Black boys matter more than pantylines

For four days, this past week newspapers’ front pages made the Cathedral of the Holy Bikini our most important national story.

All three dailies ran editorials; two about sacredness and profanity. Thursday, one daily’s cover, signalling the waning of the story’s news cycle, printed the trailing edge of a bathsuited model, following others featured frontally in the days before.

The story, it seems, goes something like this.

The big 2018 earthquake toppled one spire of an already slowly crumbling two-century-old Revival Gothic cathedral that remains a holdover venue for national functions from the days when we had a state faith.

Corporate TT stepped in with short-term repairs, but full restoration is a much heftier bill than our National Trust is capable of financing. And no one is in the Anglican pews these days. The liturgy is stale and timeworn. Even Bishop's girls are in the Evangelical church.

The charismatic young woman priest and pastoralist the old male gatekeepers put in charge of its mother church and her female-dominated vestry saw opportunity in Style Week to raise funds to restore the building, agreeing (as another Anglican church had, without scandal, for a Carnival band launch) to host some fashion shows.

Participating designers somehow missed the proviso about taste, flesh and altars. And men catwalked the cathedral’s choirstall shirtless; women in revealing swimsuits. In no time TT had viralised the images – of the women, silly, not the men – set against the backdrop of the altar, itching for bacchanal.

I didn’t expect it to last a week. But Church Meets Fashion and Cathedral Catwalk on Monday had by Tuesday become Sacrilege, Church Shame and I Tried To Stop Them. By the next day, it was Deeply Sorry & Forgive Us Our Sin, with an interesting Ye Hypocrites. And by Thursday Rules Not Clear and Cathedral Just A Tool showed shifts in the story from the church to Style Week.

But there were other things, too, I didn’t expect.

I was taken aback that other denominations chose to weigh in bluntly, shaming the Anglicans for the sacrilege of the pantyless pantylines set against the altar. Protecting Christian values was at stake, and Anglican leaders had fallen down badly. I mean, churches never police each other when clergymen appear in the headlines for molesting children or stealing from widows. Even around child marriage, mutual criticisms were far more restrained.

What was more surprising was the response of Anglican patriarch Claude Berkley. Craven contrition, and an apology – to the leaders of other churches. The “display of immodesty” was a “misuse” of the sacred space of a church.

In a culture where leaders never say sorry, it was stunning to see the big man from Tobago humble. But he went further. He suggested there would be accountability.

The whole storm, and the old-fashioned ideas about profanity, were at best amusing to me. Though part of me worried that in a place where you still face jail time for cussing, it was a reminder of the displaced value we place on propriety over anything else – justice, joy, safety.

Berkley’s ready capitulation to the petty leaders of Christianity made me a little ashamed, too. Anglican faith is about so much more than modesty, and he seemed to concede all of that on this one fashion show.

And then a friend spoke out on social media, Yuh girl here, playfully addressing the bishop about other apologies he could make while at it. She reminded him of Brandon Hargraves, the boy rescued from his family’s kennel, only to meet his death at a now defunct children’s home run by Berkley’s church.

And I couldn’t remember the bishop apologising as fulsomely over that.

Indeed, I distinctly remember instead how deeply disappointed I was at his response, which sought not to be accountable, but to pass the buck. I remember the multi-day 2014 press exposé in all the dailies on abuses at the St Michael’s Home, including Newsday’s front-page headline Boys House of Horrors.

And I wondered how a pantyline could be a more important headline than a little dead black boy.

St Michael’s is closed. And, unlike my friend, I’m not interested in apologies. Apologising won’t bring Brandon back, or undo the years of abuse to dozens of residents that workers at the closed home and the still-open Tacarigua facility are accused of.

But I am interested in the bishop’s stance on accountability. Looking at all the lace and gold in the file photos of him accompanying his apology, I wonder if it’s a fallen spire the church should be raising money for. Or whether it’s for the vulnerable human lives under its care. And recompense to those it has already failed.

Christians must be passionate about more than pantylines. My friend promised, “Doh make me have to walk naked in yuh church” to champion the children. I promised to be right behind her. Now that would be a headline.