Holy Cross, Leicester

The likes of Holy Cross Priory in Leicester would once have been common before the Reformation, but less so today. It is a friary, where the Blackfriars gather for worship. Traditionally wearing black caps, its members belong to the Order of St Dominic, or Dominicans. They were expelled from Leicester in the sixteenth century but made a clandestine return in the eighteenth, building this rather large church in the twentieth, which was finished in the fifties.

Although the architecture is late gothic, there is something rather austere about it all, something appropriate for the Dominicans, who were known for their scholarship as well as their ‘attack dog’ mentality when it came to the Roman Church’s various opponents. Dominicans tended to staff and organise inquisitions, terrible organisations which sought to identify and suppress heresy, often employing torture and burnings. Although notable black friars have been instrumental in decrying the treatment of native American peoples by Spanish colonists, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Order overall was a source of persecution and intolerance, seeing Protestants as heretics and apostates.

Despite this Dominican priory’s plain style and severe décor, the usual accoutrements of Romanism are found within: statues, votive candles and the bowing to consecrated bread. Just as those at the time of our Lord who accused Him of moral failings, were themselves whitewashed sepulchres, so this heresy-hunting order is itself tarnished and polluted by Roman idolatry.

A. D