The Bishop of Menevia, Tom Burns, has suffered a further setback in his efforts to demolish a church in Aberystwyth, after the town’s council decided to order an independent survey of the building.
Bishop Burns’ plans to knock down the Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St Winefride has been resisted by a group of parishioners since its closure in 2012.
The bishop says that the church is structurally unsound and unsuitable for the needs of the parish. But the campaign group, Save our St Winefride’s, rejects this and wants the church, which is in the town’s conservation area, to be restored.
In a latest twist to the dispute that has been running for 13 years, the Mayor of Aberystwyth Town Council has said the authority will pay for an independent survey to establish “the true state of the building” so that future decisions “will be made accordingly”.
Bishop Burns told The Tablet this week that the survey would be “meaningless and a waste of public money” as the church was surveyed in 2012 by the Catholic Church Insurance Association, which found the premises to be a health and safety risk to parishioners and clergy.
He maintains that a small group of parishioners is preventing him from opening a suitable church for the town’s 276 Catholics.
“For the last four years in Aberystwyth there has been no Catholic parish church in existence, as confirmed explicitly by the Holy See in granting its permission for St Winefride’s to be closed permanently and demolished or disposed of for a secular but not profane purpose,” said Bishop Burns.
“The diocese genuinely wishes to provide Aberystwyth with an alternative church in which public worship and private prayer in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament can take place, along with especially the Sacraments associated with baptisms, weddings and funerals.”
The diocese wants to pay to repair the slightly larger Welsh Martyrs church, which is also closed but which it claims would cost considerably less to re-open. Save our St Winefride’s have rejected this plan. No one from the group was available to comment on the latest development.
In his address to the town council, which met last week, the bishop said: “After having their case rejected three times by Rome, the petitioners on St Winefride’s have refused to accept the Vatican’s decisions. If the boot was on the other foot, and Rome had found in their favour, they would have rushed to my door demanding that St Winefride’s should be re-opened immediately – and I would have had to comply.”
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