The new Dean of Canterbury is really looking forward to Midnight Mass at the cathedral this year.
“That’s always the service that means the most to me,” says the Very Rev. David Monteith, who took up his post last December. “It hasn’t happened in the cathedral in recent years. I’ve introduced it, and so at 12 o’clock — right at the end — I am going to bring the baby to the crib and we’re going to sing ‘Come let us adore him,’ and I think that will be quite the moment.”
The next morning the Archbishop of Canterbury will deliver his Christmas sermon. Media report his message every year. In 2023 the cathedral also drew headlines for allowing visitors to bring dogs into the building, the search for cosmic dust on its roof, the appointment of a heavily tattooed priest as precentor, and — perhaps most noisily of all — plans to host a silent disco in its nave.
Canterbury is England’s oldest cathedral. Founded in 597, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. St Thomas Becket was martyred here in 1170. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and mother church of the world-wide Anglican Communion.
Canterbury Cathedral sits behind the city’s medieval walls, and Monteith is concerned to bridge what he sees as a disconnect between the cathedral and its wider surroundings.
On the other hand, it draws international visitors who feel a deep spiritual bond with the place. “I meet Anglicans from around the world every day whose eyes are open in wonder and excitement. It’s important that we treat each of those people with warmth and respect, and so make sure that their visit to the Mother Ship is as good as possible.”
The Compass Rose, symbolizing the Anglican Communion, is set into the floor of the cathedral’s crossing. Created by Giles Blomfield in the 1980s, it still seems to say something relevant about the current state of the communion, its sharp shards held together in a circle.
Some leading primates of the communion criticized Monteith’s appointment to the cathedral because he is in a civil partnership with a man. The archbishop should have intervened to prevent it, they suggested. “Canterbury has a place in our history which needs to be preserved, rather than undermined,” the primates of GAFCON said.
The cathedral receives no state funding, and the Church of England contributes enough money for just three of its 250 staff. It has a budget of £12 million and costs £30,000 a day to run. Entrance charges and ticketed events are part of its efforts to break even. Benedictine monks capitalized on pilgrimage, says Monteith. Today the economic model is events and tourism.
The Silent Disco — so named because participants listen to music through headphones — will take place on two evenings in February. This gathering emphatically should not be part of the cathedral’s economic model, according to Cajetan Skowronski, a young hospital doctor, born and raised in Sussex. At school he’d learned about the martyrdom of St. Thomas a Becket and read Ken Follett’s novel Pillars of the Earth about three generations of stonemasons building a cathedral.
He came to Canterbury on pilgrimage several times as a teenager and was enthralled.
“I remember being so struck by the architecture; it blows the mind that people in the early medieval ages built something as intricate as that. We cannot comprehend the lengths people went to glorify God,” he says.
Skowronski wrote an article — “Canterbury Fails: Why We Must Oppose the Rave in the Nave” — in The European Conservative, and he has organized a petition calling on the Archbishop of Canterbury to put a stop to it. “I don’t want this to happen without faithful Christians being able to register their concern about this happening. I would hope the archbishop will use his influence, even if he doesn’t have the power. What is going on here? It’s a way of directing the question to the whole of the church of which he is the head.”
Another vocal opponent of the cathedral’s plans is Gavin Ashenden, a former Queen’s chaplain and conservative commentator, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. He was a pupil at the King’s School Canterbury in the 1960s and ’70s. “ I love Canterbury Cathedral. I knelt in it, I sang in it, l learnt to smoke a pipe in its grounds, I knelt at Thomas Becket’s tomb. The idea of filling a holy building with gyrating teenagers is as close to blasphemy as you can get — to do that you have to have no sense of the sacred. This would never happen in a Catholic church.”
Monteith is frustrated by the use of the term “rave in the nave” adopted by the petition, calling it sensationalist and inaccurate; a silent retro-vintage disco is very far from the drug-filled rave that marked the 1990s and 2000s, he says. “It’s my experience as a dean that when you have these events, 99.9 percent of people get that it’s in a cathedral and respect that. They know they’re not in a nightclub. And the nave has always been this space where there is a deliberate intersection between the sacred and the secular. It’s different from other bits of the building.”
Church Times columnist Andrew Brown says the controversy reflects the political trouble the Church of England finds itself in. “The Conservative Party has grown extremely hostile to it, partly as a result of Justin Welby’s loud and principled opposition to the Rwanda scheme (for asylum-seekers.) Things are not better internally. Welby’s attempts to finesse the split over same-sex relationships have largely failed, with both liberals and conservatives angry at the resultant compromise. In this climate anything that an openly gay dean does — especially in Canterbury — will be attacked as a further sign of decadence.”
There’s nothing new about silent discos taking place in cathedrals. Ely, Durham, Winchester, and many others have held them. The interim Dean of Chichester, the Very Rev. Simon Holland, told TLC that he received only one letter of opposition when the disco took place in September.
It coincided with Peter Walker’s art installation Peace Doves, which saw 15,000 handmade paper doves suspended above the cathedral’s nave. “It lent a magical flavor to the event,” Holland said. “There was a massive sense of good will. People were well-behaved, there was no disruption.” A lingering smell of alcohol the next day was quickly dealt with by efficient cleaning and the judicious spread of incense.
The cathedral saw the event as a way of developing its ministry of hospitality and inclusion, particularly toward students, but Holland said that many families also attended. And while money was not the uppermost consideration — there is no immediate financial crisis facing the cathedral and admission is still free — he says the chapter is thinking about “using the nave in a more intentional and commercial way.”
“These events have been going on for a long time now without noticeably accelerating the decline of the Church of England, and without stopping it either,” Andrew Brown says. “It would be interesting to conduct a study done on the effect they have on congregations; whether any of the young people they lure in are more favorably disposed to the Church afterwards, whether any others leave in disgust. My guess is they don’t shift the needle either way.”
On one thing Dean Monteith and Cajetan Skowronski agree: Canterbury Cathedral was built for the glory of God. Skowronski doesn’t expect Canterbury’s chapter to change its mind about the disco, but he plans to hold a protest outside during the event. “God isn’t being glorified in the cathedral that night, so we will glorify him outside,” he told TLC.
Monteith responds by citing Irenaeus — “‘The glory of God is a man fully alive.’ And how much more fully alive can you be than dancing with your friends?”
