French Stranger, Spiritual Home

There is a handsome parish church tucked away in the medieval township of Stadt Bern in central Switzerland. It bulks over a sloping bank that drops down and draws us to the rushing blue-green currents of the River Aare. Its cross-tipped spire rises against the snow-capped silhouette of the Swiss Alps. The Church of Saint Peter and Paul is a standing testament to a flush of Roman Catholic revivalism in Canton Bern (1850–75) as well as to a longstanding and still active stretch of Old Catholic custodianship. French Stranger; Spiritual Home monographs Saint Peter and Paul to share its fraught yet fascinating story. Most readers will be well familiar with ‘contested’ sacred sites—especially those damaged during the Reformation—but many will be unfamiliar with the material-cultural fallout from the First Vatican Council (1869–70). The seismic dogmatic pronouncements at the council cleaved the church in two. Liberal Catholics protested papal infallibility, forming a vibrant community with closer recourse to the early church and so calling themselves Old Catholics; Old Catholics and the Roman Catholics stoutly loyal to the now-infallible pope fought “tooth and nail” for custody of churches across Switzerland. In Stadt Bern the Old Catholics came out the victors (1875). The Roman Catholic framing was of an “open robbery” of Saint Peter and Paul. Old Catholics considered their action in claiming the keys to be an orderly assumption of Catholic custodianship after Pope Pius IX had declared them heretical and schismatic. French Stranger; Spiritual Home invites you to learn about the heady provenance and conflicted early history of this contested site—the “bone of contention” in Catholic Bern—and to look in depth at the art-and-architectural forms that compose its neo-gothic profile and have enriched its east end.