More English than the English, more Roman than Rome? Historical signifiers and cultural memory at Westminster Cathedral

Sep 4, 2026

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Westminster Cathedral, the Metropolitan church of English Roman Catholicism since 1903, occupies an ambivalent position within modern London. Intended to embody a distinctly English Catholic heritage, it drew on medieval signs and rituals to claim deep historical continuity. Using cultural memory scholarship, the authors trace how successive Cardinals shaped Catholic identity through the Cathedral’s construction and use in the early twentieth century. The article also investigates institutional limits via John Southworth, the resident martyr-saint acquired in 1930, revealing anxieties about English Catholic otherness.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatDOCX

Pages26

Reading Time9 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Context and purpose of Westminster Cathedral

Cultural memory and Catholic identity

Institutional power and the case of John Southworth

More English than the English, more Roman than Rome? Historical signifiers and cultural memory at Westminster Cathedral John Jenkins and Alana Harris Abstract Westminster Cathedral, the Metropolitan church of English Roman Catholicism since 1903, occupies an ambivalent space in the heart of the modern metropolis. It was intended as a repository and symbol of a national, very English, Catholic heritage in central London, replicating and re-using medieval signs and rituals to lay claim to a history that stretched back to the original conversion of England in the late sixth century. Drawing on studies of cultural memory, the authors examine how successive Cardinals of Westminster from the late nineteenth century onwards designed, constructed, and used the Cathedral to define Catholic identity in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this they steered a difficult and often contested course between twin loyalties to the nation and to Rome. The limits of institutional power to reshape cultural memory are also explored through a case study of the Cathedral’s resident martyr-saint, John Southworth, acquired in 1930 and similarly revealing the uneasiness of English Catholicism regarding its ‘otherness’ within a national culture. Keywords English Catholicism; Cathedrals; Saints; National Identity; Heritage In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945, 262), Julia Flyte, torn between her Roman Catholic faith and her adulterous love for Charles Ryder, exclaimed: ‘sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all’. In contrast to her pious but largely ineffectual and distant younger sister Cordelia, Julia is acutely aware of her, and her family’s, dual identity. As Catholics they look across the Alps to Italy where, in a bluntly allegorical invocation of popular conceptions of papist decadence, their dissolute father resides with his mistress. Yet they also strive, somewhat in vain, for ‘Englishness’ and acceptance within Establishment society, sending their sons to Oxford and marrying their daughter to a Member of Parliament (Grimley 2007, 884-906). Brideshead is a novel about identity constructed, as Julia so acutely feels, through a cultural/collective ‘memory’ of the past, rooted and ritually revisited in the eponymous familial home (Rothstein 1993, 318-31). While the particular concerns of the family, and of Waugh himself as a Catholic convert, are atypically aristocratic for an understanding of mostly working class English Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century, the questions they provoke – on the importance of memory and place in the construction of an English Roman Catholic identity – have a far wider applicability. As this article contends, in an analogous manner the community of Catholics who commissioned and constructed Westminster Cathedral at the turn of the twentieth century simultaneously self-identified as both indigenous and cisalpine, the flowerings of a ‘second spring’ while also products of a medieval tradition undamaged by the ruptures of the Reformation. By the 1930s, when most of Brideshead takes place, the formal structures of English Roman Catholicism were less than a century old. Recusant Catholics, many densely congregated in particular localities and to a greater or lesser extent self-organising, had borne witness to the on-going presence of their devotions, despite persecution, since the Reformation. Post-medieval English Roman Catholicism was, despite occasional efforts on the part of the Roman mission, more like a patchwork of regional Catholicisms (Norman 1984, 3-4; Doyle 2005, 12-35; Morris and Gooch 2000, 9-13; Hilton 1994). In 1850, with the re-foundation of Roman Catholic dioceses in England known tellingly as the ‘Restoration of the Hierarchy’, the establishment Church was effectively overlain on these existing networks of faith. At a parish level this was perhaps less problematic, as these episcopal structures

FAQs

What role did Westminster Cathedral play for English Roman Catholic identity after 1903?

It functioned as both a repository and symbol of national Catholic heritage, using medieval signs and rituals to claim long historical continuity while defining Catholic identity in early twentieth-century London.

How did successive Cardinals of Westminster influence the Cathedral’s meaning?

They designed, constructed, and used the Cathedral to negotiate Catholic identity through loyalties to both the nation and to Rome.

Why does the article discuss John Southworth and his acquisition in 1930?

John Southworth serves as a case study to show the limits of institutional power in reshaping cultural memory, highlighting uneasiness about English Catholic otherness within national culture.

Sep 4, 2026

Upload by Kyle