Matthew Alderman Studios has been serving for the past few months as the designer for the principal elevation of the new St. Paul's University Catholic Center in Madison, Wisconsin, with RDG Design and Planning of Omaha serving as the overall architect of record. We are now releasing our concept to the various organs of the city government for their comment and review, so I can now share this exciting news with our readers.

St. Paul's University Catholic Church serves as the Newman Center for the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Under Fr. Eric Sternberg, it has spearheaded an amazing effort to bring the fire of the Faith to Madison's student population. Catholic life in Madison has undergone a remarkable renaissance under Bishop Morlino, and St. Paul's is one of the foundations of this resurgence. I can assert from personal experience that it is really heartening what is going on over there. St. Paul's is molding a new generation of faithful, responsible, and joyfully serious young Catholics.

The current facilities are crowded and do not match the parish's expanding vision. St. Paul's is proposing a mixed-use high rise, incorporating a chapel and offices on the lower floor, with a unique residential college located on its upper levels. The fourteen-story building's dormitories will house 175 students, while the chapel will have room for 500 worshippers. More details from the Wisconsin State-Journal:

Officials with the St. Paul Catholic Student Center at UW-Madison unveiled a new, less-boxy design Monday for a $45 million housing development and campus worship center. The design keeps the same square footage and 14-story height as an earlier version but presents it in a way that will better fit with surrounding historic buildings, they said. An April design drew concerns from city planners over mass and height.

"I don't know if we've addressed those concerns — it's the same height and size — but our goal is to convince city staff that while it's a tall building, it's not a very big building," said the Rev. Eric Nielsen, St. Paul's priest.

The project would replace the existing Catholic campus facility at 723 State St. The center's "relatively small" quarter-acre footprint would remain the same, with much of the 10,000 square feet coming in height, Nielsen said.

The student center portion of the current facility was built in the late 1800s. The chapel was built in 1909 and renovated 43 years ago. It has no residential component. The redeveloped center would house up to 175 students. "This is something Catholics in the state will want for students here, and urban density is something the city wants," Nielsen said.

City Planning Division Director Brad Murphy did not return phone calls for comment. The student center is across from Memorial Library on State Street Mall and between University Book Store and the landmark, neo-Gothic revival Pres House, the campus Presbyterian chapel. The new design looks less blocky and more classical than the earlier version, center officials said. It is "more cohesive" in the way it integrates a chapel and student center on the lower levels with several stories of student housing, Nielsen said.

Informational plans for the project were to be submitted Monday to the Madison Landmarks Commission, said Ron Trachtenberg, St. Paul's attorney. The project is expected to go before the Landmarks Commission Nov. 8 and before the Urban Design Commission Nov. 10. The City Council will need to approve it, he said. Center officials hope to break ground in two to three years, said Scott Hackl, St. Paul's development director. A vast majority of the money for the project is expected to be raised from a small group of benefactors, he said.

The project poses a number of intriguing challenges; it was commented when I was first discussing the possibility of involvement that I was probably the only ecclesiastical design consultant in America who had made a systematic study of early twentieth-century churches with similar mixed-use programs, which the concept is reminiscent of. I was brought on board once most of the internal program had been worked out, as well as the basic height and width of the building, but a lot of the exterior massing and detail had not yet been worked out. After consultation with the clients, a form of Romanesque was adopted as the preferred style, given its obvious ecclesiastical connotations, its ability to blend with a more modern Deco aesthetic, and its ability to withstand budgetary simplification.

The interior of the building will house a variety of dormitories, apartments, meeting rooms, study lounges, and other facilities for the campus ministry, as well as the chapel, which is accessed through a large lobby and will be on the second level of the structure. It was important to impart an ecclesiastical character to the principal facade while at the same time asserting the building's mixed-use status. In my own sketches, I drew on the work of Ralph Adams Cram at Christ Church Methodist in New York, a rugged urban ecclesiastical plant with a great deal of dignity and personality, and Bertram Goodhue's slightly earlier St. Bartholomew's, just down the street on Park Avenue. St. Bart's offered some particularly useful ideas, as the General Electric Building, a particularly lofty high rise, was built behind it and designed to serve as a suitable low-key backdrop for the church's Byzantine dome, in much the same way the main shaft of the structure relates to the church facade below. This is also an important precedent given the neighboring structure, Pres House, the Presbyterian university church, is a landmarked Gothic revival structure, so while St. Paul's should make its identity clear, it must also create a symbiotic relationship with the older structure.

I imagine you will hear more from me on this in the next few weeks as the story develops further and we get reactions from the vox pops. Everything I have heard so far has been very positive. I encourage you in any case, if you live in Wisconsin, to tell your friends and support this very worthy cause. Not only could this be a great moment for traditional architecture, it could be a unique and fruitful opportunity for future generations of young Catholics in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest.

'...and well-presented anthems in churches were often rewarded with cries of "Bravo" and handclapping.'

--Arthur J. May, The Hapsburg Monarchy 1867-1914, Harvard, 1951, p. 309

Someone had the...er...brilliant idea of inviting a man in a Winnie-the-Pooh suit to the recent birthday celebrations for Queen Elizabeth (or HRH Princess Philip of Greece and Denmark to those Jacobites in the audience). I am sure HM took things with her usual grace, but one simply wonders what made them connect men in foam costumes with royal dignity and old age.

I suspect Captain Jack Aubrey would have done slightly more than this. Still, points for style.

This little aside posted by Mark Shea reminds me why the word "spirituality" (when contrasted with "religion") puts me on my guard. There are a lot of things called spirits out there that aren't on the side of the angels. Or at least the good, unfallen sort of angels. Best to not go down that dark alley.

In my role as a lecturer on architectural topics I have been to a number of monasteries and convents, and even one seminary. All of them have been filled with devout, holy men and women and were of a traditional bent to their liturgy and life, but on one visit I definitively knew I was among friends when the monk showing me around said, in these exact words, "I'm quite devoted to the cult of relics,"* and then promptly opened up a largish armoire in the chapel filled with at least one hundred small bits of saints. I knew the talk I was scheduled to give was going to go over very well with that audience.

*Note to alarmed Protestants and the unchurched: Cult in this instance just means "veneration" or "respect" (cultus in Latin) but it sounds disappointly less scary if one puts it that way. It has nothing to do with worshipping Prince Philip as a god or drinking koolade in Guyana. One might speak in a secular context of the cultus of the American flag centered on the pledge of allegiance, or, in certain parts of the Midwest, the cultus of the Green Bay Packers centered on nearly everything someone can stick green and gold on.

The wonderful, wonderful book Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture from Jefferson to the Space Age was a constant companion of mine during college, and from it stems my fascination with Halsey Wood's "Sacre Coeur on Crack"-style design for St. John the Divine in New York; another great fanciful unbuilt unknown is this Maxfield Parrish-esque proposal (apparently seriously considered) for a U.S. summer capital complex in Colorado to house the President and his retinue during the hotter months. The castle would have been located in Mount Falcon, Colorado, and would have cost $50,000 and the landscaping $200,000. Views of Denver, the Continental Divide and Pikes' Peak would have been visible from the terrace. It would have been funded by popular subscription and was supported officially by 22 governors, who would have held the building in trust.

Wilson, who apparently had no love for Mitteleuropäische Count Chocula-style architecture (another point against him, in my book, not that I need an excuse*), nixed the idea. On the other hand, considering the massive expansion of the federal government some decades later seems to eerily intersect with the installation of air-conditioning in the federal city, perhaps this was all for the best.

*Please stand for the official anthem of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Guild of Amalgamated Deli Meat Producers and Hog Butchers: "Unser Kaiser has a first name, it's K-A-R-L, unser Kaiser has a second name it's H-A-B-S-B-U-R-G." Wait, that doesn't really scan. And I'm pretty sure Franz-Ferdinand didn't drive a Wienermobile, though it might have been from Wien (or Skoda, or something).

I do have some posts planned for today, but the image uploader is acting up this morning, so bear with me! Coming up later today or tomorrow: The turn-of-the-century castle that would have housed an American summer castle in Colorado, Winnie the Pooh turns up at Buckingham Palace, and more. In the mean time, enjoy this photo of the legendary Latin ATM at the Vatican, courtesy of a friend. It does exist!

Of course, they'd naturally use Comic Sans.

I think many of us Catholics had at the back of our heads growing up, unconsciously, at the very least that the idea of Christ's divinity, or His claim of divinity, was the hardest thing to prove. Some may even assume it was a fairly late addition to the story, like the half-hearted deifications of the Roman emperors. Much of this comes, not from history, but from historians, and rather bad popular historians at that. If one looks at the early Christological heresies, the one thing that it seemed nearly all Christians could agree on was He was emphatically not just a good man. Those outside the Church who denied His divinity, often thought Him considerably less than a good man, and there were many inside Christianity were not even sure He could be called a human being at all.

A lot of this comes from popularizers who find it convenient to throw out the text and tell us what really happened from their own speculations on human nature, or on their rather blandly respectful view of what they assume is Christian morality and their unfocused contempt for what they think is Christian dogma, as if the two could be separated. The Jefferson Bible, a bit of Enlightenment bowdlerization, is a prime example of this, in which Christ goes swanning around giving the impossible advice of the Gospels without the impossible miracles of the Gospel.

Anyone who tells you that they believe in the high moral system Christ developed, but not in His divinity, clearly has not read scripture. Christ was not a moral teacher in the manner of Confucius or Buddha, but came to fulfil the Law, doing so in startling and puzzling fits of drama and opaque parables that at times verge on performance art. Fig trees get cursed, Christ scribbles in the dirt, tells weird stories, asks people to eat him (which sent most of his followers running for the exits), uses scary phrases like people being "eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven," and claims He knew Abraham some thousand-odd years earlier.

Chesterton called these the "riddles of the Gospel." Without the miracles and the resurrection, this is not so much a moral system as a cryptographic puzzle, and a rather disheartening one at that. Without grace (and the Eucharist), the Christian life is an unreachable ideal, and a rather Quixotic and bizarre one at that. It is not the self-evident Hallmark squishiness people assume it was--humility was never a virtue in the pagan world before Christ, for one thing. If you wish a high, human moral code, go and read Marcus Aurelius and contemplate your solitary stoic self-splendor, don't drag the God-Man into it. He is not telling you how to fix yourself, asking you to let Him do the heavy lifting.

The other thing is that it is clear to the early Christians who thrashed around with the tradition handed onto them in word and scripture thought this strange visitor was clearly more than a man. Christ's divinity was being praised in song as early as the letters of St. Paul (if Christ's own assertions to the effect in the Gospels are not enough), and it is clear from rabbinic commentaries of the period on Isaiah's prophesies that even before Christ came, it was thought the Messiah would have at the very least some special relationship with God, and at the most be quasi-divine Himself--He, the wonderful counselor, mighty God, the prince of Peace.

Indeed, the errors of early Christianity are quite illuminating in that regard. We have the Dan Brownian notion that the early heresiarchs were mild-mannered peacenik types who loved Christ the simple good man (and the goddess Mary Magdalene, don't ask me how that works), rooted in history and everyday life. With a few exceptions, by and large their Christ was not only scarcely human, He was scarcely historic. The Gnostic pseudo-scriptures show Christ as a weird ghostly being, not necessarily a god but a messenger from corporate headquarters sent to untangle the mess started by Jehovah, who in this view comes across as a sort of low-ranking Dwight Schrute weirdo in the greater scheme of things, with very little connection to Jesus the friendly aeon. Christ floats in, dispenses gnosis in a historic void lacking in the arguing Pharisees and Sadducees.

Why anyone would find this talkative, haughty spirit appealing is beyond me, but then I suspect a friendly ghost is considerably less demanding than a flesh-and-blood incarnate God. At the very least such discussions prove that the modern world's problem is not a lack of proof for historic high Christology, or its remoteness from modern man, but simply its inconvenience.

Since Halloween is coming up, a bit of seasonal ghoulishness for your edification. I have been re-reading Elizabeth Kostova's rather enjoyable The Historian, one of the few reasonably memorable contributions to the vampire-slaying genre of page and screen since the late Terrence Fisher, serious High Church Anglican and horror filmmaker, left the field. The greatest achievement of this first-time author, though, seems to have been being able to camouflage, with considerable charm and suspense, the fact that on the whole not much really happens in the course of the book, nor does she seem quite able to develop even some of her own more interesting contributions to vampire legend and lore, like trying to vaguely link up Vlad the Impaler with the various heretical Cathars and Bogomils of southern France and old Bulgaria, or some rough fictional equivalent. This goes, oddly, almost nowhere, despite the fact that Cathars are, nowadays, the new Beanie Babies. (Are Beanie Babies still the new Beanie Babies? I can't keep track of these things.)

That being said, it is something of a relief to see in Kostova-land, the blood-sucking fiends still recoil in horror from a crucifix, however much the authoress seems to ignore the metaphysical assumptions this requires to work, rather than simply moping around moodily and acting all sparkly. (On the other hand, sparkly teenagers are terrifying in themselves.)

I bring this up because I ran across a rather curious sidelight on Vlad the Impaler the other day. (Which in all fairness has nothing to do with vampires--Bram Stoker's character has nothing in common with the bloodthirsty Romanian prince, save the name, and at various times in the book seems to be either a Hungarian Szekeler or perhaps even a Serb, rather than Wallachian or even properly Transylvanian, and vampires are, when you get down to it, more Greek--!--than Transylvanian. He also looks a bit like the late Victor Borge in the novel.) It is an open question exactly how nasty a piece of work the fellow was, though I doubt he was an angel, in any case.

Romanians ar understandably somewhat baffled by their national hero's Bela Lugosi reputation in the west. Imagine going to Kazakstan and discovering in their culture, er, say, Andrew Jackson, with all the good and bad that implies, is a blood-drinking undead sex symbol with a bad Canadian accent. All the Romanians I know are pleasant Mediterranean types, rather than pale ghouls, and they drink...you know, wine.

Much of Vlad III Drăculea's reputation in the West seems to stem from King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary's various the-nosferatu-ate-my-homework attempts to explain why the heck he didn't team up with Dracula to run the Turks out of Dodge (for Dodge read: Rumelia), and thus why he didn't owe his creditors back all that money they gave him. There was even a poem about it: Von ainem wutrich der hies Trakle waida von der Walache. Indeed, it seems Vlad had supporters at one time or another in Poland, Venice and even the Holy See. It seems much of his atrocities were wildly exaggerated, and while perhaps a nasty little man, was certainly not insane, for what it's worth. That being said, Corvinus or no, I am not sure I would want to get on the wrong side of someone a) named "the Impaler," and b) who doesn't drink... wine.

One of the odder bits of this propaganda campaign (in addition to the usual broadsheets and pamphlets) must be a couple of images that put the Impaler in place of Pontius Pilate, and in the place of the Roman consul watching over St. Andrew's crucifixion. The elegant court hat, the feral little face, the big Marshal Kûrvi-Tasch mustache--it is immediately recognizable and disturbingly out of place. The effect is oddly chilling and yet, brainwashed from birth by images of Chocula and the Count von Count, weirdly funny in a completely inappropriate way. It is like the Where's Waldo from hell.

Yet, it does get one thinking. It is too easy to write off Pilate as an overworked lightweight, in over his head, a bad man, a foolish man, a weak man, but perhaps not a wicked man. Yet, in letting himself be cowed by the rabble, and sending off a man he knows to be innocent as the tidiest (or least-headache-inducing) solution to a bureacratic snafu, one may rightly put him on the same footing of wickedness as the Impaler. Pilate's muzzy, dispassionate condemnation is just as inhuman and chilling as the bitter, ruthless, hot-and-cold hatred of Vlad Ţepeș. At least the Impaler never killed anyone out of sheer moral laziness.

And now, Sesame Street's Count von Count singing in German. Just in case you thought this was getting too serious.

If the medievals had invented the PopeMobile, I suspect it would have looked like one of those wacky, colorful Indian busses. I think this would be a good thing, on the whole.

A great article here. One myth, number eight, "Starving Poor," reminds me of a comment made by, I think, one end of our friend the Chesterbelloc (I forget which), who noted that poverty in England can be traced to the year 1536, the same year the monasteries, which acted pretty much as the English poor-relief system, started getting trashed by Henry VIII. Hmmm. I wonder if there's a connection?

Another thought springs to mind. Myth number one, "People of the Middle Ages were crude and ignorant," is of course easily refuted by Chartres Cathedral, chivalry, and the Medieval period's superb contributions to the field of millinery, but I'm also reminded of a throwaway line in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength: When Merlin wakes up from his epochal slumber, everyone is impressed by his elegant table manners: admitted, he's eating with his hands but he's doing it quite neatly and daintily. Presumably if you had only a knife and only occasionally a fork or spoon, you'd get to be quite good at eating without making a mess of yourself (or, one hopes, looking like this fellow). Heck, I'm told a figure as late as Louis XIV ate stew with his hands and clearly the man was no Oscar Madison, though by that point the Renaissance prejudice against bathing had set in and perhaps he did smell a bit whiffy.

Matthew Alderman. S. Lydia the Dealer in Purple Cloth. June 2010. Private Collection, New Hampshire. More work by the artist here.

St. Lydia was the first Christian to be baptized in Europe, at Philippi by the Apostle Paul; the Greek landscape is visible at beneath her feet while the Apostle Paul hovers in the distance. In one hand is the murex shell, the source of her livelihood, purple dye, and by extension a symbol of royalty and Christ the King, and also, through its marine origins, baptism and regeneration. The waves in the upper left-hand corner also recall baptism, and the strip of half-dyed cloth in her right hand recall the imagery of white robes washed in the blood of the Lamb. St. Paul's book and sword decorate the hem of her robe, while Christ the Man of Sorrows, clad in His purple robe, decorates the clasps at her shoulder. The client (who has also commissioned work from me in the past), a New England lawyer, ND law grad and new mother, commissioned this to celebrate the birth of her first child, also named Lydia. She says she wants it to be hanging in the girl's dorm room 18 years from now when she matriculates at Notre Dame.

I was recently at a mass away from my usual parish, and the offertory (I think) was a hymn singing in pleasantly autumnal tones thanking God for mown hay and the harvest and all those wonderful things Martha Stewart dries and sticks up on her front door like headhunter totems around this time of the year. It was a nice hymn, even edifying, but not very substantive. Three things occurred to me: 1) Most of the people here probably have never even seen a scythe outside of a field trip to Old World Wisconsin. 2) How is this superior to getting whatever scriptural tag would have been in the mass propers? And 3) You should be focusing on mass, so darn it, try and be edified anyway! But the point remains: how is this any better? I've noticed when away from either the "Reform of the Reform" mass I got when I was in New York, and the Tridentine liturgies I attend regularly here in the Land of Encheesement, how little scripture (even allowing for the daunting infodumps of the 3-year cycle, which cannot be digested quite as smoothly or as naturally as a nice Gradual) I actually get by comparison. We can do better than this, folks.

No, I don't know what the deal is with this, either, or where it came from, or, more importantly, just plain "why?" (When I showed this to a classicist friend of mine, she commented "What makes me think these guys are probably British?")

I've not bothered going to see it in the theater, and probably won't, but I read some interesting dissections of the latest science-versus-faith film schlockfest, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz as the lovely and irritatingly pagan Hypatia. At least she's easier to look at than Tom Hanks, though, for the record, the real Hypatia may well have been in her sixties by the time she was torn to shreds (or something) by albino mo--er--angry Egyptian Christians (or something) in AD 415. The truth is a lot murkier than that, and the old girl seems not to have been quite so relentlessly anti-Christian as all that, nor the Angry Albino--er--Egyptian Christians so relentlessly anti-pagan, either. (In other words, you shouldn't think of the Cyril-vs.-Hypatia rumble as High Noon with Grace Kelly in the Gary Cooper role. The whole thing was more of a messy political thing with the Christian-versus-Pagan business as a sort of unfortunate sideshow.) They certainly didn't torch the Great Library of Alexandria, for one thing. Scholars aren't even sure it was even around then, it having been something of a dump since centuries earlier. I'll leave the MST3K-ing of this bit of celluloid to the classicists in our audience, but thinking about this brought two points to my attention:

1. We hear a whole lot in the popular historical narrative about how Christianity pretty much snuffed out a great age of Roman science, invention and knowledge. Admitted, the ancients had some pretty nifty gadgets (aeliopile, anyone?) but they were pretty much toys, and rather antique Greek toys at that. Not so much Blackberries (are they still around? I can't keep track of the trends these days; my iPod is older than most people's cell phones) as Chia Pets. The order, stability, efficiency and grandeur of Rome was built not on labor-saving devices but...well, wait, yes it was built on labor-saving devices. They were called slaves. Instead of the Spinning Jenny, you had, well, some nice Briton captive called Jenny...or, more likely, something Welsh made out of phlegm and consonants. Or, to be fair, not just slaves but a whole lot of freedmen, bureaucrats, working class Joes and military migrants from the fringes of the empire (at least some of the barbarian hordes started out essentially as the Roman national guard) were needed to keep things running smoothly. The clockwork marvels of antiquity, such as the wondrous Antikythera mechanism, are notable primarily for their being strange anomalies. The genius of Rome was in its organization and centralization, not in some inventive spirit, and by time of Diocletian, even that was starting to go.

2. Much is made of the alleged loss of all the ancient wisdom and knowledge of classical antiquity during the medieval period. Yet, when the Renaissance rolls round, or the Enlightenment, the first thing those wacky medievals are pilloried for is following Aristotle or Galen like holy writ--authors who are precisely representative of all that lost knowledge. Indeed, the Middle Ages rediscovered some of those lost bits of knowledge via their recovery of Aristotle from the East. And when it counted, the medievals knew when to experiment and discard as necessary. No sailor of the period would have tried to steer via a largely symbolic mappamundi, and the age also gave birth to the horse-collar, stirrups, glasses, and the mechanical clock. The Venetian arsenal, the wonder of the world, was the fruit of this period. Contrast this to the Renaissance, which, until Newton and co. came along, was rather on the conservative side when it came to gadgets. I recall one anecdote of a Venetian commission which awarded a contract to design a new sort of galley to a classical scholar of Roman naval techniques, not an actual sailor or naval architect.

It seems if you're a medieval, you just can't win.

Altar at Egmanton, Nottinghamshire (Sir Ninian Comper). Source.
"As the altar is the church, as the altar is the reason for the existence of the wonderful fabric that has gradually developed into the most complex and highly-organized of the buildings of men [...]. To it, all things are tributary, and whether you say the church flows from it as from the center of life, or that the visible organism develops from it cell-by-cell [...], the result is the same."

It is a peculiar thing indeed that while the quite laudable trend after the Council has been to encourage all to communicate with hosts consecrated at that particular mass, that there has been no perceptible increase in the size of our altars to accomodate all those extra ciboria. The even more complex logistics and liturgical gymnastics that have accompanied the concession of the chalice to the laity have accompanied, similarly, no enlargement of the mensa, but instead it appears our altars have shrunk noticeably. (I will refrain from commenting on whether the practice of communion under both kinds has actually brought about any of the benefits it was assumed would accompany it; or whether it has unfortunately created significant liturgical traffic and sacramental disposal issues.) Admitted, the shelf-like nature of many older, pre-conciliar altars was a common complaint among the rubricists of the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement; the contemporary problem has less to do with depth than length.

Even a large, deep altar can fail to impress itself on an interior without sufficient breadth or a proper setting, whether it be a footpace, baldachin or even wall treatments to highlight it. Source.

The problem can be attributable to several things. First, the move towards a movable table-like altar form, that often accompanied dubious theological musings of the sort that made Edward A. Sovik a household word in the 1970s, was often rather on the puny side, a liturgical coffee-table rather than something reflective of the banquet of the Lamb. The ad-hoc and often rather haphazard nature of many of the quick-fix renovations of the period, which saw altar tables plopped in plano at the level of the sanctuary, also tended to result in rather smallish altars, perhaps because it was easier to get hold of furniture of a domestic nature than commission a full-fledged movable altar of wood or metal.


Even a traditionally-ornamented altar can appear overpowered by its surroundings when too small or when devoid of candlesticks and other ornamentation. Source.

This, coupled with the reformist tendency to avoid cluttering up the altar with extra candlesticks and the crucifix--all of which often added considerable dignity and verticality to the otherwise rather barren spectacle of a "naked" altar--resulted in the smallish, often movable altars one finds in churches today. Even when a freestanding altar is built, in an ostensibly traditional style and decorated with beautiful or incongruous odds and ends salvaged from the communion rail, they are often a bit small for the space in which they have been placed. Admitted, this may be because there wasn't much room in the sanctuary to begin with--which might be solved by going back to the old wall-altar arrangement, which required considerably less circulation space--but the results are often a bit underwhelming.

A few places where concelebration is common have tried to square this particular circle by erecting enormous square altars with massive table-tops as an exercise in Flintstones faux-primitivism--the cathedral in Los Angeles comes to mind. One would assume such highly interesting objects would serve well as the focus of the church's interior. However, given that these are often at the lowest point in a church with a sloping nave or theatrical seating, they can look rather dumpy and mushroom-like in that context, and a square's usable space for ciboria and chalices does not increase as the area is increased, given there is often a large unreachable region in the center beyond arm's length. There is good reason for the basic rectangular shape of our altars as they have developed over the ages.

A handsome altar in a modern Georgian style from the period directly before the council; seating on three sides. Such altars can serve as fruitful precedents but allowances must be made for additional circulation space under the baldachin. Source.

Given the excellent desire to place a crucifix and candlesticks on new altars, as well as the fact a growing number of churches now offer both forms of the mass, the current, faddish altar form requires careful re-examination. It is best to turn to the pre-conciliar authorities here as a starting-point, and then consider what further positive developments--such as the use of multiple ciboria--ought to be taken into account.

1. Shape: An altar should be rectangular, never round or octagonal, and only square where space constraints require it. I have seen one round altar in my life, a obje done recently in an otherwise fairly competent classical style, though wholly inappropriate rubrically and theologically. Scripture speaks of the "horns"--the corners--of the altar, and the round altar carries a whiff of the occult to it. The octagon is appropriate to baptisteries, not chancels. The Old Covenant's altars were rectilinear, and as the altar represents Christ, Christ calls Himself the cornerstone.


Cram's altar-like communion table at East Liberty Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh. Cram once commented all the interior required was six candlesticks and a crucifix to be ready for a pontifical liturgy. Note its extreme length. Source.

2. Proportions: Ralph Adams Cram, the great churchbuilder, is our best authority on this point, and in his book Churchbuilding makes much the same point about the rather underwhealming communion table which was at the time installed in the vast open chancel of Trinity Church, Boston, describing the empty sanctuary as "dead," the "black walnut table of small size" overshadowed in one photograph of the period by rather silly floral arrangements placed around the eagle lectern, itself infelicitously placed at the center of the chancel steps. Cram suggests that the church's principal altar should have a width of around one-third that of the nave; he suggests somewhere between 8 and 12 feet, the higher end of the scale being determined by the upper limit of altar height (3 feet 4 inches, in Cram's mind, a fairly comfortable number; J.B. O'Connell, about forty to fifty years later, suggests 3 feet 5 inches). These are not necessarily ritual requirements, but that of "art; which is also a question of religion, since art in the service of the Church, is simply art as an incentive to religious emotion." One may rightly question if it is only that, but Cram's point is well-taken.


A large altar set in a suitably spacious sanctuary; it could be improved slightly by the addition of candlesticks and perhaps even a hanging rood. Source.

3. Dimensions: Cram is, above, speaking primarily of altars intended as part of a larger composition including a reredos, which itself acts as something of a magnifier for an altar in a large church; his rule of thumb is a good one, but probably should be adjusted by sight for a freestanding altar with tester or baldachin. I am sure I have also seen reredoses with engaged altars that are longer than 8 feet, though perhaps the inevitable elongation is, as Cram points out, not particularly suitable. Probably about 12 feet would be the upper limit in most older churches. Most rubrical sources suggest that a bare minimum of 6 feet should be the starting point for length, if only because that length recalls the tomblike symbolism of altar's relic sepulchre. As a practical matter one could probably celebrate the old mass on a mensa of 3'-10" in width but it would have to be a very low (or narrow) mass indeed. I would be inclined to think that 6 feet be the bare minimum length, and seems rather small to me.

Preconciliar sources (such as J.B. O'Connell's Church Building and Furnishing suggest the mensa depth (not including a tabernacle or gradine) ought to be between 1'-9" to 1'-11" with a large altar, and four feet if one has a tabernacle with altar cross placed behind it. Cram suggests 2 feet even. Both of these seem to me rather impractical in a modern context. Most freestanding altars today will not (sadly) include a tabernacle directly on the mensa, but ought to be designed with space for a row of candlesticks and crucifix, so at least three to four feet seems like a safe starting-point. Given that it is easy for an altar to become overcrowded with ciboria at large masses, I would think one could perhaps even push it to five feet in depth if the sanctuary was large enough. A logical rule of thumb is to ensure that objects placed in the center can be comfortably moved without access to a stepstool from one or the other side of the altar, which would preclude anything over five-and-a-half or six feet in depth. Mocking up the altar first might be the most sensible option.

4. Placement: Most altars today are placed well forward of where they might have been located fifty or sixty years ago. This may well be a positive development in theory, but it has not been one in practice. The almost total abandonment of altar steps has also been exceedingly unfortunate, though that is a topic for another time. O'Connell suggests circulation space of at least 2'-6" between the back of an altar and the wall if it is to be consecrated (following the rubrics then in force in 1955) and that dimension is a useful one to consider when trying to determine the bare minimum of circulation space around an altar. Considering this probably does not even take into account assisting deacons, altar boys, and the rest, there should probably be considerably more space than that before one gets to the walls, sedilia, or other impediments. The space in front of the altar, beyond its raised steps also ought to be particularly deep if possible.

As I have said repeatedly in the past, most altars today are placed in sanctuaries not designed for them. The modern altar placed at the level of the chancel is occupying space originally intended for the graceful movements of the sacred ministers at high mass. Given that most freestanding altars will probably be used from both sides at some point in their lifetime, probably the space around it needs to be twice as deep as it usually is, and somewhat broader, given older altars usually did not require circulation space on the short (north and south) ends. Most sanctuaries today go the opposite route and seem to shorten the depth and widen the breadth to almost shelf-like proportions.

A good example to study are churches built in the era immediately before the Council, where some experimentation had begun with freestanding altars and versus populum liturgy but it had not become normative. Some churches placed the altar at the crossing (often an architecturally messy proposition) but still ensured there was enough space around it on the raised sanctuary platform to avoid it turning into a catwalk. On the whole, an enclosed sanctuary, even if it may not be as visible from the transepts, may result in a more satisfactory architectural solution.


The ciborium magnum of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., gives a good impression of the amount of space required to properly accommodate a large baldachin. Source.

Another important matter to consider is whether there is to be a ciborium magnum or baldachin, which, when placed in a smaller sanctuary, can cause acute circulation problems both around the altar and around the entire structure. If there is not ample space around it, one might consider thinning down the baldachin's members--there are quite a few handsome examples of delicate metalwork ciboria--or simply adopting a hanging tester or canopy instead.

The altar, as Cram says in the quote above, is the font of the life of the church structure, and its apex and summation. It is not enough to simply apply some traditionalizing edging to a liturgical coffee table, but we instead must ensure that this cornerstone must fit with perfection into its surroundings as the noble site of our bloodless participation in Christ's sacrifice.

We at the Shrine occasionally like to do our impression of Johnny Carson as the fortune-telling, future-predicting mock-clairvoyant Carnak the Magnificent (As the man himself said, "AWACS missal"--opens envelope--"What Fulton Sheen is holding in the new Madame Tussauds Exhibit"), by making our own predictions about the future of the Church, even if we do not personally own our own turban.

For instance, Drew of the Shrine predicted the Anglican Ordinariates in some form not long after Benedict got elected, as well as, also, in some form, the Motu Proprio. Meanwhile, it appears some of the (wholly imaginary) Holy Whapping Television Network's (HWTN) programming has inavertently come to life in the form of the new major motion picture There be Dragons. (Is it possible to describe a film as an Opus Dei Action-Adventure flick? I mean, one without Dan Brown in it). Admittedly, it's not the Clint Eastwood ripoff The Outlaw Josemaría Wales I was hoping for, but still, impressive.

For the record, it's not Photoshopped, and no, I don't have a clue what's going on, either. Anyone care to take a crack at a caption?

A friend writes regarding my comments on Constantine's extravagant taste in imperial robes:

"One favorite quote: 'That's why the Emperor Constantine presided over the Council of Nicaea in golden robes like he was... Michael Jackson or something.' (Too soon?)" I think nearly 2 thousand years is long enough after Constantine's death, but I agree that with all those medals and decorations General Sir Michael David "Mike" Jackson GCB, CBE, DSO, ADC, DL does have some
crazy outfits.

I meant...you know...the pop singer...with the one glove...oh, never mind. It's not worth it.

I have become a tremendous fan of the Institute for Catholic Culture and its amazing online library of recorded lectures, on all conceivable topics from Irish history to the French Revolution and the Reconquista. One of my favorite speakers is the engaging, erudite and frequently hilarious Dr. Brendan McGuire, who just finished a series on the medieval papacy, which is both substantive and quite fun to listen to. It's a bit like listening to the muppet Rowlf the Dog channeling Lord Kenneth Clark. (That's a good thing.) One favorite quote: "That's why the Emperor Constantine presided over the Council of Nicaea in golden robes like he was... Michael Jackson or something." (Too soon?) Some of his descriptions of interactions between various Christian and Muslim potentates during the reconquest of Spain verge on sounding like Bob Newhart telephone routines. You can find pieces by him, and many other speakers here. Enjoy!

My apologies. I am Lazarus, come back from the dead--it's been a busy two months. I hope to be a better and more conscientious blogger from now on. One problem is all my serious stuff tends to go up on the NLM, leaving The Shrine as a receptacle for all the usual Catholic weirdness you know and love, though unleavened with serious commentary. Keep an eye out on the NLM, by the way--there's a good piece up I did there on altars, and a few other items coming up. But if you had wanted something serious, you'd probably not go to a website named the Holy Whapping. Anyway, some various amusements for you below.

Yours truly was also recently out dining in Madison (otherwise known as "84 square miles surrounded by reality") and the lawyer I was eating with started chatting with the waitress, and mentioned that I was still relatively new to the area. Conversation follows:

Waitress: Madison's a great place to make friends. It's very laid-back and liberal.
Me: I'm neither laid back nor liberal, I'm afraid.

A friend writes: I was supposed to meet up with three clerics and a couple of laymen for dinner. I wasn't sure if I was at the right restuarant, so I
asked the the hostess, "Did a group of priests come in?" "What were
they wearing," she asked. I told her, "Clerical collars." In fact,
when I did catch up with them, one would be wearing a cassock. "No,"
she told me. Then she asked with a smile, "Did you check the bar?" Rum, Romanism and rebellion, it'd seem, is still the default combination. (It turned out he was at the wrong restaurant, unfortunately.)

I was recently a groomsman in a wedding, and getting fitted up for white tie and tails. My pants had to be hemmed again so, rather than sit in the dressing-room resembling the half-dressed recipient of some sort of Drones Club prank, I put on my khakis, in combination with my tailcoat, and sauntered back out to where the other groomsmen were standing. It was commented by the groom-to-be that I took semiformal a bit too literally.

A good friend of mine from Queens wants to start a lifestyle magazine entitled Thicket & Moat: The Misanthrope's Quarterly Guide to Good Living.

In a recent primary election I neglected to realize Treasurer was an elected office and so didn't know any of the three candidates on the ballot from Adam, Eve or Seth. I had been quite conscientious about researching all the other offices on the ballot, even beyond the usual traditional American qualifications of which candidate was taller and what color of tie he was wearing (or, for woman, pantsuit). For a moment, Wisconsin almost got its first write-in vote for Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, but I behaved myself and randomly picked one. A grad-student pal of mine comments, "Wisconsin should be so lucky."

Umberto Eco, in his novel Foucault's Pendulum, on God creating the universe via telegram. "Fiat Lux. Stop. Epistle follows."

Last, a snippet of conversation overheard on a recent return to the Big Apple, between two hipster employees of The Strand (8 miles of used books, and the happiest place on earth after Loome Theological in Stillwater, Minnesota):

Hipster One: Did I tell you that my grandfather made his living carving tombstones?
Hispter Two: I did not know that.