Each to their own
I HAD walked down the wooden jetty to look at a pod of dolphins which my nature-loving daughter had spotted in the harbour. She is on a mission to cure me of the lingering effects of a nature-phobic childhood. If I so much as stroked Topsy, my Auntie Rita’s lovable mongrel, my mum would take me to the bathroom to wash my hands. “All animals are dirty,” she instilled in me; “so stay away from them.”
I am pleased to report that I am in recovery. We had dogs when our kids were younger, but, on this occasion, the dolphins weren’t quite so spellbinding for me as for my daughter. Drifting back up the jetty to terra firma, though, I did spot something right up my street: a huge, red-brick, Gothic monastery standing out on top of Mount Victoria, looking out over Oriental Bay and the harbour in Wellington, the New Zealand capital. It felt as if I was being led to it.
New Zealand, I should explain, was an exotic and far-flung destination by our usual family-holiday standards, undertaken only because our son has joined the exodus of recently qualified NHS doctors to spend 18 months working Down Under, in his case at Wellington Hospital. Entranced as I was by New Zealand’s famously abundant nature and extraordinary, majestic, unblemished landscapes, the opportunity of a spot of church-crawling was irresistible.
Shaken not stirred
EXPLORING this landmark monastery, though, turned out to be less a case of crawling, and more one of climbing — up countless wooden staircases from the jetty. With its clapboard houses and hills, Wellington is a mini San Francisco. St Gerard’s, I discovered when I reached it, was built as a church in 1904 by the Redemptorist order to serve the many, particularly Irish, Roman Catholic migrants who landed in the harbour below.
It was once so busy that a monastery was added in the 1930s, but times have changed. The front door was locked, the windows were boarded up, and there was an array of slightly menacing “Keep Out” notices from developers (all the more striking since, in almost every other situation, the laid-back Kiwis offer visitors the nicest and warmest welcome I have encountered).
It wasn’t just the decline in congregations which did for St Gerard’s. At the start of this century, it was found that it needed major works to make it earthquake-proof enough as a public building. Wellington is, as plenty of its citizens told us with an admirable sangfroid, the earthquake capital of New Zealand. Its streets even have sobering signs telling you when you have passed the highest expected reach of any tsunami in the Cook Strait that separates North and South Islands.
Diversity and inclusion
GIVEN its prominent position on the city skyline — the local equivalent of the Christ the Redeemer statue above Rio — the shuttered monastery seemed to tell the story of the changing face of Christianity in New Zealand.
The 2023 census reports that the number of those identifying as Christian has dropped to less than one third (just 32 per cent), with a corresponding rise to 52 per cent among those claiming no religion. Has the Christianity that arrived here with settlers and colonialism in the early 19th century failed to put down sufficiently enduring roots, I wondered? Or might it be suffering a backlash similar to the one against the whole concept of European imperialism?
Well, no, to judge by the number of thriving newer Christian offshoots. In the coastal resort of Kaikoura, on the South Island, I spotted a Presbyterian church displaying a board outside with the slogan: “He died for you so you could have a good Easter.” But, in more mainstream Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, numbers are falling. Even there, though, the reality is more complicated.
The two traditions have cathedrals on the same block in Wellington. When I attended a Sunday service in one, and watched people arrive at the other, earlier the same day, it was evident that both congregations were decently large, strikingly diverse, and with a healthy demographic skewed towards the young. The Catholic cathedral noticeboard told of five new priestly vocations: of two young men of Vietnamese heritage, and of three men whose families came from the Philippines.
Ultima Thule
OUR visit coincided with the death of Pope Francis (Comment, 25 April). One of his great enthusiasms, as a self-proclaimed figure “from the end of the world” in Argentina, was to promote the Church as it operates on the peripheries. After a 24-hour, backache-inducing flight there, I can confidently report that New Zealand is about as far away from everywhere else as you can get on this planet.
So, as we travelled round the two main islands, I stopped off to see how the Pope’s death was being marked in this periphery, in the usually small, wooden-walled, corrugated-iron-roofed churches in many of the strung-out towns that line the main routes.
Disappointingly, most were locked. Perhaps popes, like everything else to do with the rest of the world, feel too distant. A notable exception was the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, which stands on a small rise next to the shores of Lake Tekapo, on South Island, in the shadow of Mount Cook.
It is one of the few churches I spotted that conform to European stereotypes — stone built, with a slate roof and bell-tower — and, as a consequence, had plenty of tourists milling around. Like them, I suspected, I was drawn in by the familiarity of the place. Yet the point about New Zealand more generally seems to be that, positioned where it is, it is seizing the chance to develop into something subtly different that embraces all aspects of its history. At first glance, it may look and sound like a bit of Europe out on a limb, but it is actually something more complex than that.
Built-in faith
THE other big story that I missed while away was the announcement that Antoni Gaudí had been declared Venerable, the first step on the road to canonisation (News, 25 April). I have a vested interest, being in the process of completing a biography of this enigmatic Catalan architect to mark the centenary of his death in June 2026.
The Vatican announcement — almost the final decision that Pope Francis made — rightly draws attention to the absolutely central part played by faith in Gaudí’s extraordinary, unmatched, and occasionally impenetrable imagination. God is there in all his buildings, and not, as is often said, only in the still-incomplete Sagrada Família in Barcelona.
Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald. Gaudí: God’s architect will be published by Hodder in the spring of 2026.
