This is the best Zenit Headline ever...

"Holy Water, Abstinence and Mimes."

"Finally, several readers asked if it was permitted to incorporate mimes and dramas during the reading of the Passion and other Holy Week readings. ..."

"The liturgy is simply not the appropriate situation for such demonstrations even though they are praiseworthy and effective catechetical tools in other circumstances."

Err... I'm not sure mimes are ever effective catechetical tools, though maybe things are different in France.

I'm heading up to New Hampshire this Friday to give a presentation on what one might term the decline and rise of liturgical architecture in the United States at Thomas More College, the home of an excellent sacred art program we profiled some time ago, as well as writer-in-residence and Catholic bon vivant John Zmirak. Bring your friends, fellow clergy, and anyone else who might enjoy it:

The Collapse and Restoration of Sacred Architecture in America

In the last half-century, Catholic churches have become proverbially ugly. But today, young Catholics crave not ephemeral plywood and shag carpeting but the timeless signposts of beauty and mystery. Is this a mere shift in taste, or is a deeper cultural conversion at hand?

Join Matthew G. Alderman, New York-based architectural critic and liturgical artist, as he explores the traditional Catholic quest to create the ideal sacred space, what went right, what went wrong in recent years, how Pope Benedict is fixing it, and what you personally can do to help. He will give special attention to the history of the Liturgical Movement, the significance of the Western tradition of iconography and sacred geometry, and the prospects for renewal.

Thomas More College Humanities Room

6 Manchester Street, Merrimack, NH

Friday, February 27, 8 pm.

All are welcome.

Also coming up is a lecture entitled The Restoration of Gregorian Chant in the 20th Century, given by Dr. Sam Schmitt (Ph.D. in musicology from CUA), March 20th at 8:00pm at the College.

On the eve of Easter, Moscow broke out of its ordered service and a screaming, raving market opened on Red Square. [...] We went every year to take part in this traditional Moscow celebration with our father. Even from far away, as you approached Red Square, you could hear the sounds of whistles, pipes and other homemade instruments. The whole square was full of people. We moved amid the puppet boths, the tents and stalls that had appeared overnight. Our religious justification was buying willow branches for the All-Night Vigil to mark Jesus's entry into Jerusalem [a substitute for palms one finds in some colder western-rite countries]. But we preferred the other stalls which sold all kinds of weird and useless things, such as 'sea dwellers' living in glass tubes filled with colored liquid, or monkeys made from wool. There were colorful balloons with wonderful designs, and Russian sweets and cakes which wer were not allowed. Nor could be go to see the woman with moustaches, or the real mermaids, or the calves with a double-head.

The competition for New York's Episcopalian cathedral, St. John the Divine, saw many flamboyant entries, such as Carlo Sada's fanciful proposal for a 1,200 foot tall "skyscraper church" which would have overtopped the Manhattan skyline, as well as most tall buildings in the world at the time. Others, featuring a crossing bristling with four separate towers, resemble an interesting cut-and-paste Photoshop accident, and a few fairly handsome efforts in a classical style challenge our retrospective notions of the absolute supremacy of Gothic during the period. There's even one ambitious if awkward astylar effort by the adolescent Goodhue, precocious, if perhaps not having hit his stride quite yet.

One truly wonderful--and slightly hallucigenic--standout was W. Halsey Wood's proposal, titled Jerusalem the Golden. It is filled with all manner of recondite symbolism and extravagant touches, such as a great organ, a choir organ split up between the two towers, and at least eight or nine lesser organs placed over the entrances to the apsidal and even the nave chapels. The dazzling display of mystical symbolism was a bit too much for the earthbound press to appreciate, who, at one point panned Wood's elaborate reckonings of his numerical iconographies, wondering amid all these tribes, apostles and angels, what was actually going to hold the building up. (To give a sense of the massiveness of the structure, the choir itself would have been seventy feet wide, one hundred and thirty-five feet long, and contain one hundred and fifty stalls to each side.)

Wood's symbolism was hardly caprice. He ended up submitting a plan carefully annotated with the relevant lines from the Apocalypse of St. John which motivated his design choices. (He was not alone--the winning design, a rather inoffensive exercise in Byzantinized Richardsonian Romanesque by Heins and LaFarge, which was later abandoned in the middle of construction, was equally encrusted with symbolism, though not without some odder touches: "Seated statues at the peaks of the great gables represent great teachers of mistaken religions, Buddha, Muhammed, and Confucius being thus subordinated to the more perfect Christian faith." (I suppose, in retrospect, it is no more heterodox than the be-haloed Aristotle in one of the windows of St. Vincent Ferrer about forty blocks to the southeast, even if somewhat more peculiar.)

Some aspects of the design are a little strange--the rather weak articulation of the principal elevation behind the low screen of the narthex; the wealth of freestanding or nearly-freestanding towers, the stumpy nave swallowed up by the great crossing; but many of these are simply traceable to the titanic scale of the project, a feature common to every one of the designs submitted. In some respects, it was as much a skyscraper church as the Sicilian Sada's proposal, if perhaps in greater continuity with the past. Indeed, as centralized and upright as the design appears, in plan it rather resembles San Marco in Venice, and preserves a clear sense of liturgical directionality within the interior, even if tempered with the functional emphasis on preaching characteristic of American Episcopalianism at the time. It was undoubtedly the most creative, innovative and imaginative proposal, and deserved its moment of glory, though it never came.

Wood's failure devastated the man, and he died shortly thereafter. His few built works are, by comparison, fairly conventional examples of the period. His massive central tower, covering the congregational space close to the pulpit, is thought to have influenced Goodhue's proposal for St. Bartholomew's Church, which featured a prominent "ciborium," or high dome, which was unfortunately not completed as originally designed. In both, it represented an interesting--and fairly successful--attempt to coherently articulate, at least according to Christine Smith in her account of St. Bart's construction, a "low church" theology of divine immanence in the lavish artistic terms usually restricted to "high church" expressions of God's transcendence. Today, fixated as we are on the gypboard-lined House of the People of God, it is interesting to see that even this communitarian view of the liturgy, whatever theological concerns we might have about its neglect of the sacrificial aspects of traditional worship, at the very least need not be ugly, a-hierarchical or architecturally incoherent.

Cram wrote in 1936 that Wood, had he survived, might have been "potentially one of the great architects of modern times," commenting further that the design was "simply astounding... had it been built it would, I am persuaded, have marked an era in the development of American architectural style.... Visionary - impracticable and fantstic if you like, wholly original and combining instinct with tremendous vitality, it represented an emotional impulse that, I believe, could easily have been given a rational practicality if only the ecclesiastical authorities of the time had had the imagination and the courage to see their opportunity and avail themselves of it."

The Rev. Matt Compton woke up to turn the light off around 5 a.m. and heard sirens near the cathedral's rectory. He thought the fire trucks were headed to a nearby condominium and office building - but then he saw a firefighter unrolling a hose and heard another say, "No, it's the church."

He sprung into action.

Compton put his boots on, grabbed his coat and rushed into the church. He directed firefighters to a southwest stairwell that led into the attic above the cathedral's decorative ceiling.

In the cathedral, water poured from the ceiling as the firefighters began battling the flames.

"It almost appeared as if it was raining in the cathedral," Compton said, adding that it smelled like "burning wood, like a fireplace."

Icicles formed on the edges of the pews, and patches of ice covered the floor.

The Rev. Daniel Mayall, Holy Name's pastor, was matter-of-fact as he pointed to where pieces of a pillar had peeled off. Earlier in the morning, a waterfall had streamed down the pillar.

"There's no other visible damage except that," Mayall said. "Everything else looks like it did yesterday."

In the sanctuary, five galeros -- red ceremonial hats with tassels that belonged to former cardinals -- still hung, apparently soaked but intact.

was invented by a British businessman as a hearty drink for the soldiers of Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War. So, in a certain sense its original function was to preserve the Papal States. (It was the defeat of Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan which led to Piedmont’s annexation of Rome in September 1870). Furthermore, true to its Papal origins, an advertising campaign of ‘the early twentieth century’ (Wikipedia) boasted that Bovril, like the Pope, possesses an infallible power! In the case of Bovril presumably the power is to keep you warm at football matches, as it doesn’t seem to be much use against Prussians.

Puritans love disasters. No sooner has some calamity befallen mankind than some hair-shirted scold emerges from his priest hole and starts wagging his finger. The message is always the same: ‘You are being punished for your immoral lifestyle.’