Each morning at the early service at St Paul’s Cathedral prayers are offered for different groups of City workers in turn. Everyone – office cleaners, financiers, insurance workers, restaurateurs, waiters, street cleaners, builders, and so on – is prayed for. As the credit crunch has bitten harder, so there have been more prayers: those affected are mentioned at the larger services of evensong every night and at the Sunday morning eucharist, attended by hundreds of people. It’s one of the ways the Cathedral can respond to the current situation. Most people don’t know we do it; but we do it, and it’s at the front line of our care.
The atmosphere around the Cathedral in the City, and even more so further east in The Wharf, is strange. There’s a studied air of “business as usual” but the feeling is different. More fear, more uncertainty, less busyness, more reflection. We don’t know who of the many people that come to the Cathedral for quiet prayer are there because of large or small financial worries. We don’t ask people, unless they want to talk, because a Cathedral can offer a great gift to the public: anonymity. It’s a big place and you can mind your own business if you want to. In the mornings, when we open up for Mattins at 7.30, a few people wander in to sit quietly for a moment or two on their way to work. The Cathedral is silent then, and beautiful.
The Cathedral is full of staff, clergy and lay who see themselves as there first and foremost for the people who visit. We are conscious that the City is shaky and that its workers are under horrendous pressure. There is always someone available from our pastoral team to spend time with anyone appearing at our doors in distress. The offices in the vicinity of the Cathedral can ask for passes so that their staff can visit whenever they want to; coming in and out as neighbours, as and when they wish, rather than attend as paying tourists.
The Cathedral is also addressing the broader ethical and social issues arising from the current crisis, seeking to make a serious and challenging contribution to how to emerge from its ravages wiser and better governed. What individual and corporate lessons in business ethics need to be learned? Will financial institutions need to constrain their global ambitions? What should risk strategies look like? What makes for genuine human flourishing? St Paul’s Institute for 21st century ethics is holding a series of debates in October on money: on global institutions and global governance; on the interplay between individual responsibility, rule making and ethics; corporate standard-setting; free markets; and the impact of the credit crunch on the third world. We will bring together practitioners in the financial world, moral philosophers, theologians, social historians and economists, in the Cathedral itself where we can host audiences of up to 2,500 people, for free and un-ticketed events. We can bring together people who wouldn’t otherwise meet – from business, the professions and other walks of life.
We are encouraged by senior figures in the City who advise us that we are playing an important part, as a large religious institution in the heart of the City, in evoking wisdom in the midst of a confusing and frightening time.
Claire Foster is Lay Canon at St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London and Director of the St Paul’s Institute
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