28 March 2023

Bredon; and Catholic Taste (2)

 "The [Catholic] Cathedral house proved to be a good specimen of that curious municipal Gothic, which is the curse of all institutions founded in 1850 ... The large room into which Bredon was shown was at least equally cheerless. It was half-panelled in atrocious pitch-pine, and it had heavy, ecclesiastical-looking chairs which discouraged all attempts at repose. There was a gas stove in the fireplace. Previous occupants of the See of Pullford lined the walls, in the worst possible style of portraiture. A plaster Madonna, of the kind that is successively exiled from the church to the sacristy, and from the sacristy to the presbytery, at one caught and repelled the eye. In point of fact the room is never used, except by the Canons of Pullford when they vest for the chapter Mass, and by the strange visitor who looks a little too important to be left in the waiting-room downstairs."

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