St. Anne's showed us a different side of the Group of Seven
National Post, 16 June 2024
Murals were made great by the church, not the other way around
At the prayer vigil on Tuesday evening after the catastrophic fire at St. Anne’s Anglican in Toronto, Father Don Beyers, the parish priest, mentioned that he was supposed to be flying that night to London to meet with the rector of the famous St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. They were to discuss a lecture that the rector had been invited to give at St. Anne’s. The topic? Imagining the church of the future.
With a glorious past in cinders behind him, Father Beyers noted that any such imagining was now more urgent. We were in the empty lot across from church, now open to the sky after its dome roof had collapsed. And there we prayed and sang Precious Lord by Tommy Dorsey. Passersby who never darken the door of a church heard that. The physical church was darkened to ashes inside; but the church, the body of Christ, endures.
When I first heard the news that St. Anne’s Anglican had burned last Sunday, I assumed it was arson. I didn’t always think that way. In 1997, I was attending a seminary attached to Holy Family, a Catholic church in Parkdale, Toronto, when it completely burned. A spark from repair work was the cause, if memory serves. On Christmas Eve 2016, I entered my own parish church on Wolfe Island, Sacred Heart of Mary, to find it filled with smoke. There was plenty of smoke, but little fire, and we never did find the exact cause. But it wasn’t arson.
Since then though we have become accustomed to vandalism and arson against churches, with dozens set on fire or otherwise vandalized. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even called it “understandable,” so our expectations now are in that line.
Toronto police say St. Anne’s is not being investigated as arson, but it will take several weeks to investigate the cause. So the loss is not compounded by a crime.
Yet the loss is significant. Most observers have lamented the art in the church and the community service St. Anne’s provided, which indicates something about the cramped horizons in which we live. It was not a well-decorated YMCA.
At the prayer vigil, a message was read that made reference to Psalm 96: Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Father Beyers noted, with some emotion, that those words — “the beauty of holiness” — were still on the walls of St. Anne’s, untouched by the fire.
There is always an interest in beauty. Holiness — sharing in God’s life and right living before Him — is often of less interest. St. Anne’s existed — exists! — to proclaim that authentic beauty flows from the holiness of God. The contrary is also evident in that neighbourhood, as it is every neighbourhood, namely that where holiness is absent, beauty disappears too.
St. Anne’s was known architecturally for its Byzantine style, which follows Constantinople rather than Canterbury. So it took more than a little imagination and open-mindedness for the Reverend Lawrence Skey to build in the Orthodox style more than a century ago.
Skey was similarly bold in commissioning J.E.H. MacDonald for the decoration. MacDonald was a member of Group of Seven, and he lamented the lack commissions for local artists.
“Canada seemingly gets her walls painted, but not decorated,” he wrote in a 1925 article about St. Anne’s. “Giotto would be out of work among us, and Michelangelo would move from Toronto to New York.”
Macdonald had never painted a church before. He assembled a team of nine other artists, including two other members of the Group of Seven. Together they painted the biblical scenes and figures which adorned the church.
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