Born in Denmark in the 1950s, I headed straight for the typical 1960s society with its clichés of liberal atheism resulting in a spiritual void. This void was not filled until I converted to the Catholic Faith many years later at Westminster Cathedral in London. Being in the arts and having been deeply involved in the staging of a large exhibition on the Jesuits and the Baroque, I came to realise the importance of the sacred image in promulgating the Faith, so vital today, where the young no longer read.
As in the period that followed the Council of Trent (1545 - 1563), the Catholic Church has redefined herself following the Second Vatican Council. In both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries changes in church architecture accompanied reforms to the liturgy, and today we are still trying to come to terms with attempts to redefine our sacred space. One way to evaluate contemporary churches is to understand the model that so many of them react against, which had been developed after Trent. However historians still debate the significance of that historical architecture; indeed, they disagree about its very qualities.
The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland fuses Christian symbolism and modernist architecture in a luminous yet vacant church for the Diocese of Oakland.
On September 12, 2006, in Regensburg, an Italianized German called secularism’s bluff. In his address, Pope Benedict XVI pinpoints secularism’s false objectivity as it holds reason hostage and presupposes its incompatibility with faith.
One of the most important teachings of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council was the provision for the establishment of schools or academies of sacred art in order to train artists.
For the first thousand years of Christian catechesis (as well as thousands of years of Hebrew tradition), oral witness was the primary means of passing on the Faith. In medieval Europe, a new type of catechesis synthesized oral teaching with visual representations and became the standard for teaching, reinforcing, elucidating, and experiencing the Faith, a pedagogy that, to this day, is still intimately associated with the truths of the Catholic Faith: stained-glass windows.
While it is not forbidden to display an image of Christ, Mary or a saint behind the main altar, in modern churches this is usually reserved for the church’s patron. At the same time, the apse may be decorated with murals and mosaics figuring several personages. Therefore, I would say that the image of Divine Mercy would not normally be set up behind the main altar unless the church was dedicated to this devotion.
Everywhere I go, I hear people speaking of churches, the churches of today, the churches of their youth, or the great churches of Europe. They often express the desire to see “churches that look like churches.” They mourn the loss of statues, murals, stained glass, marble altars, etc., but most of all, they ask why the tabernacle was moved.
In the past, churches were often the most prominent architectural edifices of a community, and Christians gladly served as patrons of church architecture because it proclaimed their faith and affirmed their world view. But today things have changed.
Cathedral building has been no easy task for Los Angeles archbishop Roger Mahony. His Eminence proposed to build a new cathedral for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles on the site of then current cathedral, St. Vibiana’s.
The church is not a work of engineering. It is a symbol. A building of stone becomes a church only after it has been consecrated, in the same way that a child becomes a Christian in baptism. To see the church as only a building, a material structure, is like deconsecrating it, emptying it of its fundamental significance as a symbol.
Now older and I hope wiser, I rejoice in the modest Thomistic revival we now experience, although I don’t wish to return to the triumphalistic Thomism of the forties and fifties. It’s a bit ironic that I’m writing to explore the connection between the Angelic Doctor and architecture; not arbitrarily creating a nexus, but pleasantly surprised to find that he actually had something to say on the matter.
Then the emperor Constantine built in the city of Ostia close to the Portus Romanus the basilica of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul and of John the Baptist, where he presented the following gifts: ...”
The draft document of Domus Dei was presented to the Catholic Bishops of the United States at their November 1999 meeting. It is intended to be a properly sanctioned replacement for Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, a 1978 tract that is generally acknowledged to be outdated in its promotion of bland Modernist structures and iconoclastic liturgical settings. The current draft of the more aptly titled Domus Dei is an improvement on its predecessor. However, the draft document falls short of its purpose. This is particularly clear in view of the growing body of architects who prefer to speak the Church’s timeless Latin in contemporary ecclesiastical buildings, rather than the trendy vernacular of Modernism.
Beauty, like the beast, is something objective. It is a property of natural or artificial things—a complex property that a thing has because of the disposition of other properties.
It has become evident recently that a plethora of opinions and reactions to liturgical renewal exist, especially as it applies to sacred space. This fact is reflective of the concern of many Catholics, and it needs to be seriously addressed.
Last autumn I published an article in Antiphon documenting a discrepancy in the 1967 English text of Eucharisticum Mysterium 56 which I speculated may have contributed to a misunderstanding and narrowing of liturgical principles and architectural norms in the United States.
The spirit of Torquemada is alive and well in the world of architectural criticism. Books already are being burned, and altars defaced and overturned. What treatment will be reserved for the architects and built work of a true Classical revival in ecclesiastical architecture, especially as this movement gathers more disciples?
Sagrada Familia is the most renowned building designed by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, whose cause for beatification was opened last year by the Cardinal Archbishop of Barcelona.
As a member of the Archdiocese of Chicago's Commission on Sacred Art, I have noticed a couple of areas of church design that are frequently overlooked in the planning.
St. Catherine of Genoa on Spring Hill in Somerville, Massachusetts—designed by the Boston firm of Maginnis, Walsh and Sullivan over the period 1907-1920—is a seminal building in the development of early twentieth-century Roman Catholic church architecture in America.
With hindsight, many are waking up to the fact that the experimental church architecture designed and built in the latter half of the twentieth century has miserably failed the Catholic people.
Before my appointment to Indianapolis I began the planning for the renovation of the Cathedral of the Diocese of Memphis, which is coming to completion as we speak.
Christ is our new time, and it is this that we celebrate in the night of faith until everything is brought to its completion in the light of the day of his coming.
After thirty years of liturgical renewal, we are well placed to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of what has been done, in order more confidently to plot our course into the future which God has in mind for his cherished people,” Pope John Paul II poignantly observes.
E. A. Sövik in his influential book Art and Architecture in Worship laid out the theory that sacred space should not be visually distinguished from common spaces, because to do so would limit the sacred to distinct times and places and deny its influence on the entirety of life.
The connection referred to in the title is between a small church building in Rome—The Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Archetto—and the large and imposing Capitol Hill building in Washington.
In wanting to explain a cultural mystery-why the world renounced emotionally-nourishing buildings, and instead embraced buildings that literally make us ill—one comes up against severe obstacles.
In Chapter Five of his Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia, our Holy Father takes up the question of the dignity with which the Holy Eucharist is to be celebrated.
The dissatisfaction that many Roman Catholics have expressed concerning the renovation or construction of church buildings within the last thirty-five years has often been attributed to the eye of the beholder.