St Chad's Cathedral
Designed by Augustus Welby Pugin and substantially complete by 1841, St Chad's is one of the first four Catholic churches constructed after the English Reformation and was raised to cathedral status in 1852. It is one of only four minor basilicas in England (the others being Downside Abbey, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and Corpus Christi Priory).
St Chad's is a Grade II* listed building and is located in a public greenspace near St Chad's Queensway, in central Birmingham. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Birmingham, currently Bernard Longley, and the dean is Monsignor Timothy Menezes.
History
St Chad's was one of the first Catholic cathedrals erected in England after the English Reformation initiated in 1534 by King Henry VIII. St Chad's Cathedral was built at the behest of Bishop Thomas Walsh, the local apostolic vicar (styled Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District). St Chad's Cathedral was designed by Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–52), the foundation stone was laid in October 1839 and the building consecrated as a church on 21 June 1841. The project received generous donations from John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, who was the penultimate Catholic Earl of Shrewsbury. The church was raised to the status of cathedral in 1852 following the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy in England by Pope Pius IX in 1850. The first bishop of Birmingham was William Bernard Ullathorne OSB, whose monument is the crypt of the cathedral. He was buried at St Dominic's Priory, Stone, a convent of Dominican sisters. In 1911 the diocese was elevated to an archdiocese.
The cathedral was situated in the Gunmakers Quarter of Birmingham, which endangered it during the Second World War. It was bombed on 22 November 1940. An incendiary bomb fell through the roof of the south aisle and bounced from the floor into some central heating pipes, which then burst. The water from the damaged central heating pipes thus extinguished the fire. A thanksgiving tablet appears in the diapered design of the transept ceiling, reading Deo Gratias 22 Nov 1940 ('Thanks be to God').
In 1941 St Chad's was declared a minor basilica by Pope Pius XII as a church of important historical connections: only one of two such in England. On formal occasions, the tintinnabulum, a golden lattice bell tower and conopaeum, which is a small red and gold striped umbrella, are displayed at the altar steps as the official symbols of a basilica. The last archbishop was Vincent Nichols, who served from 2000 to 2009, and then became Archbishop of Westminster. As of 2014 the Archdiocese of Birmingham was led by Bernard Longley, titular bishop of Zanda, who was named as the archbishop on 1 October 2009, and was installed in his cathedral by Bishop David McGough (Auxiliary Bishop of Birmingham incharge of the North Staffordshire region of the Archdiocese), and presented with his crozier by his predecessor Archbishop Nichols on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 2009.
St Chad's was the venue for Midnight Mass, broadcast by BBC One at Christmas 2016 and 2021.
Patronal saint
The patron of the cathedral is St Chad, a 7th-century bishop of Mercia and pupil of St Aidan of Lindisfarne. The cathedral enshrines, in the canopy above the altar, the relics of some long bones of St Chad. These were originally enshrined at, and rescued from, Lichfield Cathedral by Prebendary Arthur Dudley, before its despoliation during the Reformation, in about 1538. Fr Dudley passed the bones to his nieces, Bridget and Katherine Dudley of Russell's Hall, whence they were divided in parcels and passed down among their family. In 1651, Henry Hodgetts, a farmer, of Sedgley was dying and his wife summoned an itinerant priest, Fr Peter Turner, SJ to give him the last sacraments. When they recited the litany of the saints, Henry kept calling upon Saint Chad, pray for me. On being asked why he called upon St Chad, he replied, "because his bones are in the head of my bed". He then instructed his wife to pass the box of relics to Fr Turner for safekeeping and he took them back to the Seminary of St Omer, in Northern France, where he was based.
In the 19th century, the relics found their way into the hands of Sir Thomas Fizherbert-Brockholes of Aston Hall, near Stafford. After Sir Thomas's death, his widow moved to Swynnerton Hall and their chaplain, Fr Benjamin Hulme found the dusty velvet-covered box of relics under the altar, when he cleared out the chapel. Fr Hulme presented the relics to Bishop Walsh. So it was that the relics of the saint who was the apostle of the Midlands in the 7th century were enshrined above the altar. These relics were subjected to carbon dating analysis by the archaeological laboratory of Oxford University in 1985, on the order of Archbishop Couve de Murville, which showed all but one of the bones to date from the 7th century, which concurs with the death of St Chad on 2 March 672 AD.
Architecture and fittings
The architect chosen to design St Chad's, Augustus Welby Pugin, later became one of England's most renowned Gothic Revival architects. Pugin had converted to Catholicism in 1835, and spent most of the remainder of his working life designing Catholic churches, their fittings and vestments. St Chad's was the first large church that he designed which was planned, from the outset in 1837, to become a cathedral. Pugin lavished much care on the building, and described, in his letters, not only the architecture, but its decoration, fittings and furnishings. The Clerk of Works and builder of St Chad's was George Myers.
St Chad's replaced a smaller church dedicated to St Austin, built on the same site in 1808, in the Gunmakers' Quarter of the town on steeply sloping land that fell away to the canal and wharf. Because of the narrow site, and the necessity to build in brick rather than stone, Pugin was restricted in the style and proportions of the church that he could design. Because he wished to make the church as open and spacious as possible, he looked as a model to the style of churches that were built in Northern Germany in the late Middle Ages. St Chad's is built in the style of a brick hall church or "Hallenkirche", similar to Munich Cathedral and has a westwerk with narrow broached spires similar to those of Lübeck Cathedral. Because of the steep slope of the site, Pugin built a large crypt beneath the building, to be used primarily as a burial place for family tombs, and former cathedral clergy, and is now rehearsal room for the choir. The geographical alignment is unusual in that the "east end" (the location of the altar) actually faces approximately north west.
