My Attempt to Stop the Desecration of Canterbury Cathedral
By Cajetan Skowronski, European Conservative.
Consecration and desecration are constants in the drama of sacred scripture. Time and again, the consecrated chosen people stray from their covenant, desecrating themselves by the worship of idols and foreign powers, returning to God after the consequences of their betrayal catch up with them and their eyes are opened by prophetic visions. In material, spatial terms, in tent cloth and stone, and in ritual terms, in incense and offering, this cycle is mirrored in the treatment of the sacred places, the altars and temples, which are despoiled and must be dedicated anew.
The meaning of sacred is that of being “set apart” for God, as the temple tent of the Lord in the desert was set apart from the main camp of the Israelites. When the everyday, that is, the profane, intrudes into the sacred, obscuring its purpose, a profanation or sacrilege has taken place.
The prophet Ezekiel in the Old Testament, and St. Stephen in the New, both summarize the rollercoaster peaks and troughs of profanation, purification, and rededication that the Jews and their temples ride down the centuries. Ezekiel’s account urges reconsecration in his own time, and it prefigures the ultimate profanation and purification that would come in Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection. St. Stephen’s version acts as a preamble in his preaching to those who, magnifying the sacrilege of their forefathers, had destroyed the temple that was Christ’s body, which had been rebuilt in three days as He had foretold.
The role of elites and priests in inviting sacrilege is never far from the surface in these narratives. God grants Ezekiel a vision of King Solomon’s Temple just prior to its destruction, filled with reptilian and beastly idols by the very priests charged with its care, and in the holy of holies, the high priests worship not the God of Israel but the sun. God specifically condemns the conflation of the sacred and the profane:
Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them. (Ezekiel 22:26 KJV)
St. Stephen’s uncompromising condemnation of the priestly class for their tragic repetition of their forebears’ sacrilege guaranteed him the reward of becoming the first martyr of the early Church, leapfrogging the original Apostles.
Carl Trueman has powerfully identified the desecration of man, as a lens through which to comprehend the bland form of chaos in which we all now live. He rightly identifies both sex and death as sacred features of man’s life, deserving of the reverence and rituals we have now cast aside, to our detriment. I would like to expand upon this and consider the desecration of the sacred ground of our temple buildings, as both a natural consequence of the desecration of ourselves—as fleshly temples stamped through with the Imago Dei—and as a contributing factor to that same desecration of man. For each form of profanation begets the other, in a self-destructive cycle reminiscent of an Ouroboros devouring itself.
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