The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral with the Duke of Kent. The thing that impresses me most about this centre is not only its architectural grandeur and its ability to blend with the Cathedral setting but that it also presents a new challenge to the Cathedral. The challenge is to the whole ministry of people world-wide. We here in Canterbury have an enormous number of people who come to visit us. This varies from year to year, sometimes it's a million, a million and a half, two million.
Various factors determine the number of people who come.
They come to see an historic church, yet many of them do not understand anything about Christianity. They certainly do not understand much about Anglicanism. What we have tried to do over these last twelve years is to create facilities which, in the first place, will help us to minister to such people and give them some understanding of the Christian faith. Thus they can understand more fully the church they have come to see and with that an understanding of the Anglican approach to Christianity which is, to be honest, slightly different from other approaches. We have something distinctive to contribute.