From top: Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral (left) dwarfing the city’s newer Catholic cathedral; David Langwallner
At this stage I am privileged enough to have seen most of the great cathedrals of the world and, amid the case I recently finished in Manchester, saw the two great cathedrals of Liverpool, the Protestant cathedral with its neo-gothic or faux-gothic interior and the much more modern Catholic cathedral a stroll down the road, aptly called Hope Street – with its Brutalist, sacred space, where you are cylindrically surrounded. Tasteful modernity?
In nearby York is York Minster, also one of the great cathedrals, which I also visited, with its famous and deeply affecting stained glass windows. Though all built at great expense, the labour of others. The serf labour that also built the pyramids.
The Ridley Scott film Kingdoms of Heaven (2005) is a historical piece dealing with the Crusades and their conflict with the Islamic king Saladin. The Crusades were, of course. a series of historic exercises to export Christianity to the infidel or should that be in effect an exercise in colonisation, greed, and barbarism. And of course, crusade money also funded the cathedrals of Europe.
Liverpool, like Belfast is a divided city on religious lines and a working-class city with much urban degeneration, but also much beauty and not just the cathedrals. Or rather there are other cathedrals, cathedrals of men.
In the phalanx of museums at the Mersey there is the maritime museum with its deliberate reference to both the sinking of the Lusitania and the Titanic. These are cathedrals built on the servitude of others. The great ship Liners.
The Titanic Museum in Belfast is a fascinating multi-dimensional experience of an all too human story of folly and greed. Of course, the estimable Harland and Wolff in Belfast built the ship and the remnants of their trade are close by. The finest shipbuilders on the planet and on the first voyage it sank. Nothing to do with the shipbuilders though. They were only obeying orders. They were told what to do. A problem endemic to our age.
Shipbuilders and the song about same by Mr. Declan McManus aka Elvis Costello, expresses the peace-time decline of ports like Liverpool and Belfast. In the Maritime Museum there is a reconstructed railway which used to tour the docks and circumnavigate the port so everyone could gaze in wonder at the modern-day cathedrals. The harbour in Liverpool was empty apart from the ferry across the Mersey.
So, Cathedrals of the church and of man are symbols of mammon and greed and circuses for the people. Gaze in wonder, but understand the human cost. We do not need cathedrals however pleasant to look at but real property, real health care and real service for real people.
The Cathedrals we need in fact are community and connectedness. We need to talk to each other and understand the other point of view, just as in Raymond Carver‘s greatest story in 1983 about the narrator’s gradual empathy with the blind friend of his wife. Humankind. Called Cathedral.
So, I fell on the stairs at the Protestant cathedral. Lifted by a wayfaring stranger who said in deep scouse: ‘You all right lad?’
And, as I was leaving Manchester, outside my hotel, a man asked: ‘Are you Mr. Langwallner? Well yes. He responded: ‘We will build a plaque for FE Smith.’
Maybe some good will come out of all of this after all.
David Langwallner is a barrister, specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence project and was Irish lawyer of the year at the 2015 Irish law awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner
Previously: 42 Clifton Road
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