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The theological links bewildered lesser minds, but the Reverend Stewart Headlam could see quite clearly how devotion to the Virgin Mary must lead on to votes for women, how a logical implication of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was socialism, and how it was a denial of the doctrine of the incarnation to prohibit dancing girls from wearing flesh-colored tights. One can sense the desperation that the church not get left behind in a changing world.
Yale University Press has recently issued a lush, illustrated history of one of Anglicanism's most iconic buildings and the ministry arising from it, St Paul's: The Cathedral Church of London 604-2004, edited by Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint. Anglicans across the globe have felt so strong a common bond with St Paul's that it used to be referred to as the "parish church of the British Empire." An essay by John Wolffe evokes the truly national role the cathedral has played in modern times, from the state funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, and Winston Churchill, to the wedding in 1981 of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and beyond. When the signing of the armistice ended World War I, Londoners spontaneously came to St Paul's and insisted that its bemused clergymen conduct a service of thanksgiving. A foreword by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, identifies the cathedral's spiritual mission as one of harmoniously drawing together "all Christians."
Nevertheless, Arthur Burns' superb historical survey of St Paul's since 1830 reveals that such unifying aspirations have come up against countervailing realities. In the late 1860s, the cathedral began a long period of being controlled by Anglo-Catholics. The dean from 1871, R.W. Church, and his successor from 1890 to 1911, Robert Gregory, were both ex-Evangelicals who had gone high church. When a court declared that the Eucharist could not be celebrated from the eastward position (a liturgical development viewed by its opponents as an effort to make Anglican worship more Roman Catholic), Gregory and Liddon defied the ruling and dared the authorities to prosecute St Paul's. Militant Evangelicals decided that the cathedral had become the agent of an unsound faction. In 1883, one went so far as to charge the altar during the Easter service, shouting as he ran the rallying cry, "Protestants to the rescue!" This rebellion was thwarted through the expediency of stuffing Dean Gregory's handkerchief into the mouth of the disgruntled worshipper.
Yet this man's sentiments, if not his tactics, were widespread. 9,000 people signed a petition against a newly installed altar screen that depicted a breast-feeding Virgin Mary. When, in 1969, a Roman Catholic was allowed to preach at St Paul's there was a heavy police presence to deal with any possible disturbances. When the archbishop rose to introduce the speaker, he was met with shouts of "traitor."
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