In a recent blog, Fr. Dwight Longenecker commented on the loss of the "sacramental vision" in our approach to Catholic church design:
"We’ve downgraded the physical. We’ve said those things don’t matter.
In fact, there’s a sort of modern iconoclasm. We not only say these
physical things don’t matter we distrust them. We tear them down and
throw them out in favor of bare auditoria with seats in. Protestants
have always done so from the beginning, but now Catholics have done so
too."
Why is that? It is not simply a need to do things on the
cheap. It is not simply a need to be utilitarian and build a practical
and sensible structure. At the root it is a distrust in the physical
means of grace. It is a distrust and dislike for what Catholics might
call “the sacramental principle.” The sacramental principle is the idea
that God comes to us through the physical world. The physical world is
how he comes to us and reveals himself to us. This is the whole meaning
of the story of creation and God’s revelation through history which
culminates in the triumph of God’s revelation through the physical
world–which is the incarnation of his Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary."
As he eloquently explains it:
"The sacramental principle keeps this alive in the world. Catholics say
insist that matter matters. God still comes to us through the physical
realm. That’s why some of us (despite the degradations of modernism)
insist on building beautiful churches, why we insist on beautiful
vestmenst, statues and stained glass, lighting candles, kneeling to
pray, burning incense and wearing crucifixes. This is why we as
Catholics believe that through water one is united with Christ, through
bread and wine we participate in his body and blood, through oil we are
forgiven and healed, through physical love we are united with our
spouse, through the laying on of hands we are ordained and made deacons,
priests and bishops."
But what is most cutting and penetrating is his final analysis:
"The underlying reason for the poverty of modern Catholic church
architecture is more troubling than merely the fact that people have
erected cheap, ugly buildings for worship. The underlying reason is that
modern American Catholics have actually departed from their own
Catholic belief in the sacraments."
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| "La Trinité" by Jean Fouquet |
Fr. Dwight's analysis is a comforting confirmation of what I've been thinking about as I've been rewriting the Introduction for a second edition of Architecture in Communion (soon to be again available in hard copy and ebook):
"To state it
plainly, the central problem with contemporary Catholic architecture is a
sacramental problem.
"For nearly two thousand years, Catholics have been worshiping and
building places of worship intended for participation in the eternal liturgy:
the angels and saints in perpetual adoration of the Trinity, Christ eternally
offering himself to the Father for the redemption of all of creation, Christ’s
faithful on earth offering our lives sacrificially in conjunction with the
gifts of the altar through the ministerial priest for the glory of God.
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| "The Heavenly Jerusalem" by Gustave Doré |
"All
this happens in an earthly liturgy that is both a foretaste and a promise of
heavenly reality revealed in Revelation, when all the saints shall dwell again
in that new Jerusalem which is at once the reestablishment of the Desert Tabernacle
as God’s dwelling among us, the consummation of the wedding between Christ the
Bridegroom and his Bride the Church, the Church revealed as the City of God in
which the Temple is restored and the Glory of the Lord returns, in which all
nations and God’s holy people shall be united in the restored and renewed
Garden:
I saw a new heaven and a
new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth are gone, and the sea is no
more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, and made ready as a bride is arrayed for her
husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne saying: Behold,
the tabernacle of God among men, and he shall dwell with them, and they
shall be his people, and God himself shall be among them and shall wipe every
tear from their eyes, and death shall not be any more, nor shall sorrow nor
lamentation nor pain be any more, because the first things have gone. And he
who sat upon the throne said: Behold, I make all things new. (Rev 21:1-5)
And yet more
striking:
I saw no temple in it; for the Lord God almighty is its
temple, and the Lamb. And the city has no need of the sun or the moon to shine
on it, for the glory of God illuminates it, and it lamp is the Lamb. (Rev 21:22-23)
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| "Adoration of the Lamb" by Van Eyck |
"The apocalyptic vision of Revelation 21 and 22
is a symphonic recapitulation of the entire symbol-structure of the Bible: the
major themes of body, sustenance, dwelling, marriage, community, order,
governance, presence, sanctification, restoration, communion, worship, illumination,
and glorification are all woven into a liturgical and architectural tapestry
that serves as a hermeneutical key to understanding the Church’s symbolic
framework. This framework serves as a matrix for the liturgy and for church
architecture as integral to the contemplative, imaginative, and devotional life
the faithful.
"In these passages we understand that the Church herself is the
sacramental reality spoken of in the Scriptures: the Garden, the desert tabernacle,
Emmanuel (“God is with us”), the temple, the Bride of the Groom, the Lamb, the
Glory (Shekinah) of the Temple, lux sum mundi, the heavenly City of the
new Jerusalem, and the restored Garden with the tree of life. All these images
are suddenly understood in sharp and lucid relationship to one another as
different presentations of the same eternal and heavenly reality. All these are
sacramental signs of Christ and the Church, and so all serve as the basic
vocabulary of any architectural, artistic, or liturgical attempt to communicate
what Vatican Two calls “signs and symbols of the heavenly realities.” (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, #288)
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| The anti-sacramental space of modern liturgy |
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|
"Without
understanding the symbolic structure that informs the sacramental life of the
Church, without understanding the language of sacramental mediation between God
and humanity through the figures and signs by which our relationship with God
is both expressed and realized, without a robust recovery and reappropriation
of the grammar and vocabulary and syntax of liturgical architecture –the
language of the Mass, the language of the sacraments, the language of the Body
of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and the Heavenly City –there can be
no meaningful Catholic architecture. Mere “building” cannot serve the
intrinsically transcendent, eschatological, and sacramental aspects of the
liturgy; nor can it properly engage the human person and the community gathered
by Christ in the fullness of our humanity as thinking, feeling, sensing, acting
persons who have been given both memory and imagination to transcend the “here
and now” such that we can enter into the timelessness and otherness of divine
worship.
"This is why I
insist that the problem of contemporary Catholic architecture is first and
foremost a sacramental question. For the past 50 years, though the roots
of the problem go back a generation or two earlier, we have forgotten what it
means to build churches that are “signs and symbols of the heavenly realities.”
We have forgotten the concerns of Pope St. Pius X, who inaugurated the
Liturgical Movement, that our main concern is “without question that of
maintaining and promoting the decorum of the House of God in which the august
mysteries of religion are celebrated.” We have traded in the “beauty and
sumptuousness of the temple” for cheap, utilitarian, antisymbolic, and
illiterate meeting spaces. We have lost sight of the central idea that “active
participation in the most holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of
the Church” –an active participation that requires the fullness of our humanity
–recommends careful concern for “the sanctity and dignity of the temple.” (St. Pius X, Tra le sollectitudini)
How can liturgical renewal happen if our actual principles of practice seem
rather to obstruct the sacramental operation of the church building, both by
failing to support the liturgy and by failing to properly inform the souls of
the Catholic faithful?
"The sacraments
and sacramentals are necessary, and they work, because we are incarnate rational
beings –body and soul –and thus demand an intelligible and coherent
language of signs, symbols, forms, patterns, gestures, actions, and words to
fully engage us in the dignity of our humanity. We are always in history, we
are always in our culturally contingent circumstances, we are always limited by
our own human condition, which is all the more reason that the church buildings
and the manner in which we worship should aim for the perennial, for the timeless,
for the universal, and for the eternal. That our recent church buildings keep
us mired in the “here and now” through a banality of forms and materials, with
a claustrophobic immanence that never allows the heart and mind to move beyond
that constraints of the gathering space, and with a liturgical and iconographic
illiteracy that frustrates our aspirations for union and communion with God and
each other in Christ, is a matter of the gravest concern.
"If Churchill
was correct in his observation that, “first we shape our buildings, and then
our buildings shape us,” it is small wonder that our church buildings fail help
us understand the sacramental, transcendent, and eschatological basis of the
Mass, and perhaps even hinder the full reception of the graces of the
sacraments that the church building is intended to support. Pius X’s warning
proves prescient: “And it is vain to hope that the blessing of heaven will
descend abundantly upon us, when our homage to the Most High, instead of
ascending in the odor of sweetness, puts into the hand of the Lord the scourges
wherewith of old the Divine Redeemer drove the unworthy profaners from the
Temple.” (St. Pius X, Tra le sollectitudini)
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| The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) |
"With now a
half century in retrospect since the opening of the Vatican Council, we can
have some heightened sense of objectivity and understanding of the currents and
fashions, both cultural and liturgical, that affected not only the Council but
more importantly the implementation and the reception of the liturgical
principles promoted by the Council. With the inevitable detachment that time
and distance create, we can now look more objectively at the shifts during the
1960s and 70s toward the democratic and egalitarian in reaction to the (perhaps
overly) formalistic, hierarchical, and rubrical liturgical sensibilities of the
Church since Trent, and toward the immanent and experiential away from the
transcendental and eschatological. We can better understand the romantic search
for more ‘authentic’ models of community, mission, and liturgy supposedly to be
found in the early Church, and can see the limitations of a merely local
and communitarian view of liturgy to the frustration of the universal
and fully ecclesiastical. We can better evaluate the real and
lasting goods of the various trends of fashion, innovations, and experiments
ascribed to the “spirit of the Council”, whether of church arrangement,
artistic style and architectural expression, ministerial roles and lay
participation, liturgical language, musical forms, bodily gestures and postures,
and the like.
Underpinning
these observations is a central principle: that the essential nature of
Catholic liturgy, of the Church and her mission, and of the human person have
not changed. If so, then why have the churches in which we worship?"
From Architecture in Communion (2nd Edition) Publication Pending. (c) Steven J Schloeder 2012.
