Sting and Religion

The Catholic-Shaped Imagination of a Rock Icon

Evyatar Marienberg

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781725272262
  9781725272255
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725272279
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

On the back cover of one of his most groundbreaking solo albums, . . . Nothing like the Sun of 1987, Sting (Gordon Matthew Sumner, b. 1951 in Wallsend, UK) somberly stands close to a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The album was released a few months after his own mother, Audrey, died. The picture was taken on the island of Montserrat, where he was recording the album, apparently on the day of her death. "I said goodbye to my mother, as I had a recording date in Montserrat, and she died a week later." When asked by the author if his mother was particularly connected to Mary, and if this was why he chose this image, he replied "No, but I did." This evocative photograph and Sting's quick answer encapsulate the two pillars of this book: a microhistory of a specific British Catholic parish in the 1950s-60s, and the impact that growing up there had on Sting's artistic output. And beyond that, this book opens a window onto the influence of Catholic education and imagination on millions of less famous people who had similar upbringings.

Chapter 2

Religion Surrounding
Gordon Sumner: Part I

Teachers told us the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple on the edge of the Empire garrison town
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods
But the stone gods did not make a sound.50

Sting was not always called by this name, nor was he always a global rock superstar. In his long and still ongoing career, he has used extensively, as the previous chapter has hopefully shown, religious images and notions, and among them many that are based on, or derive from, the Bible. Where was he exposed to this material? As this chapter will demonstrate, his dealings with religion began quite early in his life. The more-or-less first ten years of this encounter will be discussed in the following pages.

In 1950, Ernest Matthew Sumner (b. 1927 according to his eldest son, but 1926 according to one official document I found; d. 1987), from Gosforth, then an urban district to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the North East of England, was preparing to marry Audrey Cowell (1931–1987), a nineteen-year-old resident of the nearby Wallsend. Because Audrey was under the age of twenty-one, she needed written consent from her parents—something we can assume she received. Ernest was twenty-four years old, and had been recently discharged as a soldier serving with the British Army’s Corps of Royal Engineers in Germany in the years following the war. Audrey was working as a hairdresser.

England was just starting to recover from the devastation of World War II. Many parts of the country had suffered from bombardments by the Germans during the war. Soldiers and civilians had been killed or harmed physically or psychologically. And yet, attempts to find reasons to celebrate were not rare. Wallsend, the birthplace of Audrey, was preparing to mark in the following year the fiftieth anniversary of its becoming a borough. The entire country was preparing for the “Festival of Britain,” a series of events and exhibitions that showed to the public its successes. King George VI reigned, and the prime minister was Clement Attlee from the Labour party. Attlee has been considered by many to be a very successful prime minister. It was under him that the welfare state was, in many ways, born. It was his government that created the British National Health Service, improved the working conditions of workers and the legal status of women, and helped people to acquire homes and enhance those they had.

Attlee was not a member of any religious denomination, and was considered by many to be agnostic. Ernest, on the other hand, was Catholic, even if, according to his eldest son, only nominally so:

His mother was very religious, she was a priest’s housekeeper, she went to Mass every day, and then her two younger boys went to Ushaw College to study to become priests,51 [but] they did not become priests. His father was born Protestant, Plymouth Brethren. I imagine he converted [to Catholicism] prompted by my Irish Catholic grandmother, but didn’t seem all that interested. . . . [He did not speak about religion at home]. He went to church, but I think in the 1950s and 1960s people still went to church [because] it was expected. They still were under the threat of mortal sin, [that] if they’d missed Mass on Sunday they go to hell. It’s pretty severe. It’s pretty severe. [laughing].52

Audrey was a member of the Church of England’s parish of St Luke in Wallsend, and was apparently more committed to her denomination than her future husband was to his. According to her future famous son,

As a teenager she taught Sunday school [at St Luke’s]. I suppose Bible lessons, I don’t know what they did there.53

More than four centuries have passed since Henry VIII broke the ties that connected England with the Roman papacy, and created a separate “Church of England.” The vast majority of British citizens, and Audrey among them, were by then members of this Anglican church.

On their “Notice of Marriage,”54 both future spouses attested their religious background (“Catholic” and “Church of England” respectively), and answered “Yes” to the question, “Do you practice [your religion]?” By definition then, the marriage would have been what many called a “mixed marriage.”55

They surely knew that they had, theoretically at least, three options. The first was to get married civilly, at the Registry Office. This would have possibly led to Ernest’s excommunication from his church, created some unhappy relatives, and forced the couple to have a wedding without the decorum a church offers. Their second option was to get married in an Anglican church. This would have offered a nice atmosphere and would have made about half of the family and guests happy, but would have made it almost impossible for the other half to attend the ceremony; Ernest’s ecclesiastical status as Catholic would have still been at serious risk. The third option was to get married in a Catholic church. Some Anglican relatives might, of course, not have been thrilled, but they would not have been discouraged by their own church from attending the ceremony. Both spouses would be able to keep their respective standing in their churches: the Church of England allowed its members to marry elsewhere without losing their status. Like many couples in such a situation, they chose this option.

Ernest still needed to get a permission, a “dispensation,” from the local Catholic bishop, to marry a non-Catholic. Thus, in December 1950, he asked for the dispensation through the Catholic parish of St Aidan, in Benton, another district of Newcastle upon Tyne where he apparently resided. A priest of the Catholic parish of St Mary in Sunderland, a city to the southeast, was required to confirm that Mr. Sumner, born in the port of Sunderland, was properly baptized there as an infant in 1926, which he did. From the available documents, it seems Audrey was not asked to provide a proof of her own baptism in the Church of England. This was possibly due to the fact that even if she could prove that she was baptized—and she was—it would have been, from a Catholic perspective, a dubious baptism. She was “acatolica, dubie baptizata”: The validity of baptisms by non-Catholics was considered dubious by the Catholic church at the time.56 It should be noted that dispensation for “mixed marriages” was given in cases when there was a so-called “positive doubt” about the baptism of the non-Catholic partner. If it was certain that a non-Catholic was n...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• I’ve Been Thinking ’Bout Religion
• The Bible in Sting’s Work
• Religion Surrounding Gordon Sumner: Part I
• Catholicism in Sting’s Work
• Religion Surrounding Gordon Sumner: Part II
• Religion and Spirituality in Sting’s Work
• Sting and Religion
• Bibliography
• Permissions