Sunday

For the most part, I spent yesterday in church. The English are, supposedly, the least likely of all people to go to church on Sunday, so I expected empty pews and "bare ruined choirs." Instead, I found quite the opposite. On Sunday morning I went to one of the great "shrines" of Anglo-Catholicism, All Saints' Margaret Street.. It's one of the most beautiful church buildings I've ever seen, very dark and shadowy on the inside, with glorious paintings of the saints along the walls and above the altar. It was a nice service, with wonderful singing (the Mass setting was Mozart, and the choir pulled it off magnificently). After Mass I went over and saw the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden . I suppose what All Saints' is to churches, the ROH is to opera houses. They completed a rather sweeping expansion and restoration of the buildings a few years back, but they all fit in quite nicely. I also walked through the market behind the opera house, but it's largely inhabited by tourists, so I quickly ducked back out. I really don't have much desire to see tourists while I'm in another country. All tourist traps, ultimately, are the same...nothing but T shirt vendors ("My brother went to England, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt), ice cream carts, and street performers. It felt just like Underground Atlanta, and I don't go there either!
At 3:30 I went to the London Oratory for Vespers and Benediction. This was one of the congregations that Cardinal Newman helped to find, although he's more associated with the one in Birmingham, and apparently he's not very fondly remembered in London. The church is magnificent, supposedly modeled on the Gesu in Rome. The priests and brothers, though, are relics of a past age. The liturgy, while beautiful, was cold and off putting, although splendidly sung by a choir up in a gallery. The Oratory is worth a visit, yet it seems more like a dusty memoir of a forgotten age...
I'm off to Oxford tomorrow to give my paper at St. Peter's College.