Whose holy ground?
In his poem "Little Gidding," T. S. Eliot warned his readers not to take too intellectual an approach to places of worship; instead, he urged, "You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid." Yet around the world many believers wrestle with the question of just whose prayers have been valid at particular sites. In Europe particularly, that question may prove to be inflammatory.
From a global perspective, American Christians are unusual in that their churches rarely occupy sites sacred to other faiths. But throughout history new religions often appropriated older sacred places for their own purposes. London's St. Paul's Cathedral stands over the remains of a pagan temple, and the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City is within the sacred precinct of Aztec Tenochtitlán. Invaders normally assumed that dominant religions should by right occupy the greatest buildings, and they grabbed sites accordingly. Great religious buildings are often palimpsests: a little investigation can uncover older layers of faith. Cambridge's beloved Round Church (a long-standing center of evangelical zeal) reputedly replaced the synagogue of the city's medieval Jewish quarter.
Such displacements are much in evidence across Europe and the Middle East, where Christians and Muslims so often battled each other and where frontiers shifted frequently. For a thousand years, the world's greatest Christian church was Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which became a mosque in 1453. Some great Islamic centers, like the Great Mosque of Damascus, have a Christian (and often pagan) prehistory. When the Muslims conquered Spain, they naturally converted Toledo's venerable Roman church into a mosque, which it remained for 400 years until the Christian reconquest. That mosque in turn gave way to the High Gothic cathedral that we see today.
