You've heard about it. Secretly, you want it almost as much as the Fatima Tie.

And American Papist has a rundown of the whole thing, including pictures. Because he's awesome like that.

While I have been posting lately on fairly concrete historical matters relating to the recent past in the Church, I think this reflection gives us some food for thought on the real point of it all:

"There is no return to the past. A restoration understood thus is not only impossible but also not even desirable. The Church moves forward to the consummation of history, she looks ahead to the Lord who is coming. If, however, the term 'restoration' is understood accoridng to its semantic content, that is to say, as a recovery of lost values, within a new totality, then I would like to say that this is precisely the task that imposes itself today in the second phase of the post-conciliar period. yet the word 'restoration' is linguistically laden in such a way for us moderns that it is difficult to attribute this meaning to it. In reality it literally means the same as the word 'reform', a term that has a wholly different sound to us today. Perhaps I can clarify the matter with an example taken from history. For me Charles Borromeo is the classic expression of a real reform, that is to say, of a renewal that leads forward precisely because it teaches how to live the permanent values in a new way, bearing in mind the totality of the Christian fact and the totality of man.

"It can certainly be said that Charles Borromeo rebuilt ("restored") the Catholic Church, which also in the area around Milan was at that time nearly destroyed for awhile, without making a return to the Middle Ages. On the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church. How little 'restorative' such a reform was is seen, for example, in the fact that Charles suppressed a religious order that was nearly in decline and assigned its goods to new, live communites. Who today possesses a similar courage to declare that which is interiorly dead (and continues to live only exteriorly) belongs definitively to the past and must be entrusted with clarity to the energies of the new era? Often new phenomena of Christian awakening are resisted precisely by the so-called reformers, who in their turn spasmodically defend institutions that continue to exist only in contradiction with themselves.

"In Charles Borromeo, therefore, we can also see what I meant to say with 'reform' or 'restoration' in its original meaning: to live outstretched towards a totality, to live from a 'yes' that leads back to the unity of the human forces in conflict with each other. A 'yes' that confers on them a positive meaning within the totality. In Charles Borromeo we can also see the essential prerequisite for a similar renewal. Charles could convince others because he was a man of conviction. He was able to exist with his certitudes amid the contradictions of his time because he himself lived them. And he could live them because he was a Christian in the deepest sense of the word, in other words, he was totally centered on Christ. What truly counts is to reestablish this all-embracing relation to Christ. No one can be convinced of this all-embracing relationship to Christ through argumentaion alone. One can live it, however, and thereby make it credible to others and invite others to share it."
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Ratzinger Report pp. 38-39 (Ignatius, 1985)

Much has been made in our comments boxes of the shift in the Church's teaching about religious freedom with the Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae, which I consider a brilliant treatment of the subject. I think that when thinking about this topic, a few things need to be kept in mind. First of all, the relationship of the Church to the state is not a matter contained in the deposit of Faith, but rather a matter subject to prudential judgment on the part of those who are involved in both at any given time of history. Secondly, 19th and early 20th century Popes who discussed this topic were still coming to grips with the end of what can be called "Christendom" or "Integralism," the ideal of the merging of Church and State with the result being the notions that Catholicism ought properly to be the state religion and that "error has no rights."

"Religious Freedom" says Dignitatis Humanae, "has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ" (Par. 1). As a result of this, religious freedom guaranteed by the state respects the dignity of the human person and allows for a free choice and exercise of religion. Furthermore, it allows the Church freedom to function and to preach the Gospel without becoming tied up in the affairs of state, which were so often a scandal for her in the past.

Dignitatis Humanae, furthermore, does not adopt a neutralist understanding of Church and state, but rather one in which "Government is also to help create conditions favorable to the fostering of religious life in order that the people may be truly enabled to exercise their religious rights and to fulfill their religious duties" (par 6). Unlike, say, the United States or secular Europe, then, this document urges states to support the religious lives of their citizensd and their institutions such as schools. Imagine, for a second, if our own country were to adopt such a positive approach to religious schools (granting that at this point in time that might be less desirable than at the time Dignitatis Humanae was written). Indeed, perhaps such an approach in our country from the start would've yielded a healthier religious plurality rather than the de facto Protestant establishment followed by a decline into the muddle that we now face on these questions.

This great document, then, takes nothing properly away from God and the Church, but rather demands that freedom be allowed for the preaching of the Gospel, and that coercion by the state not interfere in matters of religion. This is fundamentally important, since so much of today's European secularism and lack of Church attendance stems from lingering bitterness over the abuses of integralist "Christendom". A state religion enforced by coercion often means one associated with the many abuses that come with any state or form of government, and a revolt against the government can often seem necessarily to demand a revolt against the religion, as occurred in the French Revolution and the revolutions of the 19th century.

Dignitatis Humanae therefore acknowledges that the era of Christendom is over and is indeed perhaps an exception rather than the rule for the Church's pilgrim journey towards her Bridegroom. Rather than demanding partnership with the state, the Church demands freedom to be a leaven for the nations and to preach the Gospel without State-induced compromise. Only in this way can the excesses of secularist Europe, and the abuses of "Christendom" that sadly helped bring it about, be avoided.

I recently encountered the work of California revivalist George Washington Smith, who, despite having a name which sounds like a sixties novelty song performer, produced some intriguing if low-key work back at the beginning of the last century. Smith did not produce the most exciting work of the Spanish Colonial revival, and on the whole his work consists of those polite, plain-vanilla workmanlike background buildings that, in a more civilized age, would not require architects to get right. Still, his few ecclesiastical works show a more sophisticated touch within that simplicity, and offers much food for thought for those who would produce high architecture at a low cost.



Front Elevation: Immaculate Conception, Ajo, Arizona. A complex and beautiful detail--and one which would be fairly inexpensive to reproduce--enlivens and elevates an otherwise simple facade.

My favorite Smith work, and one of only two churches I am aware that he undertook, is the parish church he designed for Ajo, Arizona (the name means "garlic") as part of a masterplan for the would-be southwestern-style garden city. Immaculate Conception is intriguing, first, as it was designed as part of a new urban context, and not merely plopped into a suburban lot with only convenience as the determining factor. It faces onto the town's curvilinear main plaza, flanked on the opposite side of the road by a Protestant church originally intended to be of similar, if smaller and simpler, design.

This move--of differing denominations given equal time on a main square--is not an uncommon move in more recent attempts to plan an ideal city in a religiously mixed society; Lutyens did something similar with his plan for Hampstead Garden Suburb where the established Anglican church sends its spire upward next to the domed top of a Free Church meeting house. More recently, the folks at Seaside plopped a nondemoninational chapel down in their town more as a bit of urban furniture than an actual place of worship, and even then, as a civic gesture, the strange bit of preserved dune scrub later placed between the chapel and Seaside's Ruskin Square effectively negates any meaningful relationship between it and the town as a whole.

The church at Ajo has the happy advantage of being built in the southwest--like most of Smith's works--and thus is built in an adaptation of the local Hispano-Mexican vernacular. Stucco and adobe are capable of covering a multitude of budgetary sins, and also have the advantage of adding interest through their mottled surfaces to the vast unadorned walls that are often forced on the unmoneyed client. At the very least, with Catholicism raplidly expanding in the south and west, a careful study of such stucco and adobe work seems a very good idea for a church architect to undertake.



Merill & Pastor's recently completed elegant Carribbean Colonial-inspired Rosemary Beach Town Hall in Florida.

Recent secular work, such as that undertaken at Seaside and Rosemary Beach by firms such as Merrill Pastor show that not all modern stucco-work is of the supermarket strip-mall variety; such a wall-driven aesthetic allows money to be spent on refining and detailing to the highest level only very crucial symbolic and practical points in a church project. Smith is not the only architect within the last century to do decent simple work with the style--indeed, mixtures of low mission baroque and Romanesque revival crop up in an astonishing number of places and with a surprising quiet dignity. There's even a handsome mid-century brick-and-stone Romanesque church in chilly and distinctly un-Hispanic South Bend, Indiana, with a few generic Baroque flourishes that elevate it from commonplace to clever, especially considering the budget it was doubtlessly built on.

Indeed, Smith's other ecclesiastical project, a funeral memorial chapel-cum-vault, is in that mixed Romanesque-Baroque mode, with a simplified Baroque dome and a stripped-down Lombardic-inspired gable. It is a flexible style, and worthy of emulation for those having to count their pennies. Still, I'd caution architects to be careful with their revivalism--I can think of a good many bad Taco Bell-esque edifices inflicted on the Southwest, as well as even fairly good Spanish Colonial-style structures in places where they manifestly don't belong--wet South Florida, where a whole pueblo would wash away in one hour of summer rain, or even Minnesota, where vigas and bell-walls simply don't belong.



Holy Cross Parish, South Bend: Not a George Washington Smith project, but a somewhat later example of mixed Romanesque and Baroque elements, here adapted to a Midwestern contect.

Smith's church is more baroque than it is Romanesque, and it points to the curious fact that while America has always felt mildly uncomfortable around this most Italian and Catholic of styles, somehow in the southwest, its Spanish cousin seems to avoid setting off alarm bells for one of our nation's numerous stylistic neuroses. Perhaps the Franciscan connection is appropriately soothing. Whatever the reason, Smith's design is a brilliant example of how simplified Baroque detailing can enliven a remarkably plain, even stark, facade. Gothic suffers when reduced to basics, and full-blown pure Romanesque really requires real stone (and sometimes brick) to truly sing.



Immaculate Conception: the apse. Note the complex results achieved through the judicious combination of simple elements and the visual interest resulting from the distinct texture of the stucco. .

Immaculate Conception is a brilliant budget response to both the historical context of its site, and designed in such a way that its environment almost automatically brings out the best in it. Using a dome, rather than a campanile, to be the visual focus of the composition, is particularly clever, as it serves to dignify both the interior of the church and its exterior. A campanile has presence only on the exterior, and its purpose can be easily duplicated through a simple bellcote. The rough stucco enlivens potentially dull blank surfaces in a time-tested way seen across the whole of the Southwest--Georgia O'Keefe's painting of the oddly massive and unintentionally sculptural rear buttress of the Rancho de Taos parish church comes to mind--while its blinding whitness is all the more beautiful under an Arizona blue sky that lends itself to simple silhouettes. Still, while simplified, it is not merely simple, and its component parts not basic building blocks but cleverly massaged to pack the most into very little. While fairly cost-effective for its time, the design does not shy away from complex elements such as a dome or a conceptually elaborate--if simply rendered--broken pediment. A project such as this shows that baroque detail need neither impare the cost of a church, nor is it a style alien to the roots of American Catholic culture.



Immaculate Conception: Another view of the rear; note the bellcote to the left of the dome. On the whole, striking: though the dome's lantern might have been more interesting with true windows, rather than being blind as designed.

Simplicity does not mean plainness, or austerity. Nor does it is achieved by shying away from "fancy" details such as domes, cupolas, vaults or the elegant touch provided by a judicious bit of baroque detail. Such are the lessons taught by the church at Ajo, and they speak to the future of parish projects across both the Southwest, and in more abstract ways, the whole country.

Your update on that most promising of new Catholic churches, the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Lacrosse, Wis.

Mark Shea is very good at pointing out the frequency with which well-meaning Evangelicals, presumably precisely because they are well-meaning, tend to discover Catholic teaching anew by drawing to conclusion what they already believe about Christ.

He points to This article about Evangelicals discovering Catholic teaching on artificial birth control. Of course, being Catholics, we give this same truth a really cool Latin name (Humanae vitae!) and they, being Evangelicals, give it a kind of hokey-slogan name ("Is your quiver full?"). But, either way, hurray, culture of life!

Also of interest, in the vain of Evangelicals discovery Catholic teaching and practice, is this book introducing religious life to Evangelicals, Karen Sloan's Flirting with Monasticism, which is an easy and fun read about her encounter with a Dominican novice, and, through him, mendicant life.

I look forward to the next book published in this vain, "Evangelicals Discover the Papacy." I can imagine it now: "Pastor John was trying to find some way to exercise the Petrine ministry of confirming the brethern, but then we realized: it's already been done!"

Such an awesome picture deserves a good caption. Anyone?

Pakistan is amending its laws to allow persecution for rape

A woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan, according to the country's independent Human Rights Commission... Correspondents say these figures are probably an under-estimation as many rapes are not reported.


This is due in no small part to the fact that it is almost impossible to be convicted of raping a woman--in fact, usually the woman herself faces prosecution for inciting the rape:

Until now rape cases were dealt with in Sharia courts. Victims had to have four male witnesses to the crime - if not they faced prosecution for adultery.

A change for the sake of justice and humanitarianism:

Now civil courts will be able to try rape cases, assuming the upper house and the president ratify the move.

However, devout Muslims are opposed:

Religious parties boycotted the vote saying the bill encouraged "free sex"... They have threatened nationwide protests over the revised bill.

The Times is reporting rumors of the creation of a personal prelature for converts from Anglicanism to the Catholic communion.

"...the Pope will this week receive on his desk a document that proposes something akin to an Opus Dei-style personal prelature for disgruntled Anglicans of a Catholic bent. This would allow them to be received into the Catholic Church but retain their Anglican identity, with presumably their (or should I say our?) own priests going with them too. William Tighe, who touts this possibility, which is also being debated on ShipofFools, says nothing will be published officially before January."

Friends have told me that the Pastoral Provision parishes are essentially a dead-end in the long run, because there is no provision for their continuing Anglican identity: there is no way for seminarians to be trained specifically to continue these parishes, and so therefore they will eventually revert to typical Roman Rite parishes.

However, Personal Prelatures have the right to establish national or international seminaries, and therefore the creation of a viable "sub-Rite" within the Roman Church.

We'll see. And pray :)

My discussion about hermeneutics of rupture and continuity in the comments box on Matt's NPR post elicited disagreement on two levels. The first of these was about the value of a hermeneutics of continuity at all, and whether reading Vatican II supports such a thing. The second, and I believe the more serious, had to do with my reading of recent history, specifically recent American Catholic history. I, in fact, have my own particular thesis, based on both (what I consider) thorough research and reading of both sides of the issue from the time period in question, as well as encounters with those who were present. Thus, I feel that I speak with some degree of competence, regardless of limitations of age. Furthermore, I am of the firm belief that some distance from those tumultuous times might actually provide a healthy detachment of perspective from the events, and thus a different lens of interpretation than might otherwise be available.

With that, let me share my perspective on American Catholicism in the 1950's. The Church was strong in terms of numbers as such and in terms of attendance; no one can really disagree with this. Behind this exterior strength, however, I do believe that there were certain kinds of interior issues that were not present on the surface but that came out with a vengeance in the next decade.

One of these, I think, was an often weak theological formation for priests and religious, which of course also found its way to the laity. While Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris called for a re-emphasis on the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the way this often ended up coming to the average seminary was in the form of neo-scholastic manuals that often bore little resemblance to the teaching of St. Thomas himself. Furthermore, the dryness and singular approach of these manuals (I admit that I am making some inevitable generalizations here, but not particularly unfair ones, in my opinion) tended on the one hand a) to mask the theological creativity within the Church and b) to give the impression of a fixed theological system (as opposed to a fixed deposit of faith with a plurality of legitimate theological expressions, especially on matters not pertaining to defined dogma). This led to both a desire for more compelling theology, whatever it might be, and a degree of unpreparedness for change. Had they been reading de Lubac at the time rather than the manuals, one suspects they may have had less thirst for more radical theologians later. That they were not reading de Lubac, of course, had partially to do with unjust strictures stemming from Humani Generis, which de Lubac graciously accepted - a patience which later helped him become an influential part of the Second Vatican Council.

This confident, burgeoning Church of the 1950's also flourished within a milieu where American Catholicism was still an urban phenomenon and only beginning the move to the suburbs. Note what some suburban churches (and city churches, for that matter, as Matt recently explicated with the unfortunate chapel at NYU) built in that decade look like, and you might get a sense that some sort of aesthetic change for the worse was already afoot. American utilitarian and consumerist attitudes were already starting to make their way into the Church, and the continuance of this phenomenon would have likely produced some sort of crisis later on, one way or another. Add to this the fact that, some places excepting, the United States did not have a particularly consistent tradition of liturgy and music, leading to the "layered closets" of which Thomas Day speaks in which one finds, even before Vatican II, a marked degree of trendiness, much of it for the worse. Exceptions aside, the musical disasters of the 1950's and later did not come out of a vacuum but rather out of a continual lack of a sense of musical tradition. If, as Day argues, more choirs were abolished in the 1950's than in the 60's, something was definitely problematic already. Ironically, the exceptions to this dismal choral record seem to have come mostly in the Midwest, where the liturgical movement was taking hold in interesting and occasionally strange ways (such as Cardinal Stritch's versus populum funeral in Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago in 1958), but such careful approaches were quickly left in the dust of the chaotic '60's.

In the area of religious life, it is also strongly arguable that many religious communities in the 1950's were perhaps approaching the religious life with a bit too much rigidity and ignoring legitimate ways of adapting. This is evident, for example, in women's religious communities in the 1950's that were resistant to changes that, had they implemented them, might have staved off some of the problems of the '60's. It is also evident in the fact that those communities that were the very strictest in the time before the Council tended to be the ones that experienced the worst problems afterwards. It would seem to show that in some cases a healthy moderation was lacking, and that perhaps earlier openness to small change might have prevented some of the disasters to come.

The Church in America, like much of the rest of the world, was thus unprepared to deal with a Council that was in some sense long overdue. It also entered the Council at something of a crossroads in its own life, though it probably did not realize it was at a crossroads. Thus, the event of the Council itself unwittingly unleashed many latent forces in American Catholicism that only needed an excuse to express themselves, and apparently had no idea how to do so in a healthy manner. What happened at this point was not the effect of some massive conspiracy against a thriving Church, but rather of existing weaknesses showing themselves and becoming epidemic. This is not to blame all of the problems we have endured on this particular condition, but rather simply to acknowledge that it was there and that the 1950's and preceding decades and centuries were not an idealized past, but a time like any others, with good points and also with problems.

A hermeneutic of continuity, then, proposes that Vatican II was not only not a bad thing but was in itself a good and necessary event for the Church. The evangelical impulses coming out of Trent and its surrounding events had perhaps done as much as they could, and it was time for the Church to engage herself with new and good trends within the Church, such as the nouvelle theologie and the new lay movements in their infancy at the time. By acknowleding religous freedom, this Council bequeathed to us Dignitatis Humanae, whose discussion of that issue far surpasses any before or since in American polity. It bequeathed to us also the new evangelization, proposed in Paul VI's Evangelii Nuntiandi, championed in John Paul II's pontificate, and continued in Benedict XVI's. Furthermore, legitimate theological plurality within the Church lends itself to new and healthy engagement with philosophy and the others sciences, as well as the continuous unpacking of giants like St. Thomas himself, St. Bonaventure, and more recent greats like Hans Urs von Balthasar. This kind of plurality is necessary for theology in the Church to function creatively as it ought, and to engage in positive, serious dialogue with Orthodox and Protestant thinkers.

But a hermeneutic of continuity also acknowledges that we cannot have a brighter future by ignoring the present and the past 40 years. That is not to validate the mistakes that have been made, but rather to realize that we have to deal with their aftermath and approach it compassionately and realistically. This is why St. John Cantius or FSSP parishes, while providing insights to us, cannot realistically be a model for how to move forward liturgically at this time. While these places are certainly not entirely ideologically uniform, as I may have mistakenly implied earlier, they do presuppose a certain unity of openness to Latin, chant, and the like that simply cannot be expected to immediately take hold elsewhere. We cannot expect the average parish, with its plurality of views, to immediately go in the direction we might want, and indeed that the Church wants. Rather, we must learn to bring the insights of the tradition to bear on our current context with charity and with patience. Not everyone is going to listen to, and many will resist vehemently, proposals to use chant or polyphony at Mass.

In opposition, then, to our earlier commentors I think that the nouvelle theologie of de Lubac, Danielou, Balthasar, Benedict XVI, and John Paul II, and the Council that it helped inspire and continues to draw inspiration from, provide the best chance for the future of the Church. Our mission, then, is to go out and to proclaim the joy of living the Gospel and the Catholic life, the joy and beauty of the riches of our liturgy and tradition. Such a proclamation, I strongly believe, will open many eyes and ears that have perhaps been henceforth closed.

Man's voice: I think she's dead.
Woman's voice: No I'm not!

(sounds of physical harm and screaming start again.)

Announcer: That was episode two of "The Death of Mary, Queen of Scots", specially adapted for radio by Gracie Fields and Joe Frazier. And now, Radio Four will explode.

~Monty Python's Flying Circus

After reading an abridgement of John Guy's new and rather flamboyantly titled Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, I'm left more and more confused as to truly who Mary quite contrary really was. Guy pretty readily rejects Mary as an outright martyr, calling it a pose or perhaps a psychological prop, but she also doesn't think the gal did in her hubby Lord Darnley. I'm not sure I can be so quick to dismiss her martyr status, but at the same time, I'm not sure whether to affirm it, either. I'd like to think of Mary as a martyr, and as another of that select group of uppity Catholic heroines I revere (Joan and the Catherines of Aragon and Siena, for instance), but it's hard to really get a bead on her true motives.

The court that had her executed was certainly a kangaroo one and the motives that led to her death were inextricably linked to both politics and religion, but the fact of her third marriage to Bothwell being celebrated according to Protestant rites is at least somewhat baffling when it comes to her personal piety. Of course, a long time elapsed between that and her death, and it was a weird time for just about everyone involved. At the very least, her being Catholic didn't help when push came to shove, and you could add her to that vague category of Passion-Bearers and mixed religio-political martyrs that includes Louis XVI, Charles I and the late Tzar Nicholas.

What are we to make of this tragic chameleon? This imperious, strong-willed five-foot-ten beauty (with impeccable fashion sense, an almost theatrical manner and Hollywood leading-lady good looks if her death mask is anything to indicate) alternately cast as the craftiest and most bloodthirsty of Papist agents and the passive, ultimate wronged woman who seemed to have had the worst taste in husbands known to history. Certainly, the first image is more the product of a fevered Tudor imagination, but the second, while closer to the historical record, is even harder to square with her strong will and intense, even rash, personality.

Certainly, she riccocheted wildly between dominating and being dominated by the men in her life, whoever they were. I'm utterly confused, and I'm curious to know what my learned and gentle readers make of her.

So--Mary, Queen of Scots: so good or no good?

TIME.com: Today's Nun has a Veil--and a Blog


Combatting the axiom that no news is good news, the latest issue of Time takes a look at the communities of women religious whose numbers are growing and whose average age is dropping. It's a familiar story to the blogosphere by now, but not so much to your average Time reader.

Towards the end of the article, it seems as though the author might be ascribing some of the success of these communities to their technological savvy, rather than more substantial attributes. On the whole, though, it was a pleasant, uplifting, and honest article, and I experienced remarkably little of the internal cringing I generally go through when reading MSM pieces about Catholicism.

Repeat readers to the website will no doubt be aware of the Pastoral Provision started by Pope John Paul II, and the attendant Anglican Use liturgy. Check out their shiny brand new website! (Catholics and Anglicans, and ex-Anglican Catholics can all agree on their love of shiny objects.)

For those of you who just tuned in after that last commercial break, the Pastoral Provision is a juridical process by which Anglican or Episcopalian clergy and whole parishes can be brought over to the Catholic faith while retaining a distinct identity in the form of a very beautiful liturgy (approved by the Vatican and the U.S. Bishops, with one of the best translations of the Roman Canon out there) derived from the Book of Common Prayer, with plenty of smells, bells and ad orientem altars. There are six or so parishes in the U.S. that fall in this category. The Pastoral Provision's clergy are unimpeachably Catholic, in union with Rome, and also increasingly numerous these days: eighty have been ordained since the whole thing started more than a quarter-century ago, with more on the way as we speak.



In other Pastoral Provision Internet News, it looks like Our Lady of the Atonement in Texas has also significantly snazzed up their website, with some shots of their mammoth parish church extension only recently dedicated, as well as other signs of thriving sacramental and parochial life.

"My tea does not contracept!"

At long last, it aired: Matt and Dawn's Catholic-on-the-street interview with NPR religion correspondent Rachel Martin at St. Agnes. Check it out! It's actually pretty even-handed, and much less alarmist than most of the recent coverage on the subject. And my radio voice ain't half bad!

First, the obligatory gratuitous links of some of my hypothetical projects and ink drawings:

Christ the King Seminary, La Crosse, Wisconsin
Church of Our Lady, Queen of the English Martyrs, Chicago
A New Church Building for St. Agnes, 43rd Street, New York
S. Saviour's Parish Church, Generic Suburban Location
S. Gregory the Great and His Parents
Portrait of the Authoress Dawn Eden with an Allegorical Image of Chastity


Christ the King Seminary, La Crosse, Wisconsin

And now that we've got that out of the way, we're glad to have you here! Both Dawn's very kind comments earlier this week and the JunkYardBlog's intriguing take on the troubling state of the arts among our Protestant separated brethren offer some food for thought. My blogging confrere Drew has discussed the monumental awfulness of Thomas Kinkade before as symptomatic of a vacuum in American religious culture regarding the notion of kenotic suffering as a background against which joy can only be understood.

Still, I think in this instance this question of church architecture can be chalked up only partially to theological difference (meeting-house vs. Domus Dei), but at the same time, it is also symptomatic of an across-the-board throwaway attitude to church design which impacts Catholics and Protestants alike, and even secular architecture. There is, first, an absolute bare minimum of quality in design required by human dignity that is not being met in most secular architecture--and if it's not being met for places we sleep and dine and live in, how much less with God's house! Compare, for instance, the utilitarianism of two hundred years ago, with that of today. Even a disused Victorian warehouse with mass-produced cast-iron decoration is a world apart from the corrugated metal of today's quonset hut.

It's an issue of quality and laziness, in part; with regards to ecclesial architecture, it comes down in many respects to an indifference towards thought, any thought at all. Often, the whole notion that an architecture can signify something is totally forgotten, much less the question of what it should signify. Before we even get to the meaty theological questions of the house of God and the house of God's people, there's a rock-bottom modicum of thought required by good architecture, that a building is more than just a roof over one's head, that it can actually convey some sort of meaning--even if we may disagree over the substance of that meaning, or its propriety--that is not being met today.

I understand we may disagree, Catholic and Protestant, as to what the ideal results ought to be, but at least realizing that some thought has to be put into it is a fairly major mental step for many out there. It just doesn't come up. Someone may think that the stained-glass of Chartres is beautiful, but they often leave it at that, rather than pursuing it beyond art for art's sake. What does this tell us about God? About what the Catholic Church teaches? On a more personal level, what does my awestruck response to it tell me about the impact of God working through the arts, and through physical means in general?

It is interesting to note that the recent outlet-mall megachurch trend is in fact something of a deviation from the last century's trends in Protestant architecture, which was previously moving towards a more liturgical model, even in denominations not known for ritualism. The Catholic and Catholicizing Oxford Movement and the work of the Ralph Adams Cram caused an invisible revolution not only in Catholic but in Protestant churches as well. No longer was the simple white country meeting-house a model, but instead some American Protestants aspired to create their own versions of Europe's Gothic monuments. While not totally successful, at the very least, Puritan clapboard was replaced with stained-glass and grey stone as the stereotypical ideal.

(Cram once commented that the only thing that his monumental East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pitsburg required to celebrate a Catholic High Mass were a crucifix, six candlesticks and twenty minutes of prep time.)

In some instances, this change in design also accompanied a change in theological perspective, as with the Anglo-Catholic party within the Church of England, while in other places, it was more of a shift in taste than in theology. The pulpit did not give way to the altar in the chancel, and the attendant theologies of sanctoral devotion and sacramental realities did not take hold among the Presbyterians and Methodists. There nonetheless remained an openness to artistic and spiritual beauty in some form. Even then, there were a few cautious but significant shifts in emphasis: one particularly interesting case-study is that of Cram's Euclid Avenue Presbyterian in Cleveland, which ripped out an old shallow chancel with a dominant pulpit and organ and replaced it with a freestanding and distinctly altar-like communion table with an ornate Gothic reredos-cum-backdrop in the 1920s.

But even before we reach that point, there is a bare minimum which is far from being met in both the sacred and the profane. The plainest New England meeting-house had a spare sort of dignity to it, and was consistent with the theology preached within, even if the theology it expressed was radically different from that of, say, my beloved St. Vincent Ferrer. While Puritan austerity is at odds with Catholic theology, it was not aggressively ugly in the way that most contemporary designs are. At the very least, some thought was put into what a building meant, and starkness was chosen not because it was cheaper, but because it meant something--just as we ornament our churches to express the timeless truth of the Incarnation. (And certainly simplicity and austerity are Catholic and incarnational virtues when properly understood, as in the case of Cistercian architecture, a world apart from the Astrodome churches built today.) Even if we may disagree on the existential significance of the church building, there is a basic common denominator that a building, any building, can be more than just about structure or shelter, or be more than simply about itself, that we all can agree on that requires us to demand to look deeper into the philosophy we express in our churches, and the message that it may send, intentional or not.

I've managed to find some images of the curious Flamboyant Gothic brick church in Vilnius which was the inspiration for my Holy Trinity Chapel project; I post them here in part to show that I wasn't just imagining the odd half-round pseudo-proto-Palladian thermal window, and also to give a sense to my readers of how the traditionally-trained architect works from a precedent, modifying and massaging it to produce a new organic whole often surprisingly different from its parent model.


St. Anne's at night.

The ever-useful Wikipedia notes:

A novel aproach to bricks as a construction material was employed in the church's construction. The main façade, designed in the Flamboyant Gothic style, is its most striking feature. Traditional Gothic elements and shapes were used in unique ways; Gothic arches are framed by rectangular elements dominating a symmetrical and proportionate façade, creating an impression of dynamism.

St. Anne's during the day, showing its monastic context

[...] It was built using 33 different kinds of red-painted bricks. The interior is decorated in the Baroque style, as is its altar. The imitative neo-Gothic bell tower, constructed in 1870s, stands nearby.

The entry also notes:

The first church at this site, thought to be wooden, was built for Anna, the second wife of Vytautas the Great. Originally initially intended for the use of Catholic Germans and other visting Catholics, it was destoyed by a fire in 1419. The present brick church was constructed on the initiative of the King Alexander[2] in 1495 - 1500 and has also suffered severe fire damage. The reconstruction of the church, funded by Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł and Jerzy Radziwiłł, was carried out in 1582. The exterior of the church has remained almost unchanged since then.

The design of the church building is attributed to either Michael Enkinger, the architect of a church of the same name in Warsaw, or to Benedikt Rejt. However, none of the attributions is attested in written sources. St. Anne's Church is part of an ensemble, comprised of the much larger Gothic Church of St. Francis and Bernardines with a monastery.

Just thought you might like to know. There's a whole lot more Gothic out there besides delicate French cathedrals and pastoral English parish churches, and would-be architects would do well to study it.

From Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History:

When the great chess reform took place at the end of the fifteenth century, Catholic countries continued to use the vulgar [vernacular] equivalents of domina--dama in Spain, donna in Italy and dame in France, that evoked "Our Lady." But in Germany and England, transformed by the Protestant Reformation, refused derivatives of domina that might suggest any link to the suspect cult of the Virgin Mary. Instead they used the secular terms Konigin and "queen."

From a Hebrew text attributed to the Spaniard Bonsenior ibn Yehia:

She sits at the top of the high places above the city. She is restless and determined. She girds her loins with strength. Her feet stay not in her house. She moves in every direction and into every corner. Her evolutions are wonderful, her spirit untiring. How comely are her footsteps as she moves diagonally, one step after another, from square to square!

And the King, dressed in black robes, stands on the fourth square, which is white. His queen stands on the square next to him, which is black. He draws near to the pitch darkness, his eye is upon her, for he has taken an Ethiopian woman [as his consort]. There is no difference between them as they come towards you. They set out towards you along the same path, at the same pace, and by the same route. When the one dies, so does the other.

From Gautier de Coinci (c. 1177-1236) Miracles of the Virgin Mary:

Whoever serves her [Mary] well
Has such an advantage in all games
That the devil...
Cannot beguile him

[...]

God made such a Virgin Queen
That the devil was mated and undone.

[...]

God planned a brilliant move long in advance
Which the devil in no way foresaw.

[...]

He covered His side with His Queen.

[...]

The devil, who works much evil,
When God had advanced His Queen
Lost his wits and his power.

[...]

This Queen moves in such a way
That she checks the adversary in all directions
The traitor who knows many moves
Soon takes fright when she moves:
He cannot fathom even one of hers.

[...]

Then she gives him a perfect check
So ingenious and well done
That he immediately loses the game completely--
O! What a queen! O! What a chess queen.

[In reference to the former move of the chess queen, which was one square, rather than her current unlimited powers:]

Other queens move but one square,
But this one moves so fast...
That before the devil has taken one of hers
She has him so bound and bewildered
That he doesn't know which way to move.

[...]

This Queen mates the devil head on,
This Queen mates him in the angle
This Queen quiets his jangle
This Queen deprives him of his prey,
This Queen torments him every day.
This Queen goads him everywhere,
This Queen [drives him] square to square.

[...]

We cannot move without you,
[We are] your pawns:
Teach us to play, God's Chess Queen [lit., Fierce Dieu]
And take such care of us
That to the great King
We may all arrive.

A Hypothetical Church Project by Matthew Alderman


A Proposal for Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel, New York City. Matthew Alderman. Elevation onto Washington Square.

Now, I believe, nobody can say any longer that Matthew Alderman doesn't do Gothic. Or at least a species of Gothic suitably esoteric to satisfy my curiosity. Despite being in favor of a properly dogmatic understanding of the Faith, I tend not to be particularly strict when it comes to architecture, so long as it falls under the big tent of what might be termed organic tradition by some or classicism by others (in the small-c sense); the broad variety of styles, manners and hybrids that lie within that vast sweep all are necessary in some way, as with the bewildering variety of the spiritualities and personalities of the saints, to express the multiplicity of charisms that lie within the unity of the Catholic Church. Certainly, there are levels of sophistication and refinement, hierarchies of decorum and propriety, as well as practical considerations such as site or budget that suggest the selection of one mode of design over the other, or the organic development or creation of a new style, or the mixing of several different ways of building.

In this instance, Gothic was the only truly workable and sensible aesthetic choice. Holy Trinity Chapel, the semi-obselescent Newman Center for NYU, overlooks the southern end of Washington Square Park in New York, occupying a choice if narrow lot (50 by 200 feet) directly across the street from the venerable Romanesque-Renaissance-Beaux Arts Judson Memorial Chapel by the equally famous belle epoque classical firm McKim, Meade and White. This startling juxtaposition of a broad, heavy, classical mass with the narrow slender shape that Holy Trinity's lot would most logically generate, not to mention the contrast of Catholic versus Protestant, would have made for a truly virtuoso essay in city church design. However, instead, what got built on the site was a sort of grubby Stalinist parody of Sainte-Chapelle. It's due to be torn down, as most of the student parish functions have gotten absorbed by St. Joseph's a few blocks over, a tastefully dull Greek Revival box from the days when that sort of thing was popular.


Holy Trinity Chapel, as it stands.

The actual loss of the building is not a big one, but the loss of the site is extremely unfortunate to say the least. The prominence of what might have been a living parish community showing the cross in public, especially contrasted with the comparative institutionalized redundancy of Judson, now largely reduced to a glorified school auditorium. Furthermore, the replacement of a fairly low, human-scale structure, even an ugly one, with another high-rise slab hardly seems a felicitous urban development.

So, naturally, I got my sketchpad out and decided I'd tackle the problem myself.

My first notion, and the one I'd probably pursue if I was magically given this entirely imaginary commission, was to essentially plop down a Manhattanized interpretation of Sainte-Chapelle on the site. Given the proportions of the site, the time-tested refinement of French Gothic, the totemic significance of collegiate medievalism, not to mention the significance of a Catholic French university, that of Paris, to the history of higher education, such a design would be the most conservative and probably the most striking option. Washington Square, with its gleaming white marble arch and urbane atmosphere, has an aura almost European in feel that would be complemented by a gesture to this most glorious of Christendom's temples.


Judson Memorial Church, across the street.

So, naturally, I did something completely different. That's the freedom of the esquisse, the sketch project, that it allows you to strike out in a direction you might not have the luxury to in a real-life situation. Furthermore, the elegant refimenents and minor changes that would make a Sainte-Chapelle design the architect's own, are not possible in the broad, quick format of an esquisse, designed for broader explorations. French Gothic is the creme brulee of architecture--remarkably beautiful but very difficult to truly improve on and make your own. That doesn't mean necessarily one ought to stop making it; except I felt like doing something more unique for my own benefit.

I was principally inspired by the Gothic of Germany and the German-influenced lands of the east, an area with a rich Gothic past mostly overlooked by past revivals. The round arch that graces the front facade of the chapel, as well as much of the westwerk's design was inspired by the curious St. Anne's Church in Vilnius, with its appropriately three Trinitarian pinnacles. Other aspects of the design, such as its scalloped and faintly Dutch gable outline and its Cram and Goodhue-inspired detailing are intended to harmonize with the broader spectrum of New York Gothic and Dutch Revival architecture, while the red-brown brick, buff stone trim, and brick-and-stone striping are intended to tie the radically different architecture of the church to the colors and materials of its Romanesque next-door neighbor.

The iconography of the front facade is thoroughly Trinitarian and represents in stone the gradual unfolding of Divine Revelation from the Old Testament to the New Covenant. The portals are conceived as a Tree of Jesse, with Our Lady and the Infant Jesus at its center as the Sedes Sapientiae. Above the portals are the holy ancestors of Our Lord, including Adam and Eve, Noah, Enoch, David and Solomon. This group in turn is flanked by figures of Moses and Elijah, representing the shift from the age of the patriarchs to those of the prophets. Moving upwards, above the window, is the Trinity as the Throne of Grace, with Mary and St. John the Baptist standing beneath the arms of the cross, and symbols of Faith, Hope and Charity, paralleling the three Persons of the Trinity. Peter and Paul bookend the composition, just as Enoch and Elijah do below. A triple-barred cross crowns the gable, with a sunbursted triangle topping the spire. Note the placement of the astronomical clock between the registers representing the Old and New Covenants, representing the end of time, the coming of the Eschaton and the promise of Heaven. This also serves as an important civic gesture to the park, as there is no public clock on the square of this size at present.


A Proposal for Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel, New York City. Matthew Alderman. Elevation onto side-street.

The side-elevation continues the themes of the front facade. The four evangelists stand in the niches on the upper register, with further Old Testament prophets below. There is an attached rear service building housing classrooms and parochial offices, entered off a small courtyard or light-well with an iron-grilled entrance opening onto the side-street. A statue of St. Catherine, patroness of students, stands next to the entrance and forms the base of an octagonal chimney that anchors the parish house to the courtyard archway sequence. The upper level of the chapel, with its small clerestory windows, is intended to allow a small assembly hall to be located above the chapel, reached by stairs or elevator from the narthex.

The exploration of such designs, while ultimately unrealizable in this instance, allows us to consider how such problems--a juxtaposition of Catholic and Protestant, religious and urban--might be handled in future, and when we consider the sorry state of the church that this hypothetical design replaces, justifies the traditional architect of today to both the art itself and its future practitioners in a happier and more sensitive age.