SO IT was official sod-cutting time on New Brighton’s seafront recently. Well, whoop-de-do.
Several overweight, overpaid pen-pushers from the public sector – in this case the bloated Wirral Council and the North West Development Agency – got together with a publicity-seeking MP for a photo-opportunity. Er, that’s it.
There they all were, cutting “sods” with a shiny spade, supposedly to mark the start of work on rebuilding the Floral Pavilion and associated shops and civic furniture in New Brighton.
I wasn’t impressed. Not when the entire seafront, its railings, its fantastic Victorian shelters and the theatre, have simply been left to rot for years. The shelters, especially, are severely corroded.
However, I can think of a few thousand sods that are surplus to requirement and which need cutting out of the Wirral scene – most of them are sat behind desks, shuffling paper clips and eating tea and buns all day long at the Death Star HQ of Wirral Council in the former Wallasey Town Hall.
It really is too much that this monumentally under-achieving council, which has presided over so much decline and destruction of New Brighton’s built heritage over past decades, should now have the brass neck to present itself as a champion of urban renewal.
Mind you, it is absolutely typical of publicly-funded fat cats to pull this sort of PR stunt.
But at least, I guess, what will eventually emerge from all this posturing is some genuine tarting up of New Brighton's much-loved seafront.
And I'll admit that developer Neptune’s revised scheme does seem better now that the Marine Lake has been saved.
With hindsight, I feel that the protestors against the original scheme were right. It would not have been acceptable to lose the Marine Lake and have it replaced with a Morrisons supermarket.
But the new development has come not a moment too soon – because under Wiirral Council’s stewardship everything has been in steep decline for years, and not just in New Brighton, but right down the riverside through Egremont and Seacome too.
The scale of business decline has been staggering. Epic. No wonder Wallasey has such a huge unemployment problem.
*** And talking of the Marine Lake, one simply sublime view you get when walking around it is of the cathedral-sized Roman Catholic church of SS Peter and Paul, which dominates the skyline.
This beautiful basilica is surmounted by a huge dome, topped by a cross – an uplifting icon that can be seen for miles out at sea and from the Pier Head in Liverpool.
The trouble is that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Shrewsbury, which is gripped by a deathly culture of managed decline and defeatism, is determined to close SS Peter and Paul down.
Why that should be, no-one can quite fathom. The parish is a wealthy one and the parishioners are strong in faith. They desperately want to keep their church open for business but the diocese won’t hear of it.
I hear from my Catholic moles in Wirral that high-ups from the diocese have been scuttling around Wallasey trying to find a church of some other denomination that the Catholic people can “borrow” for their Masses when SS Peter and Paul’s is closed down.
This won’t do at all. Let me tell these bureaucratic defeatists what they should already know. Catholics want to worship in a CATHOLIC church.
They want a stoop of holy water for crossing themselves as they enter and leave the church. They want stations of the cross on the walls. They want statues of Our Lady and much-loved saints in front of which they can light candles and pray their hearts out for intercession with Almighty God. They want Catholic spirituality.
Now, I'm sure it is with kindness and Christian solidarity that other denominations might actually want to help the beleaguered Catholics with offers of church buildings to share. I appreciate their kindness. I really do.
But the truth is this. The Catholics of New Brighton do not want to be dumped into any kind of borrowed, utilitarian, one size-fits-all, 'Holy Coffee Morning'-type of worship space.
Such places do not have the correct sanctified, dolorous atmosphere. Usually, there are Brownie troupes giggling in the narthex and folk gossiping across the pews. That won't do at all.
Nor do local Catholics, who are used to the splendour and loftiness of SS Peter and Paul, want to end up borrowing some wee tin chapel of plain design for just one Sunday Mass a week and no benediction or exposition of the sacrament.
The fact is that local Catholics already have a perfectly suitable church. It's just that their autocratic leaders are hellbent on preventing them from staying there.
There is hope, however. There is always hope. The faithful Catholic community of New Brighton will not accept the shameful and sinful proposal to close down their church and sell them down the river.
Oh, they feel very hurt and betrayed by what they have been told by ecclesiastical bureaucrats and by tame patsy priests alike on the issue of SS Peter and Paul’s.
A Catholic priest was even heard to joke in parishioners’ earshot that the building would make a good multi-storey car park one day. How insensitive. Shame on that priest.
A much more likely outcome if the closure plans are allowed to succeed, is that the church will be sold to a developer and then demolished, the prime site being redeveloped for flats (as usual in Wirral, nodded through by our stupid council) and the profits going to heaven knows where.
Another alternative is for the giant cross to be taken off the top of the dome of SS Peter and Paul’s and replaced with a crescent moon emblem. Then the church can be given over or sold to Wirral’s growing Muslim population for use as a mosque.
History is littered with such converted uses of grand churches – and at least the building would still be used by people who believe in God.
In the background, however, much activity is going on to save our Dome of Home (as sailors returning to the Mersey ports dubbed it) for use by future generations of Catholics.
In particular, a lot of good work is being done by the campaigning organisation Save Our Unique Landmark (SOUL).
They are fighting like lions against the proposed closure, and rather cunning and well resourced lions too. I pray they will succeed.
As my old Catholic school motto puts it, Quod Bonum Est Tenete (roughly translated, Hold On To What Is Good).
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Lord Vino du Matin wrote...
That is not roughly translated, Regan, that is spot on. One can tell you were an altar boy, and not just from the way you walk.
REGAN REPLIES: I have the gait of a man who has suffered too much.
Posted by: Lord Vino du Matin | August 2, 2007 9:11 AM