The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral wanted to raise a series of questions on behalf of the youth. We don’t know if he succeeded in what he intended. How many youth have had life changing experiences when confronted with the decals spoiling the holy stones? But he certainly raises other questions, and did so provocatively enough that J.D. Vance and Elon Musk were sufficiently disturbed to lead a response that became world-wide.

The more obvious issues had to do with beauty, holiness, the sacred and the transcendent. How it is that a cathedral can embody such profundity in a space sculpted by stone? And what are the consequences of defacing and defiling the symbolism of art and architecture? Does the curator of such a project lose his right to remain responsible for something he clearly does not understand?

At some point the questions become uncomfortably and un-welcomingly personal. No one wants them to be personal, but the difficulty is that the Dean has a particular ‘life-style’ that he publicly celebrates, and which he tells us informs his values and choices. We would rather not know. But he has made his business our business, so regretfully we do.

But first let’s look at the wider historical dimension of Catholic cathedrals in the hands of curating Protestants. For the Anglican Church has form; (golf courses, helter-skelters, film noir clubs); And this Dean in particular also has form – with drunken dancing raves in the nave.

At the broadest and historical level, there is a pain that felt by Catholics at the abuse of their buildings by the state sponsored Protestant takeover. We find ourselves discomforted by the question of why Anglicanism seems unable or unwilling to curate what were conceived in the Catholic imagination as holy places in a way that was consitent with the vision that created them.

(And perhaps it actually does have something to go with the absence of the supernatural in the Communion service. An act of remembrance finds its locus in the person remembering. No doubt the invocations to the Holy Spirit to help are effective. But it is not the same as the miracle of the Mass where, just as Jesus turned water into wine, the bread and wine of the Mass are turned into Christ, and the place where that happens shares in the dramatic awesome holiness of the act itself. No transubstantiation, no Miracle. No miracle, no awe. No awe – and no sense of holy ground requiring shoes to be removed.)

Protestantism has no difficulty with buildings that are useful and versatile to worship God, but doesn’t seem to understand how to use, honour, respect, pray and worship a Catholic Cathedral whose very conception is steeped in marrying the natural with the supernatural

Cathedrals were made to celebrate the Mass. The shape is the body of Christ on the cross. Protestantism, a functionalist philosophy that strips out the supernatural, is perhaps unsurprisingly, prone to see these buildings in a functionalist way. They are for them large places to worship in.

As so many critics of the graffiti project have mentioned, this project of Mr Monteith would have worked very well in an underground car park. In fact, the art would actually have been more congruent there. The bleakness of the graffiti would have melted into the bleakness of the functional concrete, and the questions the graffiti reflected might have been more accessible, unblocked by the horror and revulsion that so many people felt when they saw an act of both artistic and spiritual desecration of a place of such beauty.

But there are additional aspects that ought to be taken into consideration since this incident where the Anglican authorities at Canterbury have created an act of vandalism.

The special pleading of ‘we need to get the youth to think’ has been heard. But this is a more multilayered problem that getting youth to reflect philosophically. It is as if the adults who sponsored the cultural vandalism found the beauty of the place too intense and painful to bear, and unconsciously have set out to deface the sacred and wound the beauty.

The Dean of Canterbury gave a clue as to the values he was embodying. And we may need to take him seriously to understand what he set out to do , and if we can, why.

He gave us a clue in his announcement:

“There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and not sanitised.”

So, let’s take him out his word. Let’s explore what this means.

What does he understand by raw?

This usually describes an open wound or part of the body or soul, which is in pain and unhealed. Why does he want to invoke and open wound and the pain and danger of infection it represents?

There is a serious juxtaposition, or more realistically a contradiction between that and the cathedral and the whole of the enterprise of Christian salvation is being about the healing of wounds. The human condition without Christ is indeed raw. Without Christ the soul is indeed an open wound. Faith in Christ, our encounter with Christ is about finding forgiveness, peace, restitution restoration, and a freedom from pain; the healing of the raw existential wound.

But David Monteith wants to celebrate not the healing, but the wound itself. Would a therapist or a spiritual director invite him to reflect on whether perhaps he carries in himself an open wound? One that he is acting out?

Whatever his motivation he set out to wound the Cathedral and what it stands for with jagged anti-art, and found the angry energy and confusion embedded in the graffiti provided the tool to do it.

To continue to parse his meaning, what does he mean by disruption?

In choosing between order and disorder or at the extreme end of things, anarchy, the question of where holiness and sanctity lie on the spectrum of things arises. Holiness is usually associated with order, and order with holiness. In the Gospels the kingdom of Heaven is reflective of a restored order in which obedience, hierarchy and the authority of God allow us to find a place of safety and belonging. When Jesus teaches us to pray ‘they kingdom come’ very few hear it as a call for disruption. There might be scope for thinking of the disruption of evil and its hold on us. But the evil is more usually associated with chaos than order. Disruption is more usually a tool of rebellion than healing.

The incarnation has been seen as the divine order of the Creator of the universe (a place of beautifully ordered astronomical and scientific coherence) entering the disorder and chaos of history.

David Monteith wants to disrupt order. If order and holiness are connected as the church has always believed an experienced, then disruption becomes a sign of the ‘other side.’ is a reflection of opposition and spiritual rebellion. It would not be too much to say that it reflects the instinct of being anti-God.

The graffiti in the cathedral does exactly what Mr Monteith intends. In a way that is opposed to the coherent curves, the symmetry and the space of the architecture of the cathedral, the graffiti is incoherent, with jagged edges a contempt for proportion.

My Monteith wants ‘Disruption.

What moral or spiritual character does that carry with it? It is an extension of the discomfort with order. To undermine or destroy order, one disrupts.

Of all Christian buildings, a cathedral represents the order and beauty of the creative mind that spun the universe into being, and arranged both the biology and beauty of life itself in an ordered fashion. Disorder, disruption destroys the precarious order of existence. Disruption and disorder disturb the precarious interdependence of things and people. It is the lexicon of destruction and ultimately death.

‘Mr Monteith wants the “Unfiltered – un-sanitised.”

Why is the Monteith preoccupation for the unfiltered. We use filtration to remove impurities. Mr Monteith wants his sponsored art to deepen the impurity. Impurity poisons. And many observers felt that graffiti is art that is poisoned. It was toxic in the mind. Where beauty brings peace, the angular, edgy and ugly brings toxicity to soul and mind.

To sanitise is to make clean; to purify. But the Monteith vision is un-sanitise, which is to pollute.

He succeeded.

But why wound, disturb, disorder, disrupt and pollute a cathedral?

There is a further question which we are not entitled to answer but we can delicately and as respectfully as possible ask. Mr Monteith is in a relationship that Catholics discern as ‘disordered.’ Does the disordered quality of his personal life spill over into his public priorities as he aspires for disruption and the destruction of beauty in his professional life?

And when he hired a non-binary trans activist as an artist, Alex Vellis (they/them pronouns) does the experience of contradiction and inner conflict between body and mind that gender dysphoria describes, have any relation to the contradiction in artistic terms between the ugliness of the graffiti and the beauty of the cathedral.

Was this some kind of acting out of pain and contradiction by the commissioning dean and the aspiring artist?

We are only in a position to ask these questions because both the Dean and the artist have told us that their sexuality and its expression inspire who they are and what they do.

And we believe them.

But we are as entitled to our judgement as they are to theirs.

We are entitled to want to protect our holy, beautiful, life giving, supremely ordered places of purified adoration and worship from those who want to wound, disturb, pollute and provoke them.

Mr Monteith set out to raise some theological questions. And he has. It’s just that they are not the ones that captured his imagination and attention. But they are the ones that he has provoked in the rest of the world. He may not like the answers that civilised people across the world, of every different philosophy, religion and commitment, have reflected back to him.