Pope Idol: Leo's singing should be celebrated
'But will anyone be interested?' the vicar asked cautiously. It was a fair response to my latest madcap scheme. One of the vicar's 12 churches, St Candida and Holy Cross at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset, hosts one of the country's only three remaining pre-Reformation saints' shrines with the relics of the saint still present. In this case, the shrine is to St Wite, a ninth-century virgin princess martyred by the Vikings. Her saint's day was coming up. Could we, I asked, recreate a pre-Reformation church service in honour of it? The vicar, the Revd Virginia Luckett, who is sometimes heard on Radio 4, agreed to my proposal – but with trepidation. She is used to conducting pilgrimages to the shrine, and knows the spiritual value of this medieval tradition. But how many people would want to sit through more than an hour of complex Latin plainsong on a Saturday evening in summer, stewing in incense? Maybe half a dozen?
I don't think the new Pope would have asked this sort of angst-ridden question. Leo XIV is the first proper singing pope since St John Paul II, and one of his first acts as pontiff was merrily to belt out the Regina Caeli (simple tone) in Latin from the Vatican balcony to the delighted crowds in St Peter's Square. Spurred by this papal expression of confidence in tradition, a Dominican friar, Father Robert Mehlhart, has started offering online singing lessons – 'Let's Sing with the Pope' – using clips of the Holy Father intoning plainchant to educate the many faithful who have never been taught how to do so. There have been hundreds of thousands of downloads in just a few weeks. Going by the miserable and mumbling attempts at congregational singing I've heard recently (even in a full Westminster Abbey), we desperately need someone glamorous and full-throated in the Church of England to do something similar. Do we have a bishop musical and valiant enough to get on YouTube and proudly reacquaint us with the best tunes of the hymnal? Oswestry has a fine booming voice that would be the envy of many a Father Christmas impersonator, Ramsbury has released some albums and I hear that Chelmsford is a good musician. Where are you all? There is a ready audience that wants to reconnect with the great English tradition of hymn-singing, now dismally neglected by schools. Are we going to leave this multitude captive to Rome?
As I plundered the local churches for vestments for the Whitchurch service (before the Reformation, even choristers generally wore fine embroidered copes), I couldn't help pondering how we have so quickly lost confidence in another national tradition: dressing properly. When Hamlet was apparently going off his onion, we knew about it from the way he dressed: 'his doublet all unbraced;/ No hat upon his head; his stockings fouled,/ Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle'. Yet since lockdown, this now seems to be our national costume. Even in Clubland, where one would hope for the confident maintenance of standards, there is the stench of sartorial decay. While having lunch a couple of weeks ago at a St James's institution which has recently abolished the requirement for neckties, I gloomily marvelled at how this relaxation has suddenly cast a tramp-like appearance on many of its members. Crumpled shirts and escaping chest hairs are now rampant. If dressing properly is a sign of good mental health, not to mention courtesy to others, what does this say about the current state of the nation?
Ties aren't the only thing disappearing from the great dining rooms – portraits are too. Dinner recently at Clare College Cambridge, to find in Hall bare stretches of blank white walls where grand canvases of eminent alumni recently hung. After dinner I discovered one, Charles Townshend, an 18th-century Chancellor of the Exchequer, awkwardly stuffed at the top of an inaccessible staircase. The Indian Governor-General Lord Cornwallis and the completely inoffensive Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson were nowhere to be seen. The Reformation martyr Bishop Hugh Latimer is apparently off being restored, but he might not make it back into Hall on his return. I suppose all this is just, in a way, given Latimer's own iconoclastic tendencies – but it's hardly the way to cherish the memory of the college's most eminent sons.
More than 100 people filled the church at Whitchurch to hear the pre-Reformation service for St Wite. They sat silent, rapt, contemplative, as the choir – finely arrayed in borrowed copes – made its unhurried way through the Latin psalms, hymns and responsories (singing, I'd say, quite as well as the Pope, though untutored by him). They then, still silently, followed the choir procession out to a recent statue of St Wite on the church tower (iconoclasm can be wound back) and back indoors to her shrine. Both sites were censed and asperged with holy water as we continued to chant. Afterwards, I asked the vicar what she thought. She could not speak. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. These old traditions, offered with confidence, still have their power.
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