Arriving at London's famous Wigmore Hall, where I went to meet its artistic director John Gilhooly, what I first encountered were several determined bands of schoolchildren making their way through the foyer, pushing and chatting. The hall, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year, once exuded a kind of staid charm – but is now very much alive.
Under Gilhooly's aegis, it holds concerts for local schools, music sessions for families with toddlers: "Chamber Tots". It has an African music series as well as its core classical programme and it offers cheap, £5 tickets for young people.
There's an almost evangelical effort to engage hard-to-reach groups. Miraculously, its finances are sound, without any state subsidy. John Gilhooly is dynamic, fluent, clever, cheerful and Irish. He's also one of a little cluster of Catholics at the apex of British cultural life whose work isn't overtly Catholic, but whose Catholicism underpins everything they do.
His faith has flourished in England. "It's easier to be a Catholic in Britain than in Ireland and it has been for the last 25 years," he tells me. "That's an irony, because you wouldn't have said that 50 years ago."
In London, he's committed to two churches: St James's, Spanish Place, just around the corner, and Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, in Covent Garden, where the Traditional Latin Mass is celebrated. Gilhooly was much moved when he took part in this year's Corpus Christi procession from Maiden Lane through central London by the reverence of many of the onlookers. He was also one of those behind last year's letter to The Times calling on Pope Francis to lift his restrictions on the Tridentine Mass – "I think I asked 25 of the signatories to sign it" but he attends the Novus Ordo as well.
"The [Traditional] Latin Mass shouldn't be restricted," he says. "There's a place for both. But I think people who weaponised the Latin Mass against the previous pope were mistaken." Not that he sees the British Latin Mass Society that way; he's thinking about the United States.
"The Mass," he says, "is the one thing that shouldn't be weaponised. Yes, the old rite is so beautiful and wonderful. But the new rite is equally valid. And the people who say it isn't are in the region of borderline heresy. It's only a small minority but they're very vocal. I think that doesn't do the liturgical movement any favours.
"I suspect the new Pope will loosen things," he continues. "But he's the Pope; it's up to him. Ideally, there will be no further restrictions. It'll be just one of the options available for people in good faith to go to. Yes, it is our heritage and it's full of beauty and it's inspired so much art, so much music, which is the reason I'm so taken by it, obviously. But we're also in 2025 and the Second Vatican Council still happened. That's all wonderful too. So, a hundred flowers should bloom, liturgically."
As director of the Wigmore Hall, he naturally includes religious work in the programme. "I'm not evangelical, you know," he says. "I'd lose my job if I pretended to be an evangelist." Nonetheless, by staging a performance of Bach's Mass in B minor this month at Spanish Place, he is bringing a religious work into a religious space.
"I'm doing the best possible music. It's wonderful that there's such an appetite for sacred music. I think the world is so colourless in so many ways that they get something beyond this world out of it that they can't fully understand.
"It's interesting to have the Bach Mass in a concert setting and then also in a liturgical setting because it's the same thing, but the function perhaps is different. The silence is incredible. Even in the secular context. It's not a devotional silence; it's a different silence ... it's a music lovers' silence, but of course something is happening beyond that."
He's right: sacred music gets to parts of the psyche that rational argument doesn't reach. Gilhooly is himself a tenor, who was mentored by the remarkable foster mother of Irish operatic talent, Veronica Dunne. But his musical formation began in his childhood in Castleconnell, Co. Limerick.
"I was taught by the Christian Brothers. Everything was beautifully done in terms of our religious formation. The singing in my school was incredible. I wouldn't be where I am now if I didn't have that learning of hymns and Latin and all the rest. We did have some of the older hymns, and some of the Latin texts, obviously.
“We had a wonderful choir. We had wonderful women, old women teachers, local organists, that sort of thing. We had a huge musical tradition in my parish. And my school was a state school, so there was nothing to be paid at all. There were concerts in the Protestant church and my parents would give me the money to attend them, and someone told Dad off for allowing me into a Protestant space."
In that vanished Ireland, Gilhooly was an altar boy. "There were lots of women, really strong women, farmers' wives and suchlike, and I would see how they approached the altar, because I was holding the paten. Some of them were widows, some had six or eight children, many didn't have anything beyond a primary education and had been put to work, essentially. But the reverence and the belief when they approached the altar, that has stayed with me.
"Those women worked so hard I don't know if they knew it or not, but they were oppressed. But their work and example created the conditions for women later to thrive, through their sacrifice. But the love they had for the Eucharist is something that I can recall now. And it was something very moving. I could still see their faces and just the way that they would look at the host. They really believed in the Real Presence. So, example is everything. But it was the women, not the men."
That piety has now collapsed. "I think, if I'd have lived in Ireland, I'd have lapsed," he reflects. "But I don't know. The Church there has had such a blow on account of the abuse scandals; I had to allow my own anger to burn out. And I think by being here it burned out. There's a point when you realise this, but it's not to forget the victims. There's a point when being angry as an individual – and I'm still angry – is actually counter-productive, and I think the anger in Ireland is still there, palpable. You can see it in the numbers [of vocations and church attendance].
"The problem that the Church lacks moral authority in Ireland, and needs to regain it, is compounded by the fact that perceptions are now worse than the actual reality. For a time it almost got to the point where you didn't trust a priest. I think we rowed back from that. But I think, just for me, the scaffolding around which my early life was created disappeared."
Yet Gilhooly's faith has flourished in London, where Catholicism has, he says, a lively intellectual aspect.
"If you ask me how I identify myself, I'm a Catholic," he says. "That's my first identity. And I'm glad to have that back."
Photo: John Gilhooly (Credit: Kaupo Kikkas)
Go to wigmore-hall.org.uk for full listings of musical events at Wigmore Hall.
This article appears in the September 2025 edition of the Catholic Herald.To subscribe to our thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.
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