Mass, Museum, Repeat

Estrella Salgado, WPAMC ’25

With time for independent exploration built into our journey through England’s cultural and historic sites, I often searched for “Catholic church near me” and headed off to a towering Neo-Byzantine masterpiece or a futuristic midcentury cathedral. In this constant rotation between churches and museums, I reflected on their (mostly) symbiotic interplay.

Gretchen Buggeln, a professor of Christian belief and the material world at Valparaiso University, as well as a Winterthur alumna, has written on the parallels between museums and sacred spaces. She points out, “Western museum culture has generally encouraged the notion of the museum visit as a quasi-religious.”¹ Architecture can make this explicit. Sir Richard Westmacott, who designed the pediment on the classical Greek façade of the British Museum, explained, “Man is represented as emerging from a rude savage state, through the influence of Religion.”² Joining this symbol of newly saved humanity is a cadre of muses promoting subjects such as mathematics, drama, and natural history. These are seemingly rational
themes, but as Buggeln notes, “Promoters of these spaces and collections knew, perhaps unconsciously, that there was something to be gained by suggesting a supernatural power behind their enterprise.”³

The supernatural can also be overt through objects’ subject matter. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s gallery of sacred silver features cases upon cases of glittering monstrances, chalices, and crucifixes. In a letter on Church museums, the Vatican proclaimed, “One should work towards establishing an interaction between the treasures in use and those not in use, in order to guarantee a retrospective vision, as well as a real functional role for these treasures for the advantage of the community.”⁴ What might greater engagement with the Catholic community look like? As a museum educator, my mind swirls with possibilities, yet I still feel a twinge of sadness that those beautiful monstrances will never again hold, as Catholic teaching holds, the Body of Christ.

In active churches, I am comforted that liturgical objects are used as intended. But while Monday morning Mass at the Oxford Oratory was packed, the line for communion at the London Oratory’s Tuesday evening service went by quickly. If churches cannot be sustained by parishioners, they must turn their collection baskets elsewhere. At nearly every church, I noticed a contactless donation station. Oliver Cox, Head of Academic Partnerships at the V&A and a board member of The Churches Conservation Trust, excitedly shared that these machines increase each donation from a few pence to a few pounds. While excellent news, it is not enough. The Westminster Cathedral has a café next to the baptistery. The Oxford Oratory touts a gift shop with branded tote bags and cufflinks. Churches in tourist centers, like Bath Abbey, charge admission outside of limited times for services. The Anglican Cathedral in Canterbury, where St. Thomas Becket was martyred, recently held a silent disco, and “Champing™”—a portmanteau for “church camping”—is available at around 350 historic churches across the UK.⁵

I wish churches success in their fundraising, and I see many of the listed strategies as positive ways to educate the public, as well as offering me opportunities to spend far too much on books and coffee. But can they sometimes undercut their ultimate mission? In Montreal, I was nearly stopped from going to Mass by a security guard who did not understand why I would attend a service in a language I did not speak; I suspect that she thought I was looking to avoid the cathedral’s admission fee. When Mass concluded, we were brusquely ushered out to admit the paying tourists. Where is the line between tourist and pilgrim? I often feel like I am both. Perhaps this positions me to go forth and bridge these two worlds.

1. Gretchen T. Buggeln, “Museum Space and the Experience of the Sacred, Material Religion 8, no. 1 (2012): 30. ↩︎
2. Jacqueline Banerjee, “The Progress of Civilisation (1851) by Sir Richard Westmacott (1775-1856),” The Victorian Web, https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/westmacottr/4.html. ↩︎
3. Buggeln, “Museum Space,” 35. ↩︎
4. “The Pastoral Function of Ecclesiastical Museums,” The Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, August 15, 2001, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/
   pontifical_commissions/pcchc/documents/rc_com_pcchc_20010815_funzione-musei_en.html. ↩︎
5. Christa Larwood, “Champing: How to Try the New Church Camping Trend,” Condé Nast Traveler, December 16, 2019, https://www.cntraveller.com/gallery/champingchurches#:~:text=Church. ↩︎