John MacDonald: Anglicans need to chip-in for their cathedral too

Author: John MacDonald,
Publish Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2026, 12:55pm

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Walking up the Cathedral with the front doors in the background. Photo / Tom Cuthbert

Congratulations to Catholic Bishop Michael Gielen, who has announced that he’s not going to be asking the city council or the government for money to rebuild Christchurch’s Catholic Cathedral.

This is the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament on Barbadoes Street, which was demolished after the earthquakes.

And I think the Anglicans need to take a leaf out of his book and drop their request for more public funding.

It’s expected to cost $80 million. The church says just over half of that will come from insurance and selling assets. The rest will come from fundraising. Half of which has already been raised. Talk about just getting on with it.

The key thing for me from yesterday’s announcement, is that the Catholic Bishop won’t be putting his hand out to ratepayers and taxpayers.

Instead, he’s asking Catholic parishioners to donate the money that still needs to be found.

Talk about learning from the debacle the Anglican Cathedral project has become.

Also, to be fair, when you’re building from scratch, you can be more confident about your costings. Compared to when you're fixing something up.

So, when Catholic parishioners went to mass yesterday, a letter from the Bishop was read out to them.

In it, Bishop Gielen said he hoped every Catholic in the diocese would contribute over the next five years.

It’s a structured gifting programme. Giving local Catholics the option of donating $10-per-week over five years - which would add up to $2,600. Or $25-per-week for five years - which would add up $6,500.

We know partly why the Bishop is taking this approach. Because he will have seen the Anglicans get the push-back from central government when they went asking Nicola Willis for more money.

Her argument was that the Anglican Cathedral in Cathedral Square is a place of worship and not a truly public facility. And she would say the exact same thing if the Catholics knocked on the door asking for money.

So the Catholics didn‘t have much of an option, other than to put their hands out to parishioners.

But, as Bishop Gielen says, when the original cathedral was built, it was the Catholic parishioners who paid for it then. So it makes sense to do the same thing again.

While I think the Anglican Church should be doing the same and dropping this idea of getting more money from the city council and the government, I doubt they will.

Because there’s this superiority thing going on. This thinking that the real cathedral, or the only cathedral worth worrying about, is the one in Cathedral Square.

There’s the fact too that it’s the Anglican Cathedral putting the handbrake on any further development in the square. Whereas, the Catholic Cathedral site is conveniently out of the way on Barbadoes Street.

But that doesn’t change my thinking that the Anglican Church and the people involved in the Anglican Cathedral reinstatement should be watching what the Catholics and doing the exact same thing.

Because, if local Catholics are being expected to have some skin in the game, then local Anglicans should too.

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