Exeter Cathedral is fighting for its future after it failed to secure multi-million pound funding to uncover the city’s Roman baths.
The £8.7m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) bid would have seen the first century bath house, buried under the Cathedral Green, excavated and opened to the public.
But the ambitious plans to create a worldwide tourist attraction were dealt a major blow when the funding body decided not to support the project.
Read it all from the Exeter Express and Echo.
Yet another straw in the wind, a harbinger of the joint problem for the UK Government and the Church of England – they do not have the money to maintain 12,000 listed heritage buildings in England, yet they are required by law (and by the needs of the lucrative British tourist industry) to do so.
In this story, all the actors – UK government, CofE and Brit tourism industry – are explicitly brought together, but the same story is being seen elsewhere in England, just not as obviously.
The Dean of Exeter Cathedral honestly admits that the root of the issue is the inability of his diocese to maintain the cathedral. He attempted to get a grant of public money to develop the Roman ruins in the basement, which would have necessarily required public money to maintain the cathedral as well. A great plan, but the Heritage Fund couldn’t justify it – there are too many other calls on the fund.
Nobody thought much about this 50 years ago, because they just took for granted the tithing and voluntary work by faithful Anglicans which helped to maintain heritage church buildings all over England. But this is now melting away, and the CofE has committed the monumental blunder of alienating the very people in its midst who are best at attracting widespread tithing and volunteer devotion – conservative evangelicals and conservative anglo-catholics.
And the UK government has actively encouraged the CofE in this monumental blunder. Its ineptitude is already putting a heavy strain on public finances, which will only increase.
Well, perhaps it is time for the Cathedral staff to get back to proclaiming the faith, and to use their positions for the benefit of the people and church in the Diocese of Exeter, rather than using them as a sinecure to support their pro-gay activism in the Church of England, as Exeter’s former Canon Chancellor did.