reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches

@Praxiteles wrote:

To return to neo-Byzantine church architecture, and to England, the chief example is of course Westminster Cathedral by Francis Bentley.

http://www.westminstercathedral.org.uk/art/art_bentley.html

reminds me a lot of flinders street station in melbourne

And from dellachiesa.com, here wehave a timely article which should be of immense benefit to the Cloyne HACK in discerning the conjunction of “heritage” and “kliturgical requirement” – assuming that they can actually read:

Church Restoration, Re-Renovation and the Third Millennium

By Michael S. Rose
A new trend is emerging. Some of the churches that were drastically altered decades ago are now being “re-renovated” to reflect their original designs.

When Bishop Bernard J. Flanagan returned to Worcester, Massachusetts after the Second Vatican Council, one of the first ways he sought to implement the “spirit of Vatican II” was by remodeling his cathedral church. No doubt influenced by the spirit of change that swept through Western society during the tumultuous sixties, he oversaw the removal of the sacred furnishings that had come to be universally identified with the Catholic sanctuary. In place of the reredos and high altar, a concrete block wall was erected. A simple freestanding altar table was introduced. The communion rail was removed, and a new, unadorned tabernacle was set upon a pillar in a side alcove.

The parish churches of the Worcester diocese followed suit over the next decade and beyond. Much the same trend occurred throughout the United States and elsewhere. The renovations that immediately followed the Council were arguably the most drastic. Altars, statues, shrines, communion rails, confessionals, and kneelers were removed from many churches. Walls and ceilings were whitewashed—murals and frescoes succumbed to the roller. Innumerable works of sacred art were lost while new features such as wall-to-wall carpeting and drop ceilings were introduced— all done in the name of the liturgical reforms of Vatican II.

Yet, in reality, the church renovators of those years merely acted on their own subjective desires rather than on the authority of the Council fathers. In fact, the Council had precious little to say about the architectural reform of our churches. Rather, Vatican II was dishonestly used as the catalyst for the reformation of Catholic church architecture. Addressing this abuse, the Vatican issued Opera Artis, a circular letter on the care of the Church’s artistic heritage, in 1971. It charged: “Disregarding the warnings and legislation of the Holy See, many people have made unwarranted changes in places of worship under the pretext of carrying out the reform of the liturgy and have thus caused the disfigurement or loss of priceless works of art.” In this document the Sacred Congregation for Clergy warned bishops to “exercise unfailing vigilance to ensure that the remodeling of places of worship by reason of the reform of the liturgy is carried out with utmost caution.”

Unfortunately this instruction was little heeded by those who engineered the church renovations during the following decades. The liturgical renovation movement actually accelerated. Some years later, the same renovators could also be found remodeling church naves and vestibules, rearranging the pews, and moving or eliminating the sanctuaries of the older, traditional churches. Throughout the sixties and early seventies various theories based on architectural Modernism were promoted by the church renovators. Those theories came to be embodied in Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, the 1978 document drafted by a subcommittee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. This document seemed to ratify both the theory and the practice of the church renovation establishment. Consequently, the architectural patrimony of the Church in the United States continued to suffer dearly.

Happily, however, it now seems that a new trend is emerging. Some of the churches that were drastically altered decades ago are now being “re-renovated.” Shortly after Bishop Daniel P. Reilly was appointed Bishop of Worcester in 1994, he announced an interior restoration project that would “re-renovate” or restore the cathedral’s sanctuary. The concrete block wall was removed, and an ornate hand-carved wood reredos and a noble cathedra were erected in its place. The tabernacle al cove was similarly adorned and a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe was fashioned from the leftover wood of the sanctuary project.

Numerous churches, from small rural parishes to urban cathedrals, are undergoing similar restorations. St. Patrick’s Church in Forest City, Missouri, for instance, is at present undergoing a re-renovation to bring it more in line with its original look. Following Vatican II, this 95-year old church was “modernized” by way of a drop ceiling and wood-paneled walls. The Stations of the Cross, the old altar, several statues, and other sacred furnishings were removed from the church. In 1999, however, the new pastor, Father Joseph Hughes, initiated the re-renovation. Fortunately, some parishioners had saved items that were removed from the church during the previous renovation some thirty years ago. A sanctuary lamp, the old tabernacle, and candlesticks were refurbished and incorporated into the new design. Just as at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Worcester, a new reredos is the highlight of the sanctuary renovation. Patterned after the church’s old altar, it sits behind the new altar and holds the altar crucifix and statuary.

Other pastors have made simpler “re-renovation” changes, such as moving the tabernacle back to its original position in the center of the sanctuary, behind the altar. Two years ago, for instance, Father Richard Simon of St. Thomas of Canterbury Church in Chicago, announced to his parish that he planned to make such a liturgical move because he felt that the experiment of removing the tabernacle from the sanctuary had failed. “We have lost the sense of the sacred that formerly was the hallmark of Catholic worship,” he wrote to parishioners in a letter of June 24, 1997. “Therefore, I have decided to restore the tabernacle to its former place in the middle of the sanctuary and to begin a campaign of re-education as to the sacredness of worship and the meaning of the Real Presence.” Once Fr. Simon returned the tabernacle to its former location he was surprised, he said, at the response. It was overwhelmingly positive and effective. “Some people even wept for joy when they saw the change,” he said. “I’m kicking myself and asking why I didn’t do this years ago.”

In Indianapolis, Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein, O.S.B. is less than pleased with the renovation of his cathedral, which was carried out under his predecessor. As part of the renovation of the Cathedral of Ss. Peter and Paul, most of the statues and the Stations of the Cross were removed and sold to an antique store in Michigan (not allowed by Opera Artis). Since being named Ordinary of the Indianapolis Archdiocese, the archbishop has already ordered a new set of Stations of the Cross, the first step in what will be a much slower process of re-renovation in Indianapolis.

Ongoing liturgical revolution
But not everyone is “re-renovating.” The artistic heritage of many churches is still threatened by those who, in the words of Msgr. Peter J. Elliot, still cling to “a kind of ‘Maoist’ mythology of a perpetual or ongoing liturgical revolution,” one that is derived from “a dated commitment to a permanent program of planned changes rather than to organic and natural development.”1

It seems that the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 is now being used as the catalyst for renovation of some of the most significant parish churches, cathedrals, and basilicas in the country, many of them historic structures thus far preserved from the fashionable post-Vatican II renovations. At this writing the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, Kentucky, the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, St. John Cathedral in Milwaukee, St. Andrew Cathedral in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Cathedral of St. Mary in Colorado Springs are all in the midst of renovations, to help their respective dioceses “move into the new millennium,” but not without artistic and spiritual casualties. Each of these cathedral churches is being subjected to a similar program of interior remodeling justified by the “ongoing liturgical revolution.”

Moving or extending a sanctuary into the nave has almost become customary for American church renovators when working with older, historic church buildings. This move is often justified by the liturgical theory that a more centralized sanctuary makes it easier for the congregation to “gather around” the altar. This new type of sanctuary is not without its ramifications for the church as a whole. The movement of the altar (or the entire sanctuary) often “necessitates” removing the altar rail, displacing or removing the high pulpit, and in the case of a cathedral the bishop’s throne may also be affected. These traditional furnishings are then replaced with modern furnishings that are often at odds with the original design and style of the building. Victor Hugo dubbed these innovative furnishings the “wretched gewgaws of a day.” Referring to elements of the 18th century renovation of Notre Dame de Paris he asked, “Who has substituted for the old Gothic altar, splendidly loaded with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy sarcophagus of marble, with angels’ heads and clouds, which looks like an unmatched specimen from the Val-de-Grâce or Les Invalides!”2

Gewgaws
In 1999 historic St. Martin of Tours Church in Cincinnati, an Italian Romanesque-style edifice built in the 1920s, was renovated over the overwhelming objections of parishioners. In St. Martin’s case, fashion audaciously fitted into the wounds of its Romanesque architecture wretched gewgaws of our own day—its stage platform, its rearranged pews, its emasculated baldachino, and so forth, all because it was felt that the altar and sanctuary needed to be brought closer to the people. The tabernacle was removed from the high altar, while the communion rail and two of the parish’s four wood confessionals were cannibalized in order to make new furnishings. The latter move, apparently, was suggested as a way to appease critics of the renovation.

Another prominent and historic Cincinnati church, St. Francis Xavier, provides an even more striking example of a renovation gone “gewgaw.” This immense Gothic-style church suffered much the same planned program as did St. Martin’s. But in this case, the interior of the church was painted a dark shade of blue to effect the look of marble, and the contemporary furnishings (altar, ambo, font, light fixtures, etc.) look as though they were transplanted from a mod-style library or theater. The contrast between the Gothic architectural forms (barrel vaults, pointed arches, and soaring columns) and the sharp, hard lines of the new fixtures creates an awkward visual dissonance that is disturbing even to the casual observer.

Similarly, when architects presented a plan to renovate St. James Cathedral in Seattle, they said they were going to “reclaim the historical integrity of the church.” Seattle Catholics wondered for some time what exactly was meant by this unique turn-of-phrase. They were assured that the “beauty and integrity of an old and venerable structure” would be respected. According to critics of the Seattle renovation, once the project was completed they no longer had an Italian Renaissance church, but a “Reformation-era church taken over by Reformers who didn’t want any ‘popish artifacts’.” It is still a beautiful building, like a museum or the U.S. Capitol, but it is no longer easily understood as a house of God with recognizable transcendent qualities.

There are, however, some notable contemporary exceptions, such as the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City. The architects here obviously took great pains to choose designs for the new furnishings that would complement, rather than detract from, the magnificent hundred-year-old edifice. Overall, the Salt Lake renovation project produced a unified structure, although one which adopted a decidedly late-twentieth-century arrangement.

Inclusivism
Another justification for some of the modernizing elements of contemporary church renovations is by way of accessibility, flexibility, and visibility. Retrofitting church buildings for handicap accessibility is becoming ever more en vogue. While the simple premise—to make the church building accessible for those who are either wheel-chair bound or otherwise physically disabled from climbing stairs—is a noble and commendable one, “accessibility” has become more of an ideology than a helpful aid. This new ideology of “inclusivism” necessitates costly elevators rising to the choir loft or having the choir moved out of the loft, modern ambos that rise and fall powered by hydraulics, lowered sanctuaries accessible by long ramps, the removal of large sections of pews, and tabernacles that are low enough to the ground so that a wheel-chair bound minister of the Eucharist can access the sacred Hosts.

Related to the ideology of accessibility, the desire for “flexibility” is also often invoked to justify radical revision of church interiors, especially regarding the seating. The renovation of the Indianapolis cathedral, for instance, disposed of the traditional pews with kneelers to make room for portable chairs (with “kneeling pillows” tied to the back of the chair). According to Sr. Sandra Schweitzer, design consultant on the project, “flexibility” is one of the most important considerations in renovating traditional churches. In a 1999 interview with the National Catholic Register, Sr. Schweitzer contended, contrary to 1500 years of evidence, that the variety of liturgies—weddings, funerals, baptisms—cannot be accommodated by the “traditional church arrangement” with its uni-directional fixed pews, choir seating, etc.3 To replace these with movable or even stackable chairs allows for different new seating configurations for various liturgies or special feastdays… Again, often good quality seating is jettisoned, and flexibility becomes an excuse for a reordering of the nave and sanctuary into more of a theater or abbey choir configuration. “Visibility” too is fast becoming an ideology that has produced some of the strangest solutions yet. When pews cannot be removed or rearranged on three or four sides of the altar, for example, some architects have skewed the pews in the side aisles seven to ten degrees toward the altar so that people can better face the altar and see the faces of other worshippers. This solution can be seen in several prominent churches such as the Cathedral of St. Peter in Erie, Pennsylvania. For many, it is terribly awkward to sit skewed by seven to ten degrees for the duration of a Sunday Mass. Another feature of some of these renovations, accomplished in the name of visibility, is the lowering of the sanctuary reredos or the shaving down of the ends of the pews.

Unpopular with the laity
All of the above-mentioned changes are significant in that they are often not popular with the average man in the pew, who is ultimately footing the bill for these projects. As a greater awareness of renovation issues grows it is becoming more common for parishioners to openly object to proposed changes to their historic church buildings.

Probably the greatest resistance ever effected by a single parish is that of St. Francis Xavier Church in Petoskey, Michigan. Parishioners there who would like to see their beautiful church protected and preserved have organized to formally oppose the renovation plans which will radically transform their Gothic-style building into a spartan “worship space.” The church still boasts numerous ornate frescoes, elaborate carvings, a marble-topped altar railing, elevated pulpit, stunning reredos with a life-size crucifix and gilded tabernacle. Its 27 statues and 24 stained glass windows render this church one of the finest examples of neo-Gothic architecture in the Midwest. One of the most drastic of the proposed changes at St. Francis is the removal of the reredos (see photo) and the elimination of the parish’s perpetual adoration chapel.

In March of 1999 parishioners who want to preserve St. Francis for future generations formed an association called the St. Francis Xavier Historic Preservation Guild, with 12 parishioners taking the lead. The guild publishes a newsletter that is distributed to their more than 600 members, uniting them in their common cause.

In April the guild mailed a survey to all registered parishioners and more than 700 were returned. By overwhelming margins, the people opposed moving the tabernacle (720 to 10), removing the communion rail (695 to 33), removing statues or the reredos (715 to 14) and moving the altar forward (677 to 39). The majority did support minor restoration such as painting and cleaning walls, replacing old carpet, restoring statues where necessary, and making improvements to the exterior of the building.

Since parish leaders seemed to turn a deaf ear to the reasonable protest, more than 900 St. Francis parishioners signed a petition to cease renovation plans. This petition with its signatures was published as a paid advertisement in the local daily.

Parishioners at St. Edmund Church in Oak Park, Illinois, took a different tack. First they commissioned an alternative design for the church which would accomplish the majority of the stated reasons for the renovation without affecting the historical integrity of the sanctuary. After petitions to the parish and the Archdiocese of Chicago failed, the St. Edmund Preservation Society asked the Oak Park Historic Preservation Committee to grant “landmark status” to the historic Chicago-area church, arguing that the proposed renovation there will change the character of the English Gothic structure. Landmark status would require the church to seek village approval on any work altering the building. Oak Park’s elected officials, however, voted against granting the church such status.

Other parishes have even tendered appeals to the Roman Rota and the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, after appeals to the pastor and the diocese failed. The preservation group at Cincinnati’s St. Martin’s Church, for instance, assembled a three-inch-thick dossier of renovation-related materials in an effort to have the Vatican intervene on their behalf. Two separate appeals have already failed, a third is still pending.

Material costs
Many have often wondered too about the material costs of these renovations, and whether or not the money spent on the unnecessary alterations is poor stewardship and an affront to social justice. Renovation of a single structure can cost upwards to $4 million but most run anywhere between $200,000 and $1 million.

To think of the material costs in purely hypothetical terms, we could estimate (conservatively) that 75% of the 17,156 parish churches that existed in the U.S. in 1962 were renovated. If the altars and communion rails alone were removed from these churches at just $10,000 per building, that would mean that 12,867 churches were renovated at a total cost of $128,670,000. This figure, of course, does not include other changes, often unwanted and unnecessary, such as moving tabernacles to side chapels, building baptismal fonts designed for adult immersion and moving choirs and organ consoles to where sanctuaries used to be. It also does not include the 2,428 parishes created between 1962 and 1999 or older buildings that have been renovated more than once. When all this is considered the rough estimate of dollars spent on church renovations since 1962 must well exceed $200,000,000. The cost in lost art and history is, of course, incalculable.4

The dawn of the new millennium provides an opportune time for architects and church renovation professionals to evaluate the untoward results of the past four decades. With hindsight we can all now better understand the Vatican’s prophetic warning issued in 1971. With the growing appreciation of traditional sacred art and architecture, especially among the some of the younger, recently appointed bishops, as well as the young priests who have been emerging from our seminaries over the past few years, more and more parishes will be open to the possibility of “re-renovation” or conservation and preservation of their architectural and artistic heritage.

Not long after Victor Hugo published his classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, architect Eugene Emmanuel Violet-le-Duc spearheaded Notre Dame’s famous re-renovation in the mid-19th century. Stained glass windows were reinstalled, new statues sculpted to fill the empty niches, the white-wash scrubbed from the walls, and on and on. Let us hold out hope that the 21st century will occasion a similar restoration of the architectural patrimony of the Church, and that this restoration will lead to a greater awakening of faith and devotion, one that will lead us pilgrims to our Father’s House, the New Jerusalem. Good architects will be able to find creative solutions that preserve the old art, protect the integrity of the architecture, and maintain a sacral atmosphere.

Notes
1 Monsignor Peter J. Elliot, Liturgical Question Box, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998, p.16.

2 Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831.

3 Michael S. Rose, “Can Modern Churches Be Beautiful?” National Catholic Register, June 13-19, 1999.

Michael S. Rose is the author of several books on church architecture, including In Tiers of Glory and Ugly As Sin. He is the creator and editor of dellachiesa.com.

Copyright 2004 Sacred Architecture Journal

And here is another one:

The Future of Renovation and Renewal

By Michael S. Rose
Armed with the wisdom of hindsight, it is time to correct the mistakes of the recent past.

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. The “innovative” forms used by church architects in the sixties and seventies—think how clever they thought themselves then—look not only outdated at the dawn of the new century, they look ugly. The non-churches of the eighties and nineties that can pass for libraries, post offices, or nursing homes are so uninspiring and banal that they fail to attract, to evangelize, or to raise the hearts and minds of men to God. They fail to acknowledge that Christ was made flesh and dwelt among us. They fail to serve the Catholic community, and they fail to make Christ’s presence known in any particular place. Similarly, the insensitive renovation of traditional churches that stripped these sacred edifices of their Catholic trappings, not only denuded a physical place, it effected the worship and beliefs of the people.

Happily, however, the realization of this failure—on the part of laity, priests, bishops, and architects alike—is the first step that will lead to the renewal of our sacred places. Designer Francis X. Gibbons, for instance, now speaks of his 1968 renovation of St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Baltimore as a “raping” of that church.1 Helen Marikle Passano, the primary patron for the restoration of the 1869 chapel at Notre Dame College in Baltimore, remembers loving the “modernization” of the chapel when she was a student there. “We thought we were moving forward with a contemporary space. But guess what? We’re moving back,” she told the Baltimore Sun in early 2001. “It’s time to bring [the chapel] back to its original glory.” To this end, she donated $1.5 million to peel away the 1960s alterations “including a flat ceiling and metal ducts that obscured the vaulted spaces above, wood paneling that covered plaster walls, and carpeting that smothered the handsome pine floor.”2 Even the Vatican finally addressed the renovation problem earlier this year when Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship informed Milwaukee’s Archbishop Rembert Weakland that his proposed cathedral renovation did not conform to Church norms or liturgical law and is doing a disservice to Milwaukee Catholics.

This “realization period” should lead to four distinct ways to improve the architecture of Catholic churches, returning these edifices from meeting spaces to sacred places. The first is the restoration—or “re-renovation”—of traditional Catholic churches. That is, architects and pastors must work together to return the older, traditionally-oriented buildings that were renovated over the past three or four decades to their former glory. The second is to salvage and renovate the modernist churches built in the latter-half of the twentieth century by re-orienting them. Many of the buildings erected during the 1960s and 1970s, although irregular in form, can be transformed into beautiful transcendent places within. The third method is to transform ugly, modernist churches into parish halls or school buildings, and build “replacement churches” that will serve as genuine sacred places, designed in continuity with the Church’s tradition. The fourth method is perhaps the easiest: to build beautiful churches anew when parishes are established.

Re-orienting the renovated church
The first step must always be to restore the hierarchical form. The sanctuary must be made distinct again from the nave, where the congregation sits. In many cases this will mean that altars that have been moved into the midst of the congregation be returned to a proper sanctuary. The altar platform—usually consisting of one or two steps—that sits out in the nave with chairs gathered around is not a sufficiently defined sanctuary by any means. Most, if not all, of the traditional churches are designed in the basilican cruciform plan. That means that there already exists a proper location for the sanctuary. The proper location is at the elevated “head” of the building. The nave serves as the body.

In other renovated churches the sanctuary has been moved to one of the nave’s side walls and the entire building re-oriented so that when one enters the church building, there is no natural progression down an aisle toward the altar of sacrifice. This type of renovation is really just a dis-orientation. Again, the sanctuary needs to be restored to its proper position at the head of the building and the nave reoriented to lead once again toward the restored altar.

The sanctuary should also be “re-defined,” that is, if the raised platform of the sanctuary has been removed, it must be restored. If the communion railing has been eliminated, the restoration of such a device would provide a distinct boundary for the sanctuary, and it would also be functional if Communion were to be distributed to kneeling penitents at the restored railing. The design of a restored railing should match the architecture of the church and the altar especially. However, in many cases, the altar in renovated churches is itself inadequate.

The poorly designed table altars that replaced high altars of past centuries can be deficient in several respects. First, they are often crafted of wood alone. In order to focus again on the sacrificial nature of the altar, the altar ought really to include an altar stone, the plain horizontal slab upon which the priest places the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The restored altar should also be a permanent fixture, built of durable materials. A simple table that could be used for a thanksgiving dinner in our homes is insufficient.

In some renovated churches the high altar fortunately still remains, although it has often served only to hold flowers or candlesticks since a freestanding altar was introduced after Vatican II. The most obvious solution in these fortunate churches is to eliminate the inadequate freestanding altar and revert to using the high altar, which is often already the natural focal point of the church, accented by either a reredos or baldacchino. In fact there is a growing movement, given impetus by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, among younger priests especially to return to the ad orientem (or ad apsidem) Mass, that is, reciting the Eucharistic prayer while facing in the same direction as the congregation at the elevated altar.

Although many priests and not a few members of the laity believe this practice has been outlawed, banned, or otherwise made illegitimate, it is not so. Nor is this centuries-old practice awkward in any way. In fact, it is quite natural for a priest to lead his congregation by turning with them toward the Lord. This solution is so obvious that it can only be politics that are preventing such a restoration.

In many other churches, however, the high altar and reredos or baldacchino have been summarily removed. Although this is a most unfortunate situation, for those parishes that are committed to restoration it can be an opportunity to design and build something even more worthy and beautiful than the original. Such is the case with St. Paul’s Cathedral in Worcester, where a beautiful new wood reredos and cathedra were constructed in 1996 to replace a semicircular concrete block wall that was put up in place of the old reredos.

It is also the case with several traditional churches that were restored in the Victoria, Texas diocese. The Diocese of Victoria is noted for its preservation of the famous “painted churches” in the Schulenburg area. Some of these churches had lost many of their sanctuary furnishings shortly after the Second Vatican Council. A generation later, however, nine parishes in the Victoria diocese tried to recapture what they had lost. The ornate high altar and reredos at St. Joseph’s Church in Moulton, Texas, for instance, was completely reconstructed from scratch by local carpenters in 1994.

There really is no reason that dignified altars cannot be made anew, complemented either by a beautiful reredos or baldacchino, depending on the style and design of the church. These elements will not only bring the focus back to the altar, they will ennoble it.

Restoring the tabernacle to prominence
Another important aspect—perhaps the most important—of a sanctuary restoration is moving the tabernacle back to its original position in the center of the sanctuary, behind the altar. In 1997 Father Richard Simon of St. Thomas of Canterbury Church in Chicago blazed a trail in this regard. He announced to his parish that he planned to make such a liturgical move because he felt that the experiment of removing the tabernacle from the sanctuary had failed. In his June 24, 1997 letter to his parishioners he wrote:

I believe that much of the liturgical experimentation that began thirty years ago has failed. We are not holier, nor more Christ-centered now than we were then. In fact, we are facing a generation of young people who are largely lost to the Church because we have not given them the precious gift that is at the heart of Catholicism, that is, the Real Presence of Jesus. Mass has become simply a drama, a vehicle for whatever agenda is currently popular. The church building is no longer a place of encounter with the Lord but a sort of a social center, not a place of prayer, rather a place of chatter.

In many churches, including our own, the tabernacle was moved from the center of the church to add emphasis to Mass and the presence of the Lord in the reception of Holy Communion. That experiment, however, has failed. We have lost the sense of the sacred that formerly was the hallmark of Catholic worship. The behavior of many in the church is outrageous. When Mass is over it is impossible to spend time in prayer. The noise level reaches the pitch that one would expect at a sporting event. The kiss of peace seems like New Year’s Eve. Christ is forgotten on the altar. You may counter that He is present in the gathering of the Church, and though this is true, it should not detract from the Lord present on the altar. If the Lord is truly recognized in the congregation, it should serve to enhance the sacredness of the moment. This is simply not happening…

Therefore, I have decided to restore the Tabernacle to its former place in the middle of the sanctuary and to begin a campaign of re-education as to the sacredness of worship and the meaning of the Real Presence. This means that Iwill nag and nag until a sense of the sacred is restored. I will be reminding you that a respectful quiet will have to be maintained in church. Food and toys and socializing are welcome elsewhere, but the church is the place of an encounter with the Living God. It will not be a popular policy, but this is unimportant.

I can hear one objection already. Where will the priest sit? I will sit where the priest has traditionally sat, over on the side of the sanctuary. Here as in many churches the “presider’s” chair was placed where the tabernacle had been. I am sick of sitting on the throne that should belong to my Lord. The dethronement of the Blessed Sacrament has resulted in the enthronement of the clergy, and I for one am sick of it. The Mass has become priest-centered. The celebrant is everything. I am a sinner saved by grace as you are and not the center of the Eucharist. Let me resume my rightful place before the Lord rather than instead of the Lord. I am ordained to the priesthood of Christ in the order of presbyter, and as such I do have a special and humbling role. I am elder brother in the Lord and with you I seek to follow Him and to worship. Please, please let me return Christ to the center of our life together where He belongs.

Once Fr. Simon returned the tabernacle to its former location at the center of the sanctuary behind the altar he was surprised, he said, at the response. It was overwhelmingly positive and effective. Some sense of reverence was indeed restored at Mass in his church. On September 16, 1997 he reported the results of the move in a “form letter”:

You cannot imagine the response I got to the letter I addressed to my parishioners on June 24th. I have received so many calls and letters that I am reduced to saying thank you in a form letter. Still, I simply have to write to say thank you for your support and prayers. So many people thought I was brave to do what I did. Brave? I simply read the Catechism and moved a few pieces of furniture. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. In the parish, some people even wept for joy when they saw the change. I am still kicking myself and asking why I didn’t do this years ago. The response has been so supportive. Many wrote and expressed their sense of loneliness in the battle for Catholic orthodoxy. Well, you are not alone, neither among the laity nor the clergy.

Perhaps you have heard the definition of a neo-conservative. He is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. That certainly describes me. I was in college in the late Sixties and went the whole route: beard, sandals, protest, leafleting for feminism, and all the rest… f a parish like this and a person like me can be turned from foolish liturgical experimentation, it can happen anywhere to anyone. Don’t give up! For instance, if they have taken the kneelers out of your church, go to the front and kneel on the hard floor. You’ll be amazed how many will join you. That’s what’s happened here.

Inspired by this well-publicized move by Father Simon many other pastors have restored the tabernacle to prominence in their churches. This, as he attests, was simply “moving furniture,” but it restored the kind of prayerful reverence in his church that he and many others desired. With the tabernacle located directly behind the altar on the building’s main axis, the two elements work together as one: the tabernacle was returned to an extension of the altar, which is the focal point of the church, just as the Blessed Sacrament is an extension of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Since the reserved Sacrament is an extension of the Mass, it logically follows that, architecturally speaking, the tabernacle ought to be situated in direct relationship to the altar, whether on the altar or behind it. This arrangement has ramifications far beyond interior design. Ultimately, it is a matter of devotion and worship. In the words of Pope John Paul II, proper devotion to the Blessed Sacrament will inevitably lead to a fuller participation in the Eucharistic celebration: In his letter on the 750th anniversary of the Feast of Corpus Christi he wrote, “Outside the Eucharistic celebration, the Church is careful to venerate the Blessed Sacrament, which must be reserved… as the spiritual center of the religious and parish community. Contemplation prolongs communion and enables one to meet Christ, true God and true man, in a lasting way… Prayer of adoration in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament unites the faithful with the paschal mystery; it enables them to share in Christ’s sacrifice, of which the Eucharist is the permanent sacrament.”3

Tying in to this theology of the Eucharist is the crucifix, the figural representation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, that which is re-presented in an unbloody manner by the hands of the ordained priest at the altar. The crucifix—the corpus of Christ on the cross—was removed from many churches during renovations, and replaced by either symbolic processional crosses or other figures such as the risen Christ or paintings of wheat, sun, and birds. As beneficial as these new symbols may be to some, the restoration of the crucifix is integral to a proper restoration of the sanctuary. It is the crucifix which directly symbolizes the whole meaning of the Mass.

Restoration of sacred art
Another element especially significant to the restoration of the sanctuary is the restoration of sacred art. Many unfortunate churches were whitewashed thirty years ago in an iconoclastic attempt to remove so-called “distractions” from the house of God en route to reducing the church to a non-church. Others parishes had their statues summarily removed for the same reason. Fortunately, these misguided purges have begun to wane, yet plenty of churches have been left barren and stripped because some pastor, liturgist, or designer was a slave to fashion and bad taste. This is what church designer Francis X. Gibbons called “rape.”

But not all is lost.

With the newest methods of art preservation and restoration, murals and frescoes can be recovered, whitewashed statues can be returned to their original colors, and deteriorated works of sacred art can be restored. Such advances in the art of preservation ought to give hope to many a pastor who desires to bring the sacred back into his church building.

Furthermore, there are, contrary to public understanding, talented artists who can be commissioned to execute beautiful new murals or mosaics in churches that are unable to recover their artistic patrimony.

With regard to statues, icons, and other pieces of “moveable” art, there exists a treasury of old sacred art available at architectural antique shops around the U. S. and beyond. A few calls can put a pastor or restorationist in touch with groups that have salvaged these often-times priceless works of art from Catholic churches that have been closed and their churches razed. The same goes for architectural furnishings such as old wooden confessionals, sacred vessels, crucifixes, Stations of the Cross, pews, and communion rails. Some of the more well-known internet auction web sites, for instance, offer a steady supply of these beautiful works of art. Unfortunately, these items more often wind up being used for secular purposes rather than in new or restored churches. We’ve all heard of confessionals being used as telephone booths in restaurants or ornate hand-carved pews being used for seats in a pub.

Reordering the nave
The same steps apply to the restoring the nave. Side shrines and Stations of the Cross that have disappeared over the decades can be refashioned anew or purchased from antique dealers and architectural salvage companies. Yet sometimes the destruction of church interiors goes far beyond what was removed. In many cases, it is also what has been added. Wood paneling, drop ceilings with acoustical tiles and wall-to-wall carpeting are the biggest offenders. Fortunately such materials date the project to the late-sixties and seventies when homeowners were renovating their houses in much the same manner. The use of these cheap materials has dropped out of fashion, Deo gratias. The removal of such “homey” items will offend few.

Because these materials are so flimsy and impermanent they are easily removed. With any luck they will have preserved what they were once hiding. The removal of ceiling tiles may reveal vaulting, clerestories, or ceiling murals intact and in good condition. Carpet removal can reveal terrazzo flooring or beautiful hardwood floorboards, and the removal of wood paneling can give way to beautiful plaster walls, sometimes decorated with beautiful stenciling or even mosaics.

More difficult to deal with, however, are the modern furnishings that often replaced the traditional ones. These newer furnishings are often at odds with the original design and style of the building.

The seating is another major restoration item. First, in those churches that had the kneelers removed from the pews: install new kneelers! For those churches that have skewed or turned their side aisle pews supposedly to better focus on the altar: turn them back facing forward. And for those churches that discarded the old pews in favor of cheap (or expensive) portable chairs, it would be ideal if new wooden pews with kneelers were to eventually be restored to the church. The fad of homey cushioned chairs will soon pass.

All in all, when restoring an historic church, the parish needs to hire competent restorationists with a proven track record of accomplishments. They must be sensitive to the original architecture of the church, but need not necessarily recreate exactly what existed some time in the past. However, any new furnishings or artwork introduced into the church should be in keeping with the architectural scheme ratherthan looking like foreign invaders.

The restorationist should be concerned with 1) reordering the church into a properly defined narthex, nave, and sanctuary in keeping with the original design, 2) re-establishing an iconographic program of sacred art and furnishings, 3) recovering any verticality that has been lost, and 4) establishing a unified whole so that the church will be restored to a sacred place with transcendent qualities.

Salvaging renovations
Some may ask: We’re stuck with this ugly building that looks like a __________ (fill in the blank); what can we do to improve upon the modern design? Fortunately, in some cases there is an easy answer. In E.A. Sövik’s theory of the non-church, he expressed his desire for a building that has a “throw-away interior,” that is, an interior that can be easily altered to suit the needs of the people at any time. Accordingly, the interiors of many of the non-churches built in the latter half of the twentieth century are easily altered. Their “throw-away interiors” can simply be thrown away and new furnishings and works of sacred art can be commissioned.

Of course, the new architect or designer has no obligation to subscribe to the modernist theory of the throw-away interior. On the contrary, he has the obligation of transforming the building into a beautiful church. It can be done, but not by designing another interior that can just be thrown away. The architect has the opportunity to reconnect with tradition in order to create a sacred place that will transcend generations and possibly cultures too.

Just as with the restoration project of a traditional church building, the first task is to properly reorient the interior spaces into a hierarchy of sanctuary and nave. This is more difficult to do with the modernist edifice than with the traditional church building because the floor plan may be somewhat irregular. Churches-in-the-round, fan-shaped theater-style churches, and asymmetrical layouts are three popular arrangements that ought to be corrected.

In this regard, the altar needs to be established at the “head” of the building, in a distinct sanctuary that is elevated above the nave and set off from the congregational seating. Most likely the altar in the modernist church to be renovated is unworthy to be used even for your kitchen table. The opportunity now exists to design a new altar that will establish itself not only as the focal point of the church but will set the tone for the new interior. Every other element of the renovation should lead to the altar in some way.

A new baldacchino or reredos can give the altar the nobility and prominence it deserves, and the close relationship of the tabernacle with the altar is just as important in the renovation of a modernist edifice as it is in the re-renovation of an historic church. The same goes for other elements and furnishings—pews, sacred art, pulpit, and communion rail. There is no reason that the traditional trappings of a Catholic church cannot be introduced into the modernist building to create a sense of the transcendent and eternal.

Replacement churches
Of course, if it is at all possible, it is better to begin anew designing a church that can serve as a “city on a hill,” one that through its traditional form and exterior elements has the capacity to carry meaning, inspire, educate, and attract both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Since many or even most of the modernist church edifices do not appear as permanent structures, their buildings can be adapted to another use, one that would serve the parish in another way, for instance, as a school building, food pantry, theater, gymnasium, or parish meeting hall.

Many of the modernist churches, because of their layout and arrangement, lend themselves easily to such a transformation. Not a few people have entered one of these new churches or non-churches and exclaimed, “my, this looks more like a gymnasium (or a theater, etc.)” If it looks like a gym or a theater, chances are it can easily be converted into a gym or theater while a new church, designed in continuity with the Catholic tradition of church architecture, rises nearby. These are properly called “replacement churches.”

In fact, a pastor or bishop can easily save face by telling a parish that the current modern facility they are using as a church was only intended as a temporary solution until a time came when parishioners could help build a permanent house of God that would speak equally to generations of Catholics to come. Well, the time has come.

Finally, perhaps the greatest opportunity comes when a new parish is established. The pastor, architect, and parish can start at ground zero, so to speak. The parish has the great advantage of hindsight. It can look back over fifty years of ugly, uninspiring church designs in order to avoid building a fad that will pass away even before the current generation has died out. There is that opportunity to connect with the tradition of creating transcendent vessels of meaning that will not only look like a churches but will be churches in their essence.

Notes:
1 “I’ve often said after I did that job,” said Francis X. Gibbons, the man who designed the renovation, “that I raped St. Mary, Star of the Sea.” (John Rivers, “Churches try to retrieve grand trappings of past,” Baltimore Sun, May 21, 2001.

2 Gunts, Edward. “Happy undoing of a modernist makeover,” Baltimore Sun, March 4, 2001.

3 John Paul II, ‘Letter on the 750th Anniversary of the Feast of Corpus Christi,’ no. 3.

Michael S. Rose is the author of several books on church architecture, including In Tiers of Glory and Ugly As Sin. He is the creator and editor of dellachiesa.com.

Copyright 2004 dellachiesa.com

The Loreto Convent Chapel, Fermoy, Co. Cork

This chapel by G.C. Ashlin is still in practically all of its orighinal pristine condition.

The angels at either side fo the altar are by John Hogan.

The neo-Byzantine Revival in the United States

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at Washington, DC, 1920-1958.

The neo-Byzantine revival

Some information and a virual tour of the Basilica, built by John McShain, the last occupant of Killarney House who gave the Killarney House estate to the Irish nation.

http://www.nationalshrine.com/site/pp.asp?c=etITK6OTG&b=107985

And just to give an idea of the scale of the apse mosaic:

Indeed!!!

Well, I am delighted to see someone is reading Archieseek. Just scroll down here in the attached blogg and you will notice a number of photographs familiar to some of us:

http://thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/

Here is the article without the pictures:

Archi-Liturgical Culture Wars by Aidan Nichols OP
by LL

The following article appeared in the September 2008 issue of ‘New Blackfriars’, a journal edited by the English Dominicans. The text of the article is reproduced in full here for the NLM with kind permission from the author, Fr Aidan Nichols OP and the editor of the New Blackfriars, Fr Fergus Kerr OP. I have omitted the references which appeared in the original article and supplemented the text with photographs:

Introduction

Church architecture has joined the disputed issues of contemporary Western Catholicism. Indeed, one commentator, the American Michael Rose, does not scruple to speak about ‘architectural culture wars’ in progress today. That the same author can vary that phrase by introducing, in place of ‘architectural’, the neologism ‘archi-liturgical’ should alert us to a fairly obvious fact. The debate about architecture is as organically connected with dispute about the Liturgy as a Modernist church in the twentieth century International style is disconnected from the traditional modalities of Catholic worship.
The ‘Jubilee Church’, erected by the Roman diocese in the year 2000 to a plan suggested by the New York architect Richard Meier, might be not the worst place to open an enquiry. That is owing to the high profile nature of this scheme, which was intended as a pilot for the third millennium of the Church’s story. An external view of the building must mention first its combination of rectangular and curved surfaces with no obvious symbolic resonance; the appropriate adjectives would be ‘analytical’ and ‘cubist’. Inside, the professor of fine arts at the American University in Rome found a stark interior, raw in its geometry, its furniture banal. The altar is an uncovered block of travertine, the ambo a box. No one had provided for the sanctuary either crucifix or image of the Mother of God, so a borrowed version of the one, from a neighbouring parish, and a repository version of the other took their place, the crucifix disconcertingly de-centred in regard to the altar. Though this observer praised the tabernacle for its colour and surface, she implies what a photograph soon confirms: it is a box—another one, if a golden one—with a circle inscribed on the side that opens. She admits that the aspiration of the building to austerity of form impresses, but doubts whether it adds up to a church, exactly—as distinct from a public building of some other kind. Her ascription of ‘iconoclastic tendencies’ to its architect, a secular Jew, would not necessarily be denied by their object. Meier argued that, had the diocese of Rome wanted a traditional church, they would not have invited him in particular to enter the competition to design it. That is a perfectly reasonable point. A defining feature of the Modern movement in architecture is to sever, of set purpose, all nostalgic ties with the past of a tradition.

As the year 2000 came and went, so it happens, an English Jesuit was working on a comprehensive study of probably the greatest of the twentieth century’s liturgical architects, John Ninian Comper, whose vision and technique could hardly stand in sharper contrast to Meier’s. Father Anthony Symondson’s biography of Comper is still awaited, but his study of Comper’s approach to building a church has already appeared. It is not only a fastidiously researched, excellently written and superbly illustrated study (from black and white photographs, many of them early, of these buildings). It is also a declaration of war. For Symondson, architectural Modernism has resulted in a rash of mediocre churches and the ruination of many old ones which depress their congregations, starve them of transcendence in worship, and deprive them of a sense of place. The importance of Comper is that

more than any other English church architect of the twentieth century, [he] endeavoured with passionate conviction to penetrate to the very core of Western civilization by studying the church art and architecture of Europe to find there spiritual values applicable to his own time.The ‘ideological impasse in which modern church architecture sleeps’, could be overcome with no compromise of liturgical principle if Comper’s understanding not only of the ‘indispensability of beauty’ but, more specifically, of the ‘legacy of Christian tradition’ were renewed. If I say that the overall effect of text and photographs in this book comes as a revelation, I shall also be declaring an interest. What follows in this essay is an attempt to second Father Symondson’s plea, notably by bringing into consort some voices harmonious with his, mainly—but not exclusively—from the United States.

The ground of my partisanship lies in the history of the subject— namely, sacred space as envisaged in Church tradition. Any visit to that history, with a view to drawing out pertinent principles, will prove hard to reconcile with those radically innovatory twentieth century buildings that reject both structure and content as found in pre-twentieth century use.

Some principles

We can note first the importance of the church building for traditional Christendom. It is hardly to be overestimated. Vera Shevzov writes of Russian Christian attitudes:
Given the meanings ascribed to the temple [i.e. church building], it is not surprising that Orthodox writers and preachers considered it an essential aspect of the Christian life. Without the temple, they main¬tained, there could be no salvation, since only it could facilitate the formation of the inner spiritual temple. Insofar as believers strove toward union and communion with God, by their nature they needed the structure and stimulus of matter. The church building provided the primary source of nourishment and healing for the human soul in its journey toward God.That tells us of the vital place of the church building, albeit in an idiom somewhat uncertainly positioned between religious rhetoric and social anthropology. Shevzov’s statement needs supplementing by a more theological definition of what a church is. For any reality, after all, ontology underlies function. Preferably, such a definition should draw on both Western and Eastern emphases since although our interest, like the problem, is Occidental, the Church here as elsewhere cannot be healthful unless she also breathes with her Oriental ‘lung’.

Writing as an Anglo-Catholic with Rome-ward inclinations, Comper comes obligingly to our aid. His prose has late Edwardian lushness but the saturated quality of this particular passage turns on its richness of allusion to Bible and Tradition.

[A church] is a building which enshrines the altar of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands and who yet has made there His Covenanted Presence on earth. It is the centre of Worship in every community of men who recognize Christ as the Pantokrator, the Almighty, the Ruler and Creator of all things: at its altar is pleaded the daily Sacrifice in complete union with the Church Triumphant in Heaven, of which He is the one and only Head, the High Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech.Comper goes on to emphasise the catholic—that is, the ecclesial and cosmic—character of the church building, to the point of arguing that ‘a Protestant church’ (as distinct from meeting-house for preaching) is a contradiction in terms. Only a high doctrine of the ecclesial mystery can explain the existence of the historic church building of traditional Christendom and the attention paid it by the community.

A church built with hands …is the outward expression here on earth of that spiritual Church built of living stones, the Bride of Christ, Urbs beata Jerusalem, which stretches back to the foundation of the world and onwards to all eternity. With her Lord she lays claim to the whole of His Creation …And so the temple here on earth, in different lands and in different shapes, in the East and in the West, has developed or added to itself fresh forms of beauty and, though it has suffered from iconoclasts and destroyers both within and without, …it has never broken with the past, it has never renounced its claims to continuity.
In his keynote essay ‘The Atmosphere of a Church’ from which I have been quoting, Comper infers from such a conception that ‘it must …reduce to folly the terms ‘self-expression’ and ‘the expression of the age’, and most notably so when they are ‘used to cover such incapacity and ugliness as every age has in turn rejected’. And he inquires, pointedly, ‘Is there such a supremacy of goodness, beauty and truth in the present age as to mark it as distinct from the past, and demand that we invent a new expression of it?’ A saint or mystic may pass directly to God without any need for the outward beauties of art, or nature for that matter. Most people cannot. Comper stresses the eschatological setting of worship.

The note of a church should be, not that of novelty, but of eternity. Like the Liturgy celebrated within it, the measure of its greatness will be the measure in which it succeeds in eliminating time and producing the atmosphere of heavenly worship. This is the characteristic of the earliest art of the Church, in liturgy, in architecture and in plastic decoration, and it is the tradition of all subsequent ages.This need exclude no genuinely ‘beautiful style’. But the basic layout must be ‘in accord with the requirements of the liturgy and the pastoral needs of those who worship within it’, while ‘the imagery [found within it] must express the balanced measure of the faith’. For these purposes it is necessary to ‘look to tradition’. It is no more satisfactory to suppose, so Comper argues, that one can properly interpret these needs without reference to tradition than were we to neglect tradition in interpreting the New Testament or the Creeds of the Church. Anti-traditionalists are, generally speaking, consistent since ‘modernism in art is the natural expression of modernism in doctrine, and it is quite true they are both the expression of the age, but of one side of it only’. And Comper goes on with frightening prescience: ‘Rome has condemned modernist doctrine, but has not yet condemned its expression in art. The attraction of the modernistic is still too strong’.

Contemporary difficulties

It would be hard to imagine a manifesto in more brutal contradiction to Comper’s principles than the United States Bishops’ Conference Committee on the Liturgy document Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, produced exactly thirty years after he wrote. The 1978 text declared the assembly of believers the most important ‘symbol with which the liturgy deals’. The document thus relegates all other elements of Catholic worship, not only the ordained ministry but the rites themselves, and so, inevitably, their artistic and architectural elaboration, to a secondary status. In due course, this text stimulated a robust counter-reaction in the American church.

Thus, for instance, the liturgical theologian Francis Mannion found behind its extraordinary choice of controlling option an attitude he called theological ‘experiential-expressivism’. That is his term for a situation where liturgical forms serve chiefly to express the inspirations of a group. The role of art in exploring, after the manner (we might add) of Comper, the ‘Christologically founded rites’ of the Church’s ‘sacramental order’ can only have the most precarious future, so Mannion opined, if such a view of the Church’s worship should come to prevail.

The most frequent visual embodiment of ‘experiential expressivism’, at least in North America, is probably the domestication of church interiors. The only ‘model’ appeal to group self-expression can readily find in the paradigm contemporary Western culture turns out to be the living room or, more institutionally, the doctor’s waiting room or, yet again, the hotel foyer. Comfortable or plush, these have it in common that they are always tame. Such accommodation to secular space is hardly unknown in Britain either. In the words of one English commentator (like Comper, an Anglo-Catholic, at least at the time of writing): ‘The sanctuary became less a place to worship God than the apotheosis of 1960s man’s homage to G-Plan furnishing and his own immanence’. Mannion’s critique was equally severe, if more soberly expressed.

The kind of hospitality appropriate to worship is not psychological intimacy in the ordinary cultural sense: it is theological intimacy, that is, the bonding of persons of all degrees of relationship by their par¬ticipation in the trinitarian life of God through sacramental initiation. By the same token, transcendence does not mean divine remoteness from the communal, but the embodiment of divine glory in communal events.An alternative organisation of space to the domestic could bear a closer resemblance to the garage. But, as the closing sentence of this citation indicates, the Bauhaus style of stripped down simplicity is scarcely more helpful than Biedermeier cosiness. In total if unwitting conformity with Comper’s essay, Mannion comments: ‘there exists considerable difficulty in reconciling the principles of aesthetic modernism and those of the sacramental tradition of Catholicism’.

That is the artifice of under-statement. How can they possibly be reconciled if architectural Modernism seeks, as it does, to expunge symbolism and memory whereas the sacramental sensibility of Catholicism is founded on precisely these things? Helpfully, Mannion points for guidance to the post-Conciliar rite for the Dedication of a Church and Altar and the relevant sections of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Given the Second Vatican Council’s movement of ressourcement in matters of early Christian Liturgy, it was certainly extraordinary that the bishops and periti expressed so little interest in the recovery of the forms of ancient Christian architecture and art, forms which are the matrix of all the subsequently developed styles the Church has known. In the post-Conciliar period, some assistance was granted, however, to the recovery of sanity by these ceremonial and catechetical documents.

In the year 2000 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States approved a replacement set of guidelines for Environment and Art in Catholic Worship. Built of Living Stones, for such was its title, represents a considerable advance on its predecessor. It does so by conceiving the church building as chiefly in function of the Church’s rites. But there is a price to be paid in terms of devotional purposes, as distinct from liturgical goals strictly so defined. For the document did not do justice to a swingeing—but not wholly unjustified—judgment passed by the Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar on how we live now.

Only in an age when man gives up his personal prayer and contents himself with being simply a communal animal in the church can one design churches which are determined purely functionally by the services of the congregation.

The need for re-iconisation

Steven Schloeder is an American architect who takes as his points of reference the dedication rites and the Catechism, as well as texts from the Second Vatican Council and Pope John Paul II. What he terms Modernist ‘whitewashed barns’—examples such as the Fronleichnamkirche at Aachen, date from so early as the late 1920s—proved, he reports, influential models for re-ordered, as well as newly built, churches in the post-Conciliar epoch. The emphasis of the Modernist movement on ‘universal space’ tallied only too well with the anti-hierarchical communitarianism which was a temptation of the mid-twentieth century liturgical movement, just as aesthetic reductivism dovetailed into notions of liturgical simplicity. The ruling maxim became ‘assembly is all’. Emphasis on the meal-aspect of the Eucharist at the expense of its more primordial sacrificial dimension—the ‘meal’ is enjoyment of the fruits of the sacrifice— followed naturally. In their worst, i.e. their most consistent, examples, writes Schloeder:

[The Modernists’] buildings have been incapable of addressing the deeper, mystical knowledge of the faith, much less the human soul’s yearning for the mystery of transcendent beauty. Rather they have fallen into a reductionist mentality, stripping the churches of those elements, symbols, and images that speak to the human heart. Their buildings speak only of the immanent—even as their liturgies studiously avoid the transcendent to dwell on the ‘gathered assembly’—and thus have departed from the theological and anthropological underpinnings of the traditional understandin of Catholic church architecture.

By the early 1960s, some commentators were resigned to soulless churches as all that a supposedly inescapable architectural modernity could provide. ‘Apart from the community which gathers in these churches’, wrote R. Kevin Seasoltz with seeming equanimity, ‘the buildings have little meaning’.

For Schloeder, in striking contrast, the church building is an icon of the spiritual reality of the Church. Here he has, I believe, rightly identified the nodal issue. Schloeder outlines briefly how in East and West this ‘iconic’ character of the church-building worked out. Given the authoritative role of Church tradition in these matters, this is in fact an indispensable exercise.

For the East: drawing on such Fathers as Theodore of Mopsuestia, Maximus Confessor and Germanus of Constantinople as well as later divines like Nicholas of Andida, Nicholas Cabasilas and Symeon of Thessalonica, Schloeder produces an overall identikit Byzantine interpretation of the church building. At the church entrance, the narthex signifies the unredeemed world: here in early times the catechumens and penitents foregathered. By contrast, the naos or central space represents the redeemed world crowned by a dome whose primary task is to recall the heavens, where Christ the Pantokrator, figured there, sits in his risen humanity at the Father’s right, holding all things together in heaven and on earth. But, writes Schloeder:

the dome also gives a sense of immanence, and suggests that the naos is also the Womb of the Virgin, as well as the Holy Cave of Bethlehem and the Holy Cave of the Sepulchre. Thus the building evokes many images of places where the Spirit vivifies the Church, which is born into the world, and redeemed into the Glory of the Lord.

Continuing his analysis, Schloeder describes the developed icon screen of late medieval and modern Byzantine-Slav churches as veiling the sanctuary which is ‘the fulfilment of the Mercy Seat of the Mosaic tabernacle, …the perfection of [the] Holy of Holies, and …even the sacramental representation of the very Throne of God’. The multiple ‘layeredness’ or rich complexity of such symbolic interpretation of the church building, even at a comparatively early stage of Greek Christian reflection, is shown in Schloeder’s summary of three chapters from the Mystagogia of the seventh century doctor St Maximus:

The entire church is an image of the Universe, of the visible world, and of man; within it, the chancel represents man’s soul, the altar his spirit, the naos his body. The bishop’s Entrance into the church symbolizes Christ’s coming into the flesh, his Entrance into the bema [the sanctuary] Christ’s Ascension to heaven.

Turning now to the West, such high mediaeval treatises as the canon regular Hugh of St Victor’s Speculum de mysteriis Ecclesiae, the black monk Abbot Suger’s Libellus de consecratione Ecclesiae sancti Dionysii, and bishop William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum furnish an analogical treatment to that found further east. The themes of the Body of Christ and the Heavenly City bespeak divine order in its integrity and fullness, which buildings shaped for the celebration of the Liturgy should reflect.

As Schloeder points out, the most common schema in the Western Middle Ages is the cruciform church as representation of the Lord’s own body on the Cross. In, for example, a mediaeval English cathedral with a black monk chapter:

Christ’s Head is at the apse which is the seat of governance represented by the bishop’s cathedra; the choir is his throat from which the chants of the monks issue forth the praise of God; the transepts are his extended arms; his torso and legs form the nave since the gathered faithful are his body; the narthex represents his feet, where the faithful enter the church; and at the crossing is the altar, which is the heart of the church.

That is not without a biblical basis. St Paul had called Christ the cornerstone (Ephesians 2: 20), and Christians members of his body (Romans 12: 5; I Corinthians 12: 12), so it was natural for Christians to see the church building as an expression of the body of the Lord. There was here a kind of Gospel transfiguration of the ancient conviction, classically expressed in Vitruvius’s De architectura, that the wonderful proportions of the human body—confirming in the microcosm the macrocosmic harmony of nature—are architecture’s proper measure. On such an understanding, nothing is more natural than to cover church walls with frescoes of the saints, or punctuate them with statues, since these remind the faithful how they are indeed part of Christ’s ‘mystical’ body. A church is, in Schloeder’s phrase, ‘built theology’.

Post-medieval churches continued to be designed to markedly symbolic plans. So Schloeder reminds us how Francesco Borromini, when remodelling the nave of St John Lateran, set up the twelve apostles in monumental statuary with the consecration crosses by their side, to bespeak the city of the Apocalypse which ‘stood on twelve foundation stones, each one of which bore the name of the one of the twelve apostles of the Lamb’ (Apocalypse 21: 4). Although St Charles Borromeo’s influential treatise Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae which sought to summarise Catholic traditions of Church design shows a markedly practical bent, Borromeo began his work with the words:

This only has been our principle: that we have shown that the norm and form of building, ornamentation and ecclesiastical furnishing are precise and in agreement with the thinking of the Fathers … That could not but ratify patristic (and post-patristic) theological symbolism—not least for Borromini. The Instructiones were re-printed, largely unchanged, on at least nineteen occasions between 1577 and 1952.36 They remain pertinent to post-Conciliar Catholicism, since, in a passage from the Constitution on the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council highlighted by Schloeder,

in any aspect of liturgical life: care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.
That passage furnishes the leit-motif of his comprehensive 1998 study Architecture as Communion, just as it does for a more general study of liturgical principles which appeared a few years later, Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy.

Schloeder’s exposition itself indicates that the tradition of symbolic interpretation was not uniform. It had variants, stemming from differences in both architectural style and theological background. Comper had increasingly sought to maximise the advantages of such pluralism by a policy of ‘unity by inclusion’: Gothic and Classical styles, for instance, are not, in Christian use, opposites. Enough is in common to call this, in broad terms, the Tradition (of iconic interpretation of architecture, q.v.).

It is a tradition which requires reinstatement in our own time, above all through the construction of buildings that actually call for a reading along some such lines. Indeed, the post-Conciliar rite of Dedication of a Church and Altar demands it, explicitly calling the church building a representation of the heavenly Jerusalem. If that rite bears any authority, then the shapes and volumes of sacred space need relating to ecclesial functions within an organic composition, and both massing and decoration allowed to recover their full symbolic valency. This in turn will permit the personal, devotional inhabiting of space as well as its corporate liturgical equivalent.

Architecture and devotion

Mannion, writing in 1999, shortly after Schloeder, and on the eve both of Built of Living Stones and Meier’s Jubilee church, was not especially sanguine as to prospects. In the secular realm, architectural Postmodernism and New Classicism were in full-scale reaction against the shortcomings of the twentieth century Modernist movement, and not least, its canonising of its own practices over against all earlier historical models. Among ‘liturgical-architectural theorists’, however, and by implication the practitioners who drew on their writings in constructing or ‘re-ordering’ church buildings, there seemed no lessening in the ‘hostility toward the past and the radical distance from traditional church styles sought by architects and designers after Vatican II’. The minimalism and chilling frugality of iconography in most modern or recently re-ordered Western Catholic churches was impossible to square with the sort of historically accurate rules-of-thumb Comper had laid down. The largely aniconic interiors of Modernist Latin-rite churches were increasingly out of kilter with the major place still given to images in domestic Catholic life and devotion. In his courageous editiorial Mannion wrote:

The functionalist principles of modern architecture and their inability to handle the ambiguity and polyvalence of Catholic devotionalism have conspired to render church architecture since Vatican II exceedingly anti-devotional. Many have lamented the removal from Catholic churches of popularly revered elements, as well as the disappearance of important conditions for the devotional life. The alienation from modern church architecture that exists on the part of many ordinary Catholic worshipers derives in great part from the rejection by the newer styles of traditional elements conducive to the devotional.
That has reference to a wide variety of devotional objects, as well as to the overall ‘atmosphere of a church’ (Comper’s phrase). The most important issues it raises are, however, those of altar and tabernacle, for which a comparatively full treatment seems, consequently, justified.

(i) The altar

In particular, the chief devotional focus of the Church gathered for the Holy Sacrifice, its principal rite, is, as Comper so forcefully realised, the altar, which is the symbol of Christ and the place where his paschal sacrifice is renewed. The altar is also the place from which, in holy Communion, the faithful are fed by the Bread of his body and the Wine of his precious blood. In a wider symbolic cosmology, the altar holds a central place as well. Their name coming from the word altus, a high place, the altar-steps bring to mind the ascent to the Temple of Jerusalem, the climb up the sacred mountain on which Zion was built. As the holy ‘mountain’, the altar remains the heart of the church. This makes treatment of the altar especially crucial.

First of all, there is the issue of orientation. In traditional usage, the altar is where possible placed at the east, on the solar axis. Facing the altar, one faces the rising sun, which overcomes cosmic darkness as Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension overcame spiritual. Orientation is a particularly neuralgic topic in contemporary Catholicism. The now widespread desire for a general return to versus apsidem celebration for the Liturgy of the Sacrifice (as distinct from that of the Word) constitutes an inescapable ‘head-on’ challenge to ‘Modernism’—understanding by that term a stance that is at once architectural, liturgical, ecclesial, sacramental and—by implication at least—eschatological.

‘The custom of orientation is biblical and it expresses the eschaton.’ This simple statement sums it up. In a more complex presentation of the Judaic and early patristic materials, the Oratorian scholar Uwe Michael Lang has shown that sacred direction—specifically to the East—was the most important spatial consideration in early Christian prayer. Its significance was primarily eschatological (the East was the direction of the Christ of the Parousia, cf especially Matthew 24: 27 and 30) and, naturally, it applied to all the faithful, including their ministers. Archaeological evidence shows the great majority of ancient churches to have an oriented apse. Granted that the altar was the most honoured object in such buildings, the only safe inference is that the celebrant stood at the people’s side, facing East, for the Anaphora. In the minority of buildings (notably at Rome and in North Africa) that have, by contrast, an oriented entrance, the position is less clear, but Lang argues persuasively that the celebrant in such a case prayed facing the doors (and thus the people) but did so with hands and eyes alike raised to the ceiling of the apse or arch where the decorative schemes of early Christian art are focussed. For Lang—who stresses that even when ‘orientation’ is not the geographical East but only a conventional ‘liturgical East’—common direction is theologically important. Celebration versus populum in the modern (eyeball-to-eyeball) sense was unknown to Christian antiquity. Not for them the situation where:

The sight-lines stop at [the celebrant], centre on his person, competence, visage, voice, mannerisms, personality—uplifting or unbearable alike. At its most objectionable, such a practice ‘elevates the priest above the Sacrament, the servant above the Master, the man above the Messiah’. The late Louis Bouyer remarked with disarming frankness:

Either you look at somebody doing something for you, instead of you, or you do it with him. You can’t do both at the same time.
The historian of the Western Liturgy Klaus Gamber put it more theologically:

The person who is doing the offering is facing the one who is receiving the offering; thus he stands before the altar, positioned ad Dominum, facing the Lord.
From the English experience Lang makes the powerful point that the adoption of the eastward position by the Oxford Movement clergy was key to their efforts to give a Catholic character to the Church of England, precisely because that position was taken (by opponents as well as allies) to express the sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic rite as a Godward act.

To the issue of the oriented altar may be added the issue of veiling which covers such topics as not only veils of fabric, as in the side-curtains of the ‘English’ or ‘Sarum’ altar revived by Anglo-Catholics like Comper in the early twentieth century, but also, in paint, wood, and stone, the iconostasis of the East and the rood screen and cancelli or communion rails of the West. The Writer to the Hebrews addresses his readers:

Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain [veil], that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart. (10: 19–22)
The American Dominican Michael Carey, recalling how cancelli or ‘rails’ where the faithful receive the Lord’s body and blood have historically given this access to the sanctuary architectural expression, comments:

If the sanctuary [of the church building] is that sacred place which holds in a special way the Real Presence of the Lord on the altar and in the tabernacle; and if the veil or veiling structure around the sanctuary represents the humanity of Christ, as the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches; and, further, if we can only enter into God’s Presence through the humanity of Christ: then, that veiling structure is necessary …Some veiling structure, then, continues to be of utmost importance for a proper liturgical spirituality. Its removal would symbolically eliminate the necessity of Christ’s Humanity, as if we could enter into the presence of the Divinity without it.
For Carey this is crucial to, in the title of Comper’s essay, ‘the atmosphere of a church’. The sense of, in Romano Guardini’s words, ‘the altar as threshold’, sets up an isomorphism between the movement of the Incarnation and the spatial inter-relation of sanctuary and nave. In both cases God stoops down to encounter us, from there to assist us, not without difficulty, across the barrier into his own realm of burning holiness and light. Here, as with the Byzantine icon-screen, threshold is not only borderline. It is also crossing over.

In that Byzantine tradition, indeed, the earlier low railed screen of the cancelli into which occasional images might be fixed, had developed by the sixteenth century into the full, floor to ceiling, wall-like iconostasis of first Russian and subsequently Greek and other churches. The role of the iconostasis is subtle, as the early twentieth century Russian Orthodox philosopher Pavel Florensky explains.

[T]he iconostasis is a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds, and it functions as a boundary by being an obstacle to our seeing the altar, thereby making it accessible to our consciousness by means of its unified row of saints (i.e. by its cloud of witnesses) that surround the altar where God is, the sphere where heavenly glory dwells, thus proclaiming the Mystery. Iconostasis is vision.
In other words, veiling at one level permits unveiling at another. The iconostasis does not only carry images of the saints but evokes the inter-related mysteries of Incarnation and Atonement. As a sympathetic English interpreter explains:

In front of the altar, the Royal Gates with Gabriel’s message and the Virgin’s answer open the way to God’s historical gift of Himself, still present with us. And on the two sides of the gates the double significance of Bethlehem and Olivet is revealed: on the north, the Virgin and the Child; on the south, Christ Pantokrator – the All-Emperor: the kenosis is answered by the Kingdom. Behind the veil, the altar speaks of Calvary, but Easter at once is all around us. The altar is also the life-bringing Tomb, the Fountain of the Resurrection.
The Western rood screen performs the same function of theologically significant veiling, with its painted or carved saints running along the line demarcating nave and sanctuary, surmounted by the Cross of the Lord. It does not represent an obscuring of the altar but its visibility through a ‘window’ framed by the saints and other motifs of Catholic doctrine. It is strange that, although the 1970 General Instruction of the Roman Missal deemed that the sanctuary should be ‘marked off from the nave either by a higher floor level or by a distinctive structure and decor’, its promulgation was followed by a rash of ‘removalitis’: the demolition of screens and even communion rails in many—if not most—Latin-rite church-buildings. For Durandus, the rail between altar and choir had taught specifically ‘the separation of things celestial from things terrestrial’. Awaiting communion kneeling at the rail encourages a moment of concentrated recollection before the altar which is less easy to reproduce when standing behind other communicants in a line.

Can one regard the addition of a ciborium (civory) or tester (painted canopy) as veiling? Though altars with civories—a columned structure above the altar made in stone, wood, or metal—often had curtains enabling the altar itself to be veiled between the beginning of the Preface and the end of the priest’s communion (missals from the first half of the sixteenth century still refer to this), the civory’s function was, rather, to honour the altar. They were favoured features of Comper’s buildings. The Anglican liturgist Bishop David Stancliffe writes:

To give [the altar] emphasis, and to combine physical proximity with a sense of transcendence, a ciborium adds dignity and colour. It also gives it a defined place within the undefined space of the church. Comper is familiar with the early Roman basilicas, and uses their syntax, if not their vocabulary.

The ‘tester’ is an alternative way of making the same gracious point. A feature of Comper’s earlier work, and presuming the ‘English’ altar, this canopy, suspended from the ceiling, was a lighter structure than the civory. Characteristically, Comper decorated the tester with a painted Christ in majesty comparable – he hoped—to the great mediaeval Sicilian mosaic majesties of Cefalu and Monreale. From the civory or tester would hang (if Comper could persuade the patrons) the reserved Sacrament in a pyx, of which Stancliffe remarks:

Where this has been done, there is a remarkable sense of the presence of Christ filling the building – something the more locked-away methods of reservation fail to communicate.
(ii) The tabernacle

The question of the the Eucharistic tabernacle (the normal Roman Rite equivalent to Comper’s hanging pyx), and its adornment and placing, is inescapable here. The history of tabernacle design is more interesting than cupboards like the box at the Roman Jubilee church might lead once to suspect. In early modern Catholicism, Eucharistic tabernacles were most frequently constructed on the model of the Ark of the Covenant in the Solomonic Temple: that is why they were veiled with a fabric covering usually changed according to the liturgical colour of the season or day. Fairly commonly, adoring angels appear in the iconography on tabernacle doors or adjacent areas, again evoking the Israelite Ark which had its own figures of attendant cherubim (Exodus 25: 18–22). In earlier epochs, animals, fruits or flowers could be incorporated into tabernacle design, to signify how the entire world is en route to transfiguration via the Eucharistic Lord. Tabernacles have also been designed as churches in miniature, since the Eucharistic sacrament which they house ‘unifies the person of Christ and his living body, the Church’. Again, the tabernacle has taken the form of a treasure-chest, because the entire spiritual treasury of salvation is present in Christ, or, in another format, of a tower reaching up toward heaven: an obvious symbolism for the earthly tabernacle qua prefiguring the heavenly. So much iconological effort implies the existence of a powerful theological rationale.

The sense of distance that Catholics have traditionally kept from the Eucharistic tabernacle, often venerating it from afar, is not so much a pagan devotional remnant, but rather a statement that the earthly worshipper remain at some distance from the heavenly tabernacle. The Eucharist will only be received in all its fullness in the eternal banquet of heaven, while on earth the fullness of Eucharistic reality remains literally and spiritually ‘reserved’ for the future.
Whatever sculptural form the tabernacle takes, both popular feeling and the general Tendenz of Roman documents since the immediate aftermath of the post-Conciliar reform militate against the marginalisation it has suffered in many new or re-ordered churches. The 1967 Instruction Eucharisticum Mysterium of the Congregation of Rites appeared to lack a proper theology of the distinct but inter-related modes of relation to the Paschal Mystery of Christ enjoyed by the tabernacle on the one hand, the consecrated Elements on the altar on the other. Yielding to a pervasive contemporary temptation, it foreshortened the eschatological orientation which was itself the main theological advance, vis-a-vis earlier magisterial statements on the Liturgy, of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium. Once again, it is an American voice that sounds the alert.

As permanent signs of Christ and His Pasch, the reserved Eucharist and the Church do not conflict with the unfolding of the paschal sacrifice in the liturgy when they are present prior to the consecration, rather they are signs formed in previous liturgies which draw us back to the eternal Pasch present anew in the contemporary celebrations …Because the consecration, the Host on the altar, the assembled Church, and the tabernacle have distinct relations to the Pasch, they do not detract from each other when simultaneously present.
By 1980, when John Paul II’s Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship issued its Instruction Inaestimabile donum, it seemed plain that ‘problems had arisen with a diminution of devotion to the Eucharist, not disassociated from inadequate attention to the place of reservation in new or renovated churches’. Hence the Instruction’s insistence that the tabernacle be located in ‘a distinguished place …, conspicuous, suitably adorned and conducive to prayer’. The same note is struck in Benedict XVI’s Post-Synodal Exhortation Sacramentum caritatis. Without a prominent tabernacle (or hanging pyx – why not?) there is no possibility – special supernatural graces aside—of what Stancliffe terms a sense of the presence of Christ filling a building. In The Spirit of the Liturgy Joseph Ratzinger maintained:

The Eucharistic Presence in the tabernacle does not set another view of the Eucharist alongside or against the Eucharistic celebration, but simply signifies its complete fulfilment. For this Presence has the effect, of course, of keeping the Eucharist forever in church. The church never becomes a lifeless space but is always filled with the presence of the Lord, which comes out of the celebration, leads us into it, and always makes us participants in the cosmic Eucharist. [And he asks rhetorically,] ‘What man of faith has not experienced this?’
Conclusion

Francis Mannion relaxed his characteristic iron discipline of understatement when he wrote:

[A] future generation of historians will make a stronger connection than we do today between the early iconoclastic movement, the Reformation ‘stripping of altars’, and the post-Vatican II treatment of the historic heritage of Catholic art.
Three years previously, in the unlikely context of the London Tablet, the stained glass artist Patrick Reyntiens had entered a similar plea.

t begins to become more and more obvious that the exact ambience and cultural context of the visible elements in the interiors of modern churches should be thought out and acted upon in far greater seriousness and depth than hitherto … [T]he sacred space has been violated since Vatican II very much as it was first at the time of the Reformation, and this must be rectified for the health of the Church.And so, Quo vadis? As if with prophetic insight into the ravages of architectural Modernism, the American Neo-Gothic builder Ralph Adams Cram wrote in the opening year of the twentieth century:

We must return for the fire of life to other centuries, since a night intervened between our fathers’ time and ours wherein the light was not.
That was Comper’s message too, but in his case, it came to entail a comprehensive openness to all the great stylistic epochs of the Church as builder. That was possible owing to both the ontological character of beauty as a transcendental determination of being and the fundamental internal coherence or organicity of the Church’s tradition. The unifying element in any particular building comes from the architect’s contribution. A church must be not only a rationally designed liturgical space but a unified work of art.

John Henry Newman, in the nineteenth of the Parochial and Plain Sermons took as his text Psalm 78: 69, which in the Authorised Version reads, ‘He built His sanctuary like high palaces, like the earth which He hath established for ever’. Newman used the homiletic opportunity to argue against the opinion that Jesus’s prediction to the Woman of Samaria—future worshippers ‘shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth’ (John 4: 23)—nullifies the psalm in question (and in so doing renders trivial the topic of this essay).

Our Saviour did not say to the Samaritan woman that there should be no places and buildings for worship under the Gospel, because He has not brought it to pass, because such ever have been, at all times and in all countries, and amid all differences of faith. And the same reasons which lead us to believe that religious edifices are a Christian ordinance, though so very little is said about them in Scripture, will also show that it is right and pious to make them enduring, and stately, and magnificent, and ornamental; so that our Saviour’s declaration, when He foretold the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, was not that there should never be any other house built to His honour, but rather that there should be many houses; that they should be built, not merely at Jerusalem, or at Gerizim, but every where; what was under the Law a local ordinance, being henceforth a Catholic privilege, allowed not here and there, but wherever was the Spirit and the Truth. The glory of the Gospel is not the abolition of rites, but their dissemination; not their absence, but their living and efficacious presence through the grace of Christ.A church-building, says Newman, represents
the beauty, the loftiness, the calmness, the mystery, and the sanctity of religion …and that in many ways; still, I will say, more than all these, it represents to us its eternity. It is the witness of Him who is the first and the last; it is the token and emblem of ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever’ …That is why they are: happy …who, when they enter within their holy limits, enter in heart into the court of heaven. And most unhappy, who, while they have eyes to admire, admire them only for their beauty’s sake, and the skill they exhibit; who regard them as works of art, not fruits of grace; bow down before their material forms, instead of worshipping ‘in spirit and in truth’; count their stones, and measure their spaces, but discern in them no tokens of the invisible, no canons of truth, no lessons of wisdom, to guide them forward in the way heavenward!
We enter these iconic buildings aright if, as we do so, we contemplate the mystery of the Church and, through the Church, the Kingdom. Go to the greatest of Comper’s churches – to St Mary’s Wellingborough (Northamptonshire), or St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate (London)—and you will learn how.

Labels: Architecture

St. Louis Cathedral, St Louis, Missouri

This must be one of the most extraordinary pronouncements ever made to the Institut de France. The Pope’s reflections on Western Culture and Civilisation:

VOYAGE APOSTOLIQUE
EN FRANCE À L’OCCASION DU 150e ANNIVERSAIRE
DES APPARITIONS DE LOURDES
(12 – 15 SEPTEMBRE 2008)

AU MONDE DE LA CULTURE

DISCOURS DU PAPE BENOÃŽT XVI

Collège des Bernardins, Paris
Vendredi 12 septembre 2008

Monsieur le Cardinal,
Madame le Ministre de la Culture,
Monsieur le Maire,
Monsieur le Chancelier de l’Institut,
Chers amis,

Merci, Monsieur le Cardinal, pour vos aimables paroles. Nous nous trouvons dans un lieu historique, lieu édifié par les fils de saint Bernard de Clairvaux et que votre grand prédécesseur, le regretté Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a voulu comme un centre de dialogue de la Sagesse chrétienne avec les courants culturels, intellectuels et artistiques de votre société. Je salue particulièrement Madame le Ministre de la Culture qui représente le gouvernement, ainsi que Monsieur Giscard d’Estaing et Monsieur Chirac. J’adresse également mes salutations aux ministres présents, aux représentants de l’UNESCO, à Monsieur le Maire de Paris et à toutes les autres autorités. Je ne veux pas oublier mes collègues de l’Institut de France qui savent ma considération et je désire remercier le Prince de Broglie de ses paroles cordiales. Nous nous reverrons demain matin. Je remercie les délégués de la communauté musulmane française d’avoir accepté de participer à cette rencontre ; je leur adresse mes vœux les meilleurs en ce temps du ramadan. Mes salutations chaleureuses vont maintenant tout naturellement vers l’ensemble du monde multiforme de la culture que vous représentez si dignement, chers invités.

J’aimerais vous parler ce soir des origines de la théologie occidentale et des racines de la culture européenne. J’ai mentionné en ouverture que le lieu où nous nous trouvons était emblématique. Il est lié à la culture monastique. De jeunes moines ont ici vécu pour s’initier profondément à leur vocation et pour bien vivre leur mission. Ce lieu, évoque-t-il pour nous encore quelque chose ou n’y rencontrons-nous qu’un monde désormais révolu ? Pour pouvoir répondre, nous devons réfléchir un instant sur la nature même du monachisme occidental. De quoi s’agissait-il alors ? En considérant les fruits historiques du monachisme, nous pouvons dire qu’au cours de la grande fracture culturelle, provoquée par la migration des peuples et par la formation des nouveaux ordres étatiques, les monastères furent des espaces où survécurent les trésors de l’antique culture et où, en puisant à ces derniers, se forma petit à petit une culture nouvelle. Comment cela s’est-il passé ? Quelle était la motivation des personnes qui se réunissaient en ces lieux ? Quels étaient leurs désirs ? Comment ont-elles vécu ?

Avant toute chose, il faut reconnaître avec beaucoup de réalisme que leur volonté n’était pas de créer une culture nouvelle ni de conserver une culture du passé. Leur motivation était beaucoup plus simple. Leur objectif était de chercher Dieu, quaerere Deum. Au milieu de la confusion de ces temps où rien ne semblait résister, les moines désiraient la chose la plus importante : s’appliquer à trouver ce qui a de la valeur et demeure toujours, trouver la Vie elle-même. Ils étaient à la recherche de Dieu. Des choses secondaires, ils voulaient passer aux réalités essentielles, à ce qui, seul, est vraiment important et sûr. On dit que leur être était tendu vers l’« eschatologie ». Mais cela ne doit pas être compris au sens chronologique du terme – comme s’ils vivaient les yeux tournés vers la fin du monde ou vers leur propre mort – mais au sens existentiel : derrière le provisoire, ils cherchaient le définitif. Quaerere Deum : comme ils étaient chrétiens, il ne s’agissait pas d’une aventure dans un désert sans chemin, d’une recherche dans l’obscurité absolue. Dieu lui-même a placé des bornes milliaires, mieux, il a aplani la voie, et leur tâche consistait à la trouver et à la suivre. Cette voie était sa Parole qui, dans les livres des Saintes Écritures, était offerte aux hommes. La recherche de Dieu requiert donc, intrinsèquement, une culture de la parole, ou, comme le disait Dom Jean Leclercq : eschatologie et grammaire sont dans le monachisme occidental indissociables l’une de l’autre (cf. L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu, p.14). Le désir de Dieu comprend l’amour des lettres, l’amour de la parole, son exploration dans toutes ses dimensions. Puisque dans la parole biblique Dieu est en chemin vers nous et nous vers Lui, ils devaient apprendre à pénétrer le secret de la langue, à la comprendre dans sa structure et dans ses usages. Ainsi, en raison même de la recherche de Dieu, les sciences profanes, qui nous indiquent les chemins vers la langue, devenaient importantes. La bibliothèque faisait, à ce titre, partie intégrante du monastère tout comme l’école. Ces deux lieux ouvraient concrètement un chemin vers la parole. Saint Benoît appelle le monastère une dominici servitii schola, une école du service du Seigneur. L’école et la bibliothèque assuraient la formation de la raison et l’eruditio, sur la base de laquelle l’homme apprend à percevoir au milieu des paroles, la Parole.

Pour avoir une vision d’ensemble de cette culture de la parole liée à la recherche de Dieu, nous devons faire un pas supplémentaire. La Parole qui ouvre le chemin de la recherche de Dieu et qui est elle-même ce chemin, est une Parole qui donne naissance à une communauté. Elle remue certes jusqu’au fond d’elle-même chaque personne en particulier (cf. Ac 2, 37). Grégoire le Grand décrit cela comme une douleur forte et inattendue qui secoue notre âme somnolente et nous réveille pour nous rendre attentifs à la réalité essentielle, à Dieu (cf. Leclercq, ibid., p. 35). Mais elle nous rend aussi attentifs les uns aux autres. La Parole ne conduit pas uniquement sur la voie d’une mystique individuelle, mais elle nous introduit dans la communauté de tous ceux qui cheminent dans la foi. C’est pourquoi il faut non seulement réfléchir sur la Parole, mais également la lire de façon juste. Tout comme à l’école rabbinique, chez les moines, la lecture accomplie par l’un d’eux est également un acte corporel. « Le plus souvent, quand legere et lectio sont employés sans spécification, ils désignent une activité qui, comme le chant et l’écriture, occupe tout le corps et tout l’esprit », dit à ce propos Dom Leclercq (ibid., p. 21).

Il y a encore un autre pas à faire. La Parole de Dieu elle-même nous introduit dans un dialogue avec Lui. Le Dieu qui parle dans la Bible nous enseigne comment nous pouvons Lui parler. En particulier, dans le Livre des Psaumes, il nous donne les mots avec lesquelles nous pouvons nous adresser à Lui. Dans ce dialogue, nous Lui présentons notre vie, avec ses hauts et ses bas, et nous la transformons en un mouvement vers Lui. Les Psaumes contiennent en plusieurs endroits des instructions sur la façon dont ils doivent être chantés et accompagnés par des instruments musicaux. Pour prier sur la base de la Parole de Dieu, la seule labialisation ne suffit pas, la musique est nécessaire. Deux chants de la liturgie chrétienne dérivent de textes bibliques qui les placent sur les lèvres des Anges : le Gloria qui est chanté une première fois par les Anges à la naissance de Jésus, et le Sanctus qui, selon Isaïe 6, est l’acclamation des Séraphins qui se tiennent dans la proximité immédiate de Dieu. Sous ce jour, la Liturgie chrétienne est une invitation à chanter avec les anges et à donner à la parole sa plus haute fonction. À ce sujet, écoutons encore une fois Jean Leclercq : « Les moines devaient trouver des accents qui traduisent le consentement de l’homme racheté aux mystères qu’il célèbre : les quelques chapiteaux de Cluny qui nous aient été conservés montrent les symboles christologiques des divers tons du chant » (cf. ibid., p. 229).

Pour saint Benoît, la règle déterminante de la prière et du chant des moines est la parole du Psaume : Coram angelis psallam Tibi, Domine – en présence des anges, je veux te chanter, Seigneur (cf. 138, 1). Se trouve ici exprimée la conscience de chanter, dans la prière communautaire, en présence de toute la cour céleste, et donc d’être soumis à la mesure suprême : prier et chanter pour s’unir à la musique des esprits sublimes qui étaient considérés comme les auteurs de l’harmonie du cosmos, de la musique des sphères. À partir de là, on peut comprendre la sévérité d’une méditation de saint Bernard de Clairvaux qui utilise une expression de la tradition platonicienne, transmise par saint Augustin, pour juger le mauvais chant des moines qui, à ses yeux, n’était en rien un incident secondaire. Il qualifie la cacophonie d’un chant mal exécuté comme une chute dans la regio dissimilitudinis, dans la ‘région de la dissimilitude’. Saint Augustin avait tiré cette expression de la philosophie platonicienne pour caractériser l’état de son âme avant sa conversion (cf. Confessions, VII, 10.16) : l’homme qui est créé à l’image de Dieu tombe, en conséquence de son abandon de Dieu, dans la ‘région de la dissimilitude’, dans un éloignement de Dieu où il ne Le reflète plus et où il devient ainsi non seulement dissemblable à Dieu, mais aussi à sa véritable nature d’homme. Saint Bernard se montre ici évidemment sévère en recourant à cette expression, qui indique la chute de l’homme loin de lui-même, pour qualifier les chants mal exécutés par les moines, mais il montre à quel point il prend la chose au sérieux. Il indique ici que la culture du chant est une culture de l’être et que les moines, par leurs prières et leurs chants, doivent correspondre à la grandeur de la Parole qui leur est confiée, à son impératif de réelle beauté. De cette exigence capitale de parler avec Dieu et de Le chanter avec les mots qu’Il a Lui-même donnés, est née la grande musique occidentale. Ce n’était pas là l’œuvre d’une « créativité » personnelle où l’individu, prenant comme critère essentiel la représentation de son propre moi, s’érige un monument à lui-même. Il s’agissait plutôt de reconnaître attentivement avec les « oreilles du cœur » les lois constitutives de l’harmonie musicale de la création, les formes essentielles de la musique émise par le Créateur dans le monde et en l’homme, et d’inventer une musique digne de Dieu qui soit, en même temps, authentiquement digne de l’homme et qui proclame hautement cette dignité.

Enfin, pour s’efforcer de saisir cette culture monastique occidentale de la parole, qui s’est développée à partir de la quête intérieure de Dieu, il faut au moins faire une brève allusion à la particularité du Livre ou des Livres par lesquels cette Parole est parvenue jusqu’aux moines. Vue sous un aspect purement historique ou littéraire, la Bible n’est pas simplement un livre, mais un recueil de textes littéraires dont la rédaction s’étend sur plus d’un millénaire et dont les différents livres ne sont pas facilement repérables comme constituant un corpus unifié. Au contraire, des tensions visibles existent entre eux. C’est déjà le cas dans la Bible d’Israël, que nous, chrétiens, appelons l’Ancien Testament. Ça l’est plus encore quand nous, chrétiens, lions le Nouveau Testament et ses écrits à la Bible d’Israël en l’interprétant comme chemin vers le Christ. Avec raison, dans le Nouveau Testament, la Bible n’est pas de façon habituelle appelée « l’Écriture » mais « les Écritures » qui, cependant, seront ensuite considérées dans leur ensemble comme l’unique Parole de Dieu qui nous est adressée. Ce pluriel souligne déjà clairement que la Parole de Dieu nous parvient seulement à travers la parole humaine, à travers des paroles humaines, c’est-à-dire que Dieu nous parle seulement dans l’humanité des hommes, à travers leurs paroles et leur histoire. Cela signifie, ensuite, que l’aspect divin de la Parole et des paroles n’est pas immédiatement perceptible. Pour le dire de façon moderne : l’unité des livres bibliques et le caractère divin de leurs paroles ne sont pas saisissables d’un point de vue purement historique. L’élément historique se présente dans le multiple et l’humain. Ce qui explique la formulation d’un distique médiéval qui, à première vue, apparaît déconcertant : Littera gesta docet – quid credas allegoria…(cf. Augustin de Dacie, Rotulus pugillaris, I). La lettre enseigne les faits ; l’allégorie ce qu’il faut croire, c’est-à-dire l’interprétation christologique et pneumatique.

Nous pouvons exprimer tout cela d’une manière plus simple : l’Écriture a besoin de l’interprétation, et elle a besoin de la communauté où elle s’est formée et où elle est vécue. En elle seulement, elle a son unité et, en elle, se révèle le sens qui unifie le tout. Dit sous une autre forme : il existe des dimensions du sens de la Parole et des paroles qui se découvrent uniquement dans la communion vécue de cette Parole qui crée l’histoire. À travers la perception croissante de la pluralité de ses sens, la Parole n’est pas dévalorisée, mais elle apparaît, au contraire, dans toute sa grandeur et sa dignité. C’est pourquoi le « Catéchisme de l’Église catholique » peut affirmer avec raison que le christianisme n’est pas au sens classique seulement une religion du livre (cf. n. 108). Le christianisme perçoit dans les paroles la Parole, le Logos lui-même, qui déploie son mystère à travers cette multiplicité et la réalité d’une histoire humaine. Cette structure particulière de la Bible est un défi toujours nouveau posé à chaque génération. Selon sa nature, elle exclut tout ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui « fondamentalisme ». La Parole de Dieu, en effet, n’est jamais simplement présente dans la seule littéralité du texte. Pour l’atteindre, il faut un dépassement et un processus de compréhension qui se laisse guider par le mouvement intérieur de l’ensemble des textes et, à partir de là, doit devenir également un processus vital. Ce n’est que dans l’unité dynamique de leur ensemble que les nombreux livres ne forment qu’un Livre. La Parole de Dieu et Son action dans le monde se révèlent seulement dans la parole et dans l’histoire humaines.

Le caractère crucial de ce thème est éclairé par les écrits de saint Paul. Il a exprimé de manière radicale ce que signifie le dépassement de la lettre et sa compréhension holistique, dans la phrase : « La lettre tue, mais l’Esprit donne la vie » (2 Co 3, 6). Et encore : « Là où est l’Esprit…, là est la liberté » (2 Co 3, 17). Toutefois, la grandeur et l’ampleur de cette perception de la Parole biblique ne peut se comprendre que si l’on écoute saint Paul jusqu’au bout, en apprenant que cet Esprit libérateur a un nom et que, de ce fait, la liberté a une mesure intérieure : « Le Seigneur, c’est l’Esprit, et là où l’Esprit du Seigneur est présent, là est la liberté » (2 Co 3, 17). L’Esprit qui rend libre ne se laisse pas réduire à l’idée ou à la vision personnelle de celui qui interprète. L’Esprit est Christ, et le Christ est le Seigneur qui nous montre le chemin. Avec cette parole sur l’Esprit et sur la liberté, un vaste horizon s’ouvre, mais en même temps, une limite claire est mise à l’arbitraire et à la subjectivité, limite qui oblige fortement l’individu tout comme la communauté et noue un lien supérieur à celui de la lettre du texte : le lien de l’intelligence et de l’amour. Cette tension entre le lien et la liberté, qui va bien au-delà du problème littéraire de l’interprétation de l’Écriture, a déterminé aussi la pensée et l’œuvre du monachisme et a profondément modelé la culture occidentale. Cette tension se présente à nouveau à notre génération comme un défi face aux deux pôles que sont, d’un côté, l’arbitraire subjectif, et de l’autre, le fanatisme fondamentaliste. Si la culture européenne d’aujourd’hui comprenait désormais la liberté comme l’absence totale de liens, cela serait fatal et favoriserait inévitablement le fanatisme et l’arbitraire. L’absence de liens et l’arbitraire ne sont pas la liberté, mais sa destruction.

En considérant « l’école du service du Seigneur » – comme Benoît appelait le monachisme -, nous avons jusque là porté notre attention prioritairement sur son orientation vers la parole, vers l’« ora ». Et, de fait, c’est à partir de là que se détermine l’ensemble de la vie monastique. Mais notre réflexion resterait incomplète, si nous ne fixions pas aussi notre regard, au moins brièvement, sur la deuxième composante du monachisme, désignée par le terme « labora ». Dans le monde grec, le travail physique était considéré comme l’œuvre des esclaves. Le sage, l’homme vraiment libre, se consacrait uniquement aux choses de l’esprit ; il abandonnait le travail physique, considéré comme une réalité inférieure, à ces hommes qui n’étaient pas supposés atteindre cette existence supérieure, celle de l’esprit. La tradition juive était très différente : tous les grands rabbins exerçaient parallèlement un métier artisanal. Paul, comme rabbi puis comme héraut de l’Évangile aux Gentils, était un fabricant de tentes et il gagnait sa vie par le travail de ses mains. Il n’était pas une exception, mais il se situait dans la tradition commune du rabbinisme. Le monachisme chrétien a accueilli cette tradition : le travail manuel en est un élément constitutif. Dans sa Regula, saint Benoît ne parle pas au sens strict de l’école, même si l’enseignement et l’apprentissage – comme nous l’avons vu – étaient acquis dans les faits ; en revanche, il parle explicitement, dans un chapitre de sa Règle, du travail (cf. chap. 48). Augustin avait fait de même en consacrant au travail des moines un livre particulier. Les chrétiens, s’inscrivant dans la tradition pratiquée depuis longtemps par le judaïsme, devaient, en outre, se sentir interpelés par la parole de Jésus dans l’Évangile de Jean, où il défendait son action le jour du shabbat : « Mon Père (…) est toujours à l’œuvre, et moi aussi je suis à l’œuvre » (5, 17). Le monde gréco-romain ne connaissait aucun Dieu Créateur. La divinité suprême selon leur vision ne pouvait pas, pour ainsi dire, se salir les mains par la création de la matière. « L’ordonnancement » du monde était le fait du démiurge, une divinité subordonnée. Le Dieu de la Bible est bien différent : Lui, l’Un, le Dieu vivant et vrai, est également le Créateur. Dieu travaille, il continue d’œuvrer dans et sur l’histoire des hommes. Et dans le Christ, il entre comme Personne dans l’enfantement laborieux de l’histoire. « Mon Père est toujours à l’œuvre et moi aussi je suis à l’œuvre ». Dieu Lui-même est le Créateur du monde, et la création n’est pas encore achevée. Dieu travaille, ergázetai ! C’est ainsi que le travail des hommes devait apparaître comme une expression particulière de leur ressemblance avec Dieu qui rend l’homme participant à l’œuvre créatrice de Dieu dans le monde. Sans cette culture du travail qui, avec la culture de la parole, constitue le monachisme, le développement de l’Europe, son ethos et sa conception du monde sont impensables. L’originalité de cet ethos devrait cependant faire comprendre que le travail et la détermination de l’histoire par l’homme sont une collaboration avec le Créateur, qui ont en Lui leur mesure. Là où cette mesure vient à manquer et là où l’homme s’élève lui-même au rang de créateur déiforme, la transformation du monde peut facilement aboutir à sa destruction.

Nous sommes partis de l’observation que, dans l’effondrement de l’ordre ancien et des antiques certitudes, l’attitude de fond des moines était le quaerere Deum – se mettre à la recherche de Dieu. C’est là, pourrions-nous dire, l’attitude vraiment philosophique : regarder au-delà des réalités pénultièmes et se mettre à la recherche des réalités ultimes qui sont vraies. Celui qui devenait moine, s’engageait sur un chemin élevé et long, il était néanmoins déjà en possession de la direction : la Parole de la Bible dans laquelle il écoutait Dieu parler. Dès lors, il devait s’efforcer de Le comprendre pour pouvoir aller à Lui. Ainsi, le cheminement des moines, tout en restant impossible à évaluer dans sa progression, s’effectuait au cÅ“ur de la Parole reçue. La quête des moines comprend déjà en soi, dans une certaine mesure, sa résolution. Pour que cette recherche soit possible, il est nécessaire qu’il existe dans un premier temps un mouvement intérieur qui suscite non seulement la volonté de chercher, mais qui rende aussi crédible le fait que dans cette Parole se trouve un chemin de vie, un chemin de vie sur lequel Dieu va à la rencontre de l’homme pour lui permettre de venir à Sa rencontre. En d’autres termes, l’annonce de la Parole est nécessaire. Elle s’adresse à l’homme et forge en lui une conviction qui peut devenir vie. Afin que s’ouvre un chemin au cÅ“ur de la parole biblique en tant que Parole de Dieu, cette même Parole doit d’abord être annoncée ouvertement. L’expression classique de la nécessité pour la foi chrétienne de se rendre communicable aux autres se résume dans une phrase de la Première Lettre de Pierre, que la théologie médiévale regardait comme le fondement biblique du travail des théologiens : « Vous devez toujours être prêts à vous expliquer devant tous ceux qui vous demandent de rendre compte (logos) de l’espérance qui est en vous » (3, 15). (Le Logos, la raison de l’espérance doit devenir apo-logie, doit devenir réponse). De fait, les chrétiens de l’Église naissante ne considéraient pas leur annonce missionnaire comme une propagande qui devait servir à augmenter l’importance de leur groupe, mais comme une nécessité intrinsèque qui dérivait de la nature de leur foi. Le Dieu en qui ils croyaient était le Dieu de tous, le Dieu Un et Vrai qui s’était fait connaître au cours de l’histoire d’Israël et, finalement, à travers son Fils, apportant ainsi la réponse qui concernait tous les hommes et, qu’au plus profond d’eux-mêmes, tous attendent. L’universalité de Dieu et l’universalité de la raison ouverte à Lui constituaient pour eux la motivation et, à la fois, le devoir de l’annonce. Pour eux, la foi ne dépendait pas des habitudes culturelles, qui sont diverses selon les peuples, mais relevait du domaine de la vérité qui concerne, de manière égale, tous les hommes.

Le schéma fondamental de l’annonce chrétienne ad extra – aux hommes qui, par leurs questionnements, sont en recherche – se dessine dans le discours de saint Paul à l’Aréopage. N’oublions pas qu’à cette époque, l’Aréopage n’était pas une sorte d’académie où les esprits les plus savants se rencontraient pour discuter sur les sujets les plus élevés, mais un tribunal qui était compétent en matière de religion et qui devait s’opposer à l’intrusion de religions étrangères. C’est précisément ce dont on accuse Paul : « On dirait un prêcheur de divinités étrangères » (Ac 17, 18). Ce à quoi Paul réplique : « J’ai trouvé chez vous un autel portant cette inscription : “Au dieu inconnu”. Or, ce que vous vénérez sans le connaître, je viens vous l’annoncer » (cf. 17, 23). Paul n’annonce pas des dieux inconnus. Il annonce Celui que les hommes ignorent et pourtant connaissent : l’Inconnu-Connu. C’est Celui qu’ils cherchent, et dont, au fond, ils ont connaissance et qui est cependant l’Inconnu et l’Inconnaissable. Au plus profond, la pensée et le sentiment humains savent de quelque manière que Dieu doit exister et qu’à l’origine de toutes choses, il doit y avoir non pas l’irrationalité, mais la Raison créatrice, non pas le hasard aveugle, mais la liberté. Toutefois, bien que tous les hommes le sachent d’une certaine façon – comme Paul le souligne dans la Lettre aux Romains (1, 21) – cette connaissance demeure ambigüe : un Dieu seulement pensé et élaboré par l’esprit humain n’est pas le vrai Dieu. Si Lui ne se montre pas, quoi que nous fassions, nous ne parvenons pas pleinement jusqu’à Lui. La nouveauté de l’annonce chrétienne c’est la possibilité de dire maintenant à tous les peuples : Il s’est montré, Lui personnellement. Et à présent, le chemin qui mène à Lui est ouvert. La nouveauté de l’annonce chrétienne ne réside pas dans une pensée, mais dans un fait : Dieu s’est révélé. Ce n’est pas un fait nu mais un fait qui, lui-même, est Logos – présence de la Raison éternelle dans notre chair. Verbum caro factum est (Jn 1, 14) : il en est vraiment ainsi en réalité, à présent, le Logos est là, le Logos est présent au milieu de nous. C’est un fait rationnel. Cependant, l’humilité de la raison sera toujours nécessaire pour pouvoir l’accueillir. Il faut l’humilité de l’homme pour répondre à l’humilité de Dieu.

Sous de nombreux aspects, la situation actuelle est différente de celle que Paul a rencontrée à Athènes, mais, tout en étant différente, elle est aussi, en de nombreux points, très analogue. Nos villes ne sont plus remplies d’autels et d’images représentant de multiples divinités. Pour beaucoup, Dieu est vraiment devenu le grand Inconnu. Malgré tout, comme jadis où derrière les nombreuses représentations des dieux était cachée et présente la question du Dieu inconnu, de même, aujourd’hui, l’actuelle absence de Dieu est aussi tacitement hantée par la question qui Le concerne. Quaerere Deum – chercher Dieu et se laisser trouver par Lui : cela n’est pas moins nécessaire aujourd’hui que par le passé. Une culture purement positiviste, qui renverrait dans le domaine subjectif, comme non scientifique, la question concernant Dieu, serait la capitulation de la raison, le renoncement à ses possibilités les plus élevées et donc un échec de l’humanisme, dont les conséquences ne pourraient être que graves. Ce qui a fondé la culture de l’Europe, la recherche de Dieu et la disponibilité à L’écouter, demeure aujourd’hui encore le fondement de toute culture véritable.

Merci beaucoup.

And here is an English translation:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080912_parigi-cultura_en.html