Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

The other day I went with a few others to the Newman House up the road from Arran House to attend Catholic mass. On the whole I think we all enjoyed the experience and actually gained a lot from it. For me, it was a relief to finally hear a native Englishman discuss the role of Catholicism in England, a topic I’ve been curious about even before coming to London.

Briefly looking around at the number of university students congregated in the small chapel, the priest quickly recognized that most were foreign to England. I could not tell whether or not his decision to touch on prominent hot button religious issues was planned. Regardless, the priest took advantage of preaching to the variety of students about contraceptives, abortion, homosexuality, and the global fear of Catholicism. Obviously they’re quite heavy, controversial issues to discuss in just a twenty-minute sermon.

Although the priest’s explanation of the Catholic Church’s view regarding homosexuality was particularly intriguing—and positive—, I was most interested in his discussion regarding the presence of Catholicism in England. He described the underlying sense of fear of Catholicism and the Papacy among the English. The priest made comments alluding to the English people’s standoffishness toward practicing Catholics and the Church on the whole. The discord among Anglicans and English Catholics apparent today may be incomparable to the country’s history but the unease among the English is still faintly visible. The priest at one point joked that the English fear the Papacy in Rome and devout Spanish Catholics will some day return to England to convert everyone back to Catholicism.

From my experience touring Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, a Hindu mandir, Jewish synagogue, and Islamic mosque, and attending Catholic mass in a small university chapel, I have realized a subtle controversial religious dialogue materializing in London. England has an established church but their reaction to religious diversity is much different from America’s where no church is established. There is a fear of Catholics worldwide, but where I live the religion is thriving and accepted (again, that could easily be just because of my location in the northeast). I think religion is part of an American’s cultural identity but also one’s spiritual faith is more strongly expressed, whereas in England, Anglicanism easily becomes just a label. As Kate Fox described: a child once asked their parent what their religious background was, and the parent told the child to mark Anglican. When the child questioned this decision, the parent stated that that’s just what one was supposed to put. Furthermore, as the gentleman at the synagogue explained today, it would be unwise for a candidate for Prime Minister to publically share their religious beliefs, whereas in the United States, a politician’s religious devotion is widely broadcast. Although both nations continue to struggle with religious tolerance and freedom, I would say I feel more comfortable as Catholic in America than in England. I receive opposition in America, but I also feel free to defend my beliefs. Here in England, even people’s spiritual devotion to the established church is diminishing; completely ignoring the fact that Catholicism’s presence is seemingly minimal. Although my experience at the Newman House was most definitely positive, I look forward to finding a larger community of Catholic students at UEA in Norwich (hopefully).

We’ve already talked about the elitism that we’ve seen in museums such as the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery, and I’m sure that everyone has at least a passing familiarity with the debate over the Elgin Marbles. (If not, Stephenie wrote a small book about it a few days ago, so just keep scrolling down the page.) I don’t want to beat the imperialism theme over the head too much, so I’ll try to take a different angle here. What has struck me about so many of the museums that we’ve visited has been the vast collections of stuff housed within their walls. Isn’t this the point of musuems? you might ask. Well, yes. But I feel like the size of the collections and the way that they are displayed here just screams “materialism” more loudly than any museum that I’ve visited previously.

Apart from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum is the best example of this. The array of exhibits in this museum is incredible–everything from fashion to theatre, jewelry, micromosaics, sculpture, medieval art, and every silver dish ever manufactured in the British Empire. Wandering through (the floor plan made absolutely no sense to me, so I just walked around), my eyes started to glaze over because of the sheer number of artifacts displayed. In the silver rooms, for instance, there were cases packed so tightly with pieces that there was not enough room for display cards; interested viewers had to pick up a card that was chained to the outside of the case. And underneath all of these cases, which took up a pretty substantial area, were drawers full of more pieces that didn’t fit in the displays. It was insane. The V&A had some amazing pieces, but the opulence and materialism on display there were astounding.

Although some of the other museums that I visited were much smaller and were actually house museums, I noticed this same glorification of materialism. The Sir John Soane Museum is a wonderfully eccentric home that Soane, a nineteenth-century architect, designed specifically to hold his collection of artifacts and his “cabinet of curiosities.” It’s really neat to walk through and see all of the peices that he has hiding in the nooks and crannies of his home (one room has extendable walls that fold out from the permanent walls. There are currently sketches by J.M.W. Turner that are displayed on these hidden walls). His collection includes several pieces of Greek and Roman statues, wonderful works of art by Hogarth and Canaletto, and even an Egyptian sarcophagus. But again, I got the sense that there were just so many things packed into such a small space. And I had to wonder, like Stephenie, how he came by all of these treasures and why he needed a room full of Roman busts. It seemed as though he had collected all of these things simply because he could. Thankfully he had the foresight to turn his home into a museum so that his collection would be accessible to the public to come and learn from it, but the thought still lingered.  The Wallace Collection left a similar feeling, although a large portion of the collection housed there comes from other parts of Europe.

I firmly believe that these huge, opulent collections are only possible because of Britain’s imperial past. They had access to so much of the world, and they had the power and the weapons to take artifacts from all of these places (even if the Elgin Marbles were supposedly sold legally). As the strongest nation of the nineteenth century, Britain was able to amass all of the silver found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and all of the pieces of sculpture housed in the Soane. The money was there and the artifacts were ripe for the taking, so materialism (and I think fascination with exotic cultures, especially with the Orient) naturally followed. I’m not trying to say that this is right or wrong, and Americans as a whole definitely value the consumer and material wealth. It’s just what has really struck me from the museums that I’ve visited.

Last night at Barclays Wealth was the first time I have ever been to an event where I was expected to mingle with rich, important people with one of my intention being to network for possible jobs (the other being to represent my school and my program, but I’ll get to that). I felt I was supposed to get dressed in formal clothing (painful shoes, scary make-up processes, scary hair frying devises) so I wouldn’t stick out as someone that didn’t care about the program, and it was kind of stressful. I recognize that a lot of people like dressing up, and that is great (they were super helpful and made it way less stressful). But I don’t like dressing up. I rarely dress up, and when I do, I’m really uncomfortable. I also have no idea how to network. I’m perfectly happy talking to strangers, but I don’t know what any of the social customs are for that particular type of event. The fact that I was wearing fancy, uncomfortable clothing leads me to believe that I am not expected to act like myself even though that is what I expect a person’s advice would be if I asked them directly. Otherwise I would being wearing normal clothes, the clothes I wear when I am expected to be myself. There are unwritten codes of conduct and a change in clothing and appearance denotes that those codes need to be enacted. I don’t think anyone could overtly tell me what those codes are because they are codes that you only learn through practice, and people that know them are unconscious of them because they seem natural.

This brings me to class. We’ve been spending all this time talking about how class in England is so weird because it’s based on habits and lifestyle choices when in America it’s mostly just a tax bracket thing. I really think we’ve been exaggerating this difference quite a bit. Class in America might be about tax brackets once you get there, but if you want to get rich, you probably need a sweet job, and if you want a sweet job, you probably need to be good at mingling with rich, important people. People from lower classes in the United States and in England alike do not get the same opportunities as the upper classes to practice mingling and all the social customs that go along with it (being comfortable in fancy clothes, which hand to hold your drink in, the best hand shake, how to politely find important people, what subjects are taboo, what jokes are okay, how coarse to get with language, how to gracefully enter and leave a conversation, how much criticism of society is acceptable and what part are off limits, how to show off without seeming like a jerk, etc.).

As a disclaimer, I’m not trying to paint myself as a victim and say that class limited me here. The fact that I’ve never had to look for a real job and that I just don’t like wearing fancy clothes limited me, but that is expected because I am young. But that experience of being really uncomfortable brings to my attention that there is a huge difference in social customs. Dickinson gave me this opportunity, and I’ll be better at it next time. What about people who just don’t get this opportunity in the first place?

For America, it’s the same thing we hear over and over again. The American Dream is a myth that propels itself by a handful of people who actually make it. People from lower classes have the deck stacked against them in more ways than one and the rich have just hte opposite. For England I think it’s a little more complicated, and I invite anyone to put their two cents in because I’m still trying to work it out myself. If England has a more rigid class system in which people take pride in their working class characteristics, how do they learn the social customs necessary to network and make more money? How can we even say that England has a rigid class system if Kate Fox says that middle classes have so much class insecurity that the use of bizarre upper class sounding, French terms are now characteristic of middle classness? If class in England is really not about money and success, is it the ends to some English equivalent to the American Dream?

As someone who is fairly religious I have spent a large amount of time in London contemplating religion – something that I think many of us have done and which is a large theme in our course.  Thus far I have been to the building of or attended a religious service in a mandir, a mosque, a Catholic mass, evensong at St. Paul’s, and after today, a synagogue.  As a practicing Catholic, I expected to feel very at home at both the Catholic service I attended and evensong (given how many similarities there are between Anglicanism and Catholicism).  However, even sitting through a mass that I have sat through every Sunday for the last 20 years I felt completely alien.  While the format of mass was the same and prayers were the same, the level of participation and tone of the homily were unlike anything I had ever experienced.

On Sunday, when Mary, Mary Kate, Jamie, and I walked two blocks to the Newman House I had pretty low expectations as to what mass would be like.  The mass put on at Dickinson every weekend is quick, easy, and low on congregational participation.  Back home in California, my church puts a large focus on intellectual exploration of scriptures and does not discuss controversial issues.  Instead, on Sunday I attended a service where everyone was active and where I heard an extremely rousing and inspiring homily.  The priest completely ignored the gospel for the day (which was the famous tale of the prodigal son) and discussed the upcoming papal visit, general English views of Catholicism, homosexuality, and the previous mistakes made by the Catholic Church.   The priest discussed the lack of positive press about the Catholic Church in England and tied that to the English fear of popery – he even made continual jokes about how the English still see the Spanish armada sailing across the Channel to turn them all back to Catholicism.  He then spent a long time discussing homosexuality – a topic that never EVER came up in my more conservative Church (which is ironically enough considered very liberal among Catholics in the area).  He said that it was unacceptable and sin to denounce anyone, including members of the LGBT community.  He argued that just because we are Catholic we are not allowed to hate or discriminate.  He stemmed his next point off of this idea – he said that we should not look at the Catholic Church as infallible.  He made the point that we cannot pretend that the priest abuse scandal didn’t happen and that we must admit that the Catholic Church mishandled the debacle.  His over reaching message, however, was tolerance, acceptance, and education about Catholicism.

The idea of education leading to tolerance and acceptance has been the general message of most of our visits to religious institutions.  Both the mandir and the mosque were exercises in religious education and both of our guides spent a lot of time discussing religious doctrine and the need for understanding about different religions.  In the face of all the religious discrimination and controversy surrounding both the building of a mosque near where the Twin Towers once stood and the minister threatening to burn Korans in Florida in the United States, its refreshing and reassuring to know that somewhere in the world there is religious dialogue occurring and several different faiths are trying to bridge gaps and end violence and discrimination.