Fr Anthony Symondson SJ, who died on 31 January at the age of 83, was one of the 20th century’s most significant historians of ecclesiastical architecture. He became a leading commentator on modern church buildings, producing books on important architects like Ninian Comper and Stephen Dykes Bower. To this he added numerous reviews, chapters and editions; he also produced more devotional works on the life of St Paul VI and St Peter Favre and was a regular contributor to the Catholic Herald.
Symondson’s architectural work was inseparable from his faith; he traced its first stirrings to a visit he made as a young man to the Church of the Annunciation on Bryanston Street in London, just around the corner from Marble Arch. A soaring Anglican establishment done up in neo-Medieval style, he found himself totally overwhelmed by its beauty. Until then, churches had interested him, but he had regarded them only as places of worship of God and not as physical buildings in their own right.
He later identified the Bryanston Street moment as his “aesthetic” conversion, comparing it to a sudden Evangelical experience, but insisted that “it was not a strictly religious conversion even though some of its ingredients were religious”. Nevertheless, he credited it with setting in motion the two irresistible pulls of his life. An architect uncle encouraged him to pursue his new-found enthusiasm, and his studies led him to a deeper understanding of the Church; that in turn, although not until much later, paved the way to Catholicism.
In childhood, Symondson had sensed that Catholic churches, while often simpler than those in which his High-Church Anglican family worshipped, had a numinous element. He nearly converted at the age of 18, egged on by Catholic cousins and dissatisfied with the ecclesiological muddle that existed in the Church of England even then. Family horror and an over-optimistic clergyman held him back: “Leo XIII’s condemnation of Anglican orders was not an infallible but disciplinary declaration and was open to revision,” the latter said.
Aged 23, Symondson joined the staff of the Architectural Press. Although he appreciated the work, he found its atmosphere “left-wing, secular and humanist” at a time when he was moving away from the ritualistic Anglicanism of his youth. It did not destroy his faith, but led instead to what he called “distaste for religion as an end in itself”. Meanwhile, with Gavin Stamp, John Martin Robinson and others, he became a leading light in the architectural preservation movement that saved much of London’s built heritage.
Like many others, Symondson found that casting off organised religion was easier than jettisoning God, and he soon found himself quietly returning to the pews. Anglican orders followed, and then a spell of fulfilling parish ministry in Hoxton, east London. Although it was where he realised once and for all that Anglicanism was untenable, he openly described his last day in Hoxton as “one of the unhappiest of my life”. He was received into the Catholic Church at Farm Street in 1985, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
In his idiosyncratic, flowing prose, Symondson observed that in the end he had been faced with a choice: either to remain an Anglican or “to go forward and enter the stream that flowed from Bethlehem and which is most fully represented in the Catholic Church, wherein subsists the fullness of truth”. A day after his reception, he went to his local church for Mass; despite the liturgical chaos and guitars, and a priest so Irish as to be nearly incomprehensible, he realised that he had “never before experienced so strongly a sense of Eucharistic reality”.
Symondson later agonised about whether he should have converted when he first thought of it, but wisely concluded that “though sincere, it would have been an immature conversion, and, knowing my character as it was then, I would have accepted the prevailing model of the Church without reserve and put myself on a course that would probably have ended unhappily in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. My conversion would have been largely intellectual and of a form that would not easily have withstood modification.”
Following a period as secretary to the Converts’ Aid Society, Symondson was admitted to the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Birmingham; in his late forties he became at the time the oldest Jesuit novice in the world. After studies in Dublin and Guyana, he taught at Stonyhurst, where he was ordained, and then sent into parish life before taking his final vows in 2011. He spent his active retirement writing from Farm Street, and served on Westminster Cathedral’s art and architecture committee.
Symondson died at the Jesuit nursing home in Boscombe, in Dorset. He was for the most part unaware of the recent developments of the present papacy, but in former years he was disarmingly honest as he encouraged others to swim the Tiber. His time in the Society of Jesus, he said, had been “an experience of the best and worst sides of Catholic life and human nature”. “Such is the escapable reality of being in the Church,” he concluded. “Catholic failings give it human credibility and from the dunghill lilies grow.”
Fr Symondson’s articles for the Herald are available in our online archives
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