Jane Austen to the rescue?

“Jane Austen's grave may save a troubled Winchester Cathedral,” the website of Religion News Service proclaimed earlier this year. And not just by helping the deficit-ridden cathedral rake in Austen 250 tourist cash (although that, too): No, “the celebrations may offer a much-needed diversion from the social troubles besetting the congregation,” the story argues.

Because however serene and beautiful Austen’s final resting-place appears, the cathedral has apparently had a lot going on lately: bullying allegations, staff departures, a congregational rebellion, an investigation ordered up by the bishop himself . . . In other words, not much either serene or beautiful.

As far as I can make out from press reports (the most complete seems to be here), the problems center on the cathedral’s famous choir, whose dozens of members include both adult professionals and young boys and girls.

In 2021, a newly fired assistant music director claimed he’d been bullied and belittled by a senior member of the cathedral’s clergy, whose management style allegedly featured my-way-or-the-highway public tongue-lashings. Then last year, the beloved veteran choir director resigned, sparking rumors that he’d been forced out by the same clergy member. Some of the choir’s professional singers quit, and so did a former BBC official who was a lay member of the cathedral’s governing body. The dispute got into the press (“The talk is of funds being diverted away from the choir and into other areas of cathedral life,” a conservative monthly magazine wrote.)

Congregants began refusing to take communion from the cathedral’s clergy leaders. The Bishop of Winchester ordered up an outside investigation, whose findings were detailed publicly only in a vague press release (“some significant failings in leadership and management”) and an opaque summary. In response to the report, the dean of the cathedral—the head of its governing clergy—stepped down in early March, two months ahead of her planned retirement. By April, Religion News Service reported, the alleged bully was “currently not at work.”

The whole mess sounds worthy of a novel: not so much a novel by Austen as by Trollope--either Anthony, the Victorian bard of bad behavior in the Church of England, or his contemporary collateral descendant Joanna, one of whose novels is about the crisis that ensues when a dean tries to abolish a cathedral’s choir school.

Meanwhile, though, it’s Austen whose 250th anniversary year is giving Winchester Cathedral plenty of excuses to celebrate (and cash in) with tours, exhibits, talks, souvenirs, teas, and a Regency ball, not to mention the October 16 unveiling of a new Jane Austen statue.

Over the past eighteen months, that statue drew its share of controversy, as blog readers will recall. But in retrospect, that tempest in a teapot was nothing! The dean and cathedral clergy probably found it--what's the phrase?--a much-needed diversion.