Monument to an Occasion

In 1946, Winston Churchill journeyed to the small Missouri town of Fulton to accept an honorary degree from little-known Westminster College. His acceptance speech made Fulton a historic site. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," Churchill said, "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." To combat the forces that lurked behind it, he proposed a "fraternal association" between the U.S. and Great Britain.

Seeking to commemorate the occasion, Westminster began looking for a memorial in 1961. The college decided that nothing could be more appropriate than a church designed by Sir Christopher Wren. As surveyor to King Charles II, Wren had rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666, creating out of its ashes a new city--as indomitable an assertion of man's stubborn will to survive as was Churchill's trumpeted defiance when the bombs fell on Wren's London during World War II.

Bold Virtuosity. Wren's must have been one of the most sizable architectural commissions of all time. In the years between 1670 and 1711, he over saw the design and construction of St. Paul's Cathedral, Chelsea Hospital, most of Greenwich Hospital, portions of Hampton Court, and many lesser secular buildings. His most sustained performance was to design and rebuild the 55 churches destroyed in the fire.

Trained as a mathematician and astronomer at Oxford, Wren used an empirical approach to architecture. In general, he kept to the Gothic tradition, with steeples and layers of construction piling upward, but to this he added French, Flemish and Italian Baroque as it suited his purpose, pleased his fancy, or kindled his architectural imagination. He might be called a virtuoso of the eclectic. St. Paul's combines coupled columns from the Louvre with the triple-layered dome of Mansart's Hotel des Invalides. It served as a model for the U.S. Capitol dome. At St. Mary leBow, he placed a pyramidal spire atop a Renaissance balustrade atop an antique classical temple, all atop a belfry that stands slightly catercorner from the church itself.

End of Quest. The Wren church that Westminster College finally settled on was St. Mary the Virgin, which was more simple, restrained and less celebrated than some of Wren's other churches. Still, in many ways it has a classical elegance equaled by few. The church was built on the foundations of an earlier church; its facade was constructed with a triangular pediment surmounting a Romanesque window flanked by Baroque volutes. The slim neo-Romanesque belfry contained five bells and was surmounted by a lead-sheathed clock tower.

On the night of Dec. 29, 1940, St. Mary took a direct hit during one of the Luftwaffe's heaviest air blitzes. Only the stone walls and the twelve Corinthian columns that had lined its spare interior remained aloft. After the war, the Diocese of London decided not to rebuild the church, since it stood in what had become the financial district of London. Too few parishioners lived within the old city's boundaries to attend it. Instead, the church was scheduled to be razed for a city redevelopment project --until dilemma and opportunity met in Westminster's quest.

Each one of St. Mary's 7,000 exterior stones was taken down, numbered, and shipped across the Atlantic. They were then reassembled on a knoll at the edge of the Westminster campus. Dedicated two weeks ago, the rebuilt church is complete with a new roof, new bells, new organ, humidity control and air conditioning.

Set so stolidly in America's heartland, St. Mary's is an assertive symbol of that fraternal association Churchill bespoke, a reminder of the common heritage of both nations. On simpler esthetic grounds, it stands amidst Missouri's flat plains as a monument of excellence that the uninstructed can admire, a standard that traditionalists can repair to, and a challenge that the creative can strive to surpass.

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