WELLINGTON CATHEDRAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 5

WELLINGTON CATHEDRAL

Sir,-I was sorry to see The Listener devoting its cover space to the proposed Cathedral for Wellington. Among those New Zealand Christians who served in Italy there must be many who would share with me a profound sorrow that we are to see repeated in Wellington that which so often while we were abroad seemed to us a tragic error. Every Italian village had its magnificent church. Many, many times we visited these vast empty halls of marble and of stone which shouldered aside the miserable dwellings of a people with whom starvation was a frequent lodger. Poems in stone? Yes, perhaps they were. Wonderful buildings, fine examples of an exquisite harmony of art and craftsmanship, Yet a poem in stone may be ea bitter comment upon a tragedy in flesh and blood, It seemed to me that in most such palaces of the temporal church. each and every stone might well have been said to have been a tribute to the earthy vanity of ecclesiastical dignity, and an emblem of the cold, harsh emptiness of worldly things. The whole splendid structures seemed so far removed from the spiritual truths of Christianity that Christ had disappeared from sight and all that was left was the stone, the ornate chapels, and perhaps the superficial splendours of occasional pageantry. On architectural grounds alone the proposed Cathedral could be severely handled by a competent critic; however, I feel that the whole principle is wrong. The "Temple of the Living God" cannot be created in stone. He is at home in the fields and in the forests, but most of all in the hearts of men. Rather than erect a monument to temporal vanity and misdirected idealism the worthy citizens of Wellington could perform a far finer service to New Zealand and to the Christian cause if they’ placed their Cathedral funds at the disposal of the City Missioner for the pois and maintenance of a youth hostel, or for the establishment of a permanent health camp. Let the Cathedral builders build instead a modern home for wayward youth replacing the crime colleges that we know as Borstals, and they will indeed be building a cathedral, not so much in stone as in the hearts and lives of the people. Put souls before mortar. and lives’ before stone. i -8676 (Wellington).