 until March 2024.
4. John ch.14 v.2 “In my Father’s House are many mansions”
5. cf. Conservation & Heritage Journal issue nos. 41 to 43
6. Ricardo Urioste was formerly Vicar General under Archbishop Romero
7. Julian Filochowski, past Archbishop Romero Trust Chairman, formerly Director of CAFOD
8. The Catholic Association For Overseas Development [CAFOD]
9. The Trust was commissioning client and CAFOD were joint principal donors
10. The Cathedral has several principal windows by William J Dowling for Harry Clarke’s studio and by John N Lawson with Goddard & Gibbs
11. The artist Fernando Llort, who knew Romero personally, set up El Árbol de Dios artisans’ workshop in 1981: cf. www.fernando-llort.com/el-arbol-de-dios, El Savador
12. John Jones, computer & graphic artist: cf. https://www.jjgallery.com
13. Michael Evans [RIP 2011] Bishop of East Anglia, donor to Romero Shrine, trustee of Archbishop Romero Trust
14. The original bust is outside Romero’s house, as described in C&HJ issue no. 43
15. The cathedral’s spiritual and liturgical layout - initially outlined by Canon James Cronin - was illustrated in C&HJ issue no. 42
16. A cause of Canon Michael Branch that potentially links the firebombed cathedral with Coventry’s Community of the Cross of Nails
17. Francis Erconwald Pritchard was a Canon in the then RC Diocese of Southwark
18. Cited in Dowd 2022: 145
19. Author’s italics
20. Irvine’s 2013: 41
21. Irvine’s italics - by gyrovague, a term applied by St Benedict to wandering monks, Louth here denotes unsettled, homeless, potentially dissolute persons
22. Irvine 2013: 41
23. Dowd 2022: 86
24. Ps. 121 v.4 King James Version
25. Hebrews ch. 12 v.1
26. Ps. 125 vv.1-2 The Cathedral Psalter version