reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches
- This topic has 7,926 replies, 103 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 4 months ago by
.
- Posts
This appaered in todays Sunday Independent. Unfortunately, the same more reflective appraoch to planning and development has not yet reached Cork County Council or Cobh Urban District Council and most certainly has dawned on the Heritage Unit of the Cork County Council, especilly in its approach to Cobh cathedral. The same old procedures are applied again, the same fascist attempts to keep the public (especially the interested public) out of the planning process, and the same justification of works on historic buildings based on the assessments of Council employees who, let’s face it, would not be likely professionally to survive in the open market context.
At least recession has made us think about proper planning
With construction slowing, maybe now we will think twice before scarring our landscape with more architectural eyesores, writes Eamon Delaney
Sunday March 15 2009
NOT everything about the recession is bad — one immediate good effect is on planning and architecture. Some terrible eyesores went up in the last decade, buildings erected with little care for design or the environment.
The fact that everything has slowed down is surely a good thing, for at least now we’ve a chance to properly look at the plans.
Already postponements have been made which can only be described as positive, and others have almost certainly been put on ice. Meanwhile, the rampant ‘bungalow blitz’ around the country which was ruining the landscape has also slowed.
Getting ‘maximum space’ was the key thing during the boom: building as far out on the pavement as possible, endangering pedestrians and giving no sense of space or perspective to the actual buildings. And, of course, less art was commissioned.
While some landmark buildings did go up, there were also shocking eyesores, such as the awful glass box and sterile plaza at the end of Dame Street, next to Dublin’s classic City Hall. It is completely out of scale and character with the street and with Dublin Castle behind it, and yet the authorities got away with it, because it is a city council building and so immune to the planning laws!
Thankfully, with the downturn, this sort of building, which everyone was too busy to question, has stopped and the cranes have stalled on the big important sites, just as the cement mixers stand idle next to half-finished Dallas-style houses all around the countryside.
Now that the money has run out maybe we’ll have a chance to think a bit more about proper planning in the future.
Other monstrosities put on ice recently include:
• The proposals for the old Dun Laoghaire Baths site caused major local controversy, and led to the subsequent rise of independent candidate Richard Boyd-Barrett.
The plan was for a high rise, private development with a hotel attached and was totally inappropriate to the shoreline.
• The plan for the Carlton cinema on O’Connell Street is technically active. It envisages ‘opening up’ the street and blowing a hole in the Victorian frontage worse than any damage done by the 1916 Rising. In an area already saturated with declining retail, yet another shopping centre is planned, but this time with a garden on its roof!
Anyway, as many have pointed out, the old Carlton site should rightly be the place for the new Abbey Theatre, rather than sending it off to the docklands.
• The Bank of Ireland HQ plan was a particularly shocking proposal as it involved an institution wrecking their own already acclaimed building.
Unveiled back in 1972, the Bank of Ireland’s distinctive black bronze headquarters on Baggot Street is rightly lauded as a landmark piece of Miesian modernism, with three separate blocks and big abstract sculptures in the spaces in between.
But the philistine bank planned to roof over the open spaces and put glass cladding around the bronze — ostensibly for ‘environmental reasons’, ie to get more space and value for money.
The poet Seamus Heaney was among those who spoke out against the barbarous changes, which have now been put on hold.
Given the current banking crisis, hopefully this will stay the case.Anthony Charnley’s prospect of Cork City published in Smith’s History of Cork in 1750. It shows all of the medieval churches in the old city. Many of them had been rebuilt in the elegant “Italian” or Paladian idiom following the destruction caused by the bombardment of Cork during th Williamite siege of 1690. With the exception of Cork Cathedral (which was rebuilt in the 19th century) and of St. Mary’s, Shandon, all of them have passed out of ecclesiastical use and are deployed to less than savoury purpose. Indeed, it would be useful to know what Cork Corporation is doing with Christ Church, or what the recent commercial development around St. Paul’s has done to its interior, and whether or not the sepulchral monuments have been restored to the internal walls of St. Peter’s (having been gauged out and dumped at the back door of the church).
For anyone interested in late Classical and Byzantine mosaics in Italy, the following site is most informative:
The contemporary aesthetics’ Problem as seen by the British philosopher Roger Scruton in yesterday’s London Times:
From The TimesMarch 16, 2009
What has art got to do with beauty these days?
We need to live in a world that welcomes us, not one where art invites cynicism and an ugly environment doesn’t matterRoger Scruton
When the study of beauty first attracted the attention of modern philosophers, it was at the beginning of the 18th century and during the height of the scientific revolution. For philosophers of the Enlightenment nature was not the plaything of an unknowable God, but an open book, whose meaning can be clearly read by science. Nature had been demystified, to become the home of mankind, and it is thus that the great 18th-century painters portrayed it. Art could be beautiful, as nature was beautiful. But it was beautiful because it imitated nature, which was the source of beauty in all its forms.The Romantic movement emphasised the creative artist rather than the natural world as the origin of beauty. According to the Romantics, it was by encountering ideas and feelings crystallised in works of art that we could obtain the oneness with the scheme of things which the Enlightenment philosophers had looked for in the works of nature. The self-expression of the artist was endowed with the authority of revelation. Originality rather than convention became the criterion of artistic success, and the individual transgression attained a value as great as any obedience to social norms.
In our time this Romantic conception of the artist has been taken to such extremes that we no longer know whether art and beauty have much to do with one another. It is not just that arbitrary objects (Brillo boxes, pickled sharks, piles of bricks) are now regularly presented as artworks. Among the artworks that we are called upon to admire are acts of desecration, such as Andres Serrano’s crucifix in urine and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, or gestures of violence against art itself, such as the sarcastic postmodernist productions of the romantic operas.
And because critics made fools of themselves in the mid-19th century, by preferring the salon art of Bouguereau to the innovative visions of Manet, few critics today will venture an adverse judgment of anything that presents itself as an original gesture, however offensive or banal. Hence the continuing scandal of the Turner Prize – which is not a scandal at all, since nobody in a position to say so has pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes.
Many people conclude that art is not what it was once cracked up to be, that it is not about the beautiful, the sublime and the transcendent, but that it is a skill like any other and that the greatest part of the skill is self-advertisement. Find a way of drawing attention to yourself, whether with words or images or noises; get the right connections, the right agent and the right kind of subsidy, and you too can be an artist. Of course, talent is important. But it is a talent for attracting attention, rather than for seeking and finding the eye of God. Just look at what Christo achieved, simply by wrapping buildings, and even sections of the Australian coastline, in plastic sheets! It took talent of a quite special kind to get someone else to pay for such a prank, and then to be paid again for doing it.
Today people are a little more cynical than they were when such nonsense began. But this is not because they have lost the interest in beauty or the need to encounter it in their daily lives. They have lost faith in art as a way of supplying that need. This loss is a painful one, for the reason that it is difficult now to return to the 18th-century love of nature in order to enjoy what was promised by art, namely redemption from the trivial and a face-to-face encounter with the truth. Nature, too, is not what it was once cracked up to be. It has lost its former status as the open book in which we could read ourselves.
The nature poets of the 18th and 19th centuries could walk the country lanes of England and see only the smiling face of an ordered world, whose laws were known and whose aspect was in harmony with the human bid for a more than worldly significance. Those conflicts that they sensed in themselves – between freedom and causality, between sacred and profane, between exultation and ordinariness – they found resolved in nature, where, as Wordsworth put it: “Our souls have sight of that immortal sea/ Which brought us hither.â€
I don’t think that we can look on nature now in quite that way. It is not just that the country lanes of England display more food wrappers and plastic bottles than wildflowers, though this is a significant fact. It is that nature no longer has a face. As science and technology have advanced, the face has been scraped away, to reveal the bare structure – the cosmic skeleton – beneath it. Even the most devoted hikers and ramblers know that the smiles they receive from the landscape have their origin in themselves, and that the smiles are ever fainter, as the “eye of the beholder†becomes clouded by cynicism and science. Of course, we are still sensitive to natural beauty. But it appears before us as a fragile and threatened thing, and not as the great immovable fact that once it was.
Yet the need for beauty remains. We see this in all the areas where people make choices concerning the way things look, or feel or sound. As soon as appearances are chosen not just for their agreeableness but also for their meaning we enter the realm of aesthetic judgement, as this was understood by the Enlightenment. That is why there is even today an “aesthetics of everyday lifeâ€.
People may have given up on art, and they may be sceptical towards natural beauty. But they still design their own lives, searching for agreement and for a shared sense of what matters and why.
This search for aesthetic order is not just a luxury; it is essential to life in society. It is one way in which we send out signals of humility, and show that we are not just animals foraging for our needs but civilised beings who wish to live at peace with our neighbours. That is why we adopt dress codes; it is why we are guided by taste in our language, in our gestures and in our ways of looking at other people and inviting them into our lives.
That is also why the current battles over architecture and public space are so important. They are not battles about economics or administrative convenience. They are about beauty: in other words, about the creation of meaningful appearances. We need to live in a world that welcomes us, as nature welcomed Wordsworth and John Clare. The habit of desecration that we have witnessed in the world of art has also afflicted the built environment, with the facetious projects of the “starchitects†– I think of Rogers, Libeskind, Foster and Koolhaas – designed not for the city but against it.
Beauty is not popular among professional architects, just as the pursuit of beauty is not popular among visual artists: it suggests costly sacrifices, and a scaling down of pretentions for the sake of people whom they don’t need to know. But the controversy over modern architecture remains real and important: for it reflects the need of ordinary people that appearances be respected, so that the place where they find themselves can also be shared as a home.
It is, to my way of thinking, the most vivid proof we have that beauty still matters.
© Roger Scruton 2009. Beauty will be published by Oxford University Press on March 26 at £10.99. To buy it for £9.49 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
And some more from Roger Scruton in the London Times of 14 March 2009:
From The TimesMarch 14, 2009
Beauty by Roger Scruton
Kitsch is worse for us than porn or gratuitous violence, argues the philosopher and writer Roger Scruton. And what offers a path out of the desolation? BeautyIn an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history. As Wagner expressed the point: “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.†Even for the unbeliever, therefore, the “real presence†of the sacred is now one of the highest gifts of art.
Conversely the degradation of art has never been more apparent. And the most widespread form of degradation – more widespread even than the deliberate desecration of humanity through pornography and gratuitous violence – is kitsch, that peculiar disease that we can instantly recognise but never precisely define, and whose Austro-German name links it to the mass movements and crowd sentiments of the 20th century.
In his article “Avant-garde and Kitschâ€, published in Partisan Review in 1939, Clement Greenberg presented educated Americans with a dilemma. Figurative painting, he argued, was dead – it had exhausted its expressive potential, and its representational aims had been bequeathed to photography and the cinema. Any attempt to continue in the figurative tradition would inevitably lead to kitsch, in other words to art with no message of its own, in which all the effects were copied and all the emotions faked. Genuine art must belong to the avant-garde, breaking with the figurative tradition in favour of “abstract expressionismâ€, which uses form and colour to liberate emotion from the prison of narrative. In this way Greenberg promoted the paintings of de Kooning, Pollock and Rothko, while condemning the great Edward Hopper as “shabby, second-hand and impersonalâ€.
Look back at figurative art in the Western tradition and you will observe that, prior to the 18th century, there was primitive art, naive art, routine and decorative art, but no kitsch. Just when the phenomenon first appeared is disputable: maybe Greuze shows traces of it; maybe it had even been foreshadowed in Murillo. What is certain is that, by the time of Millet and the Pre-Raphaelites, kitsch was in the driving seat. At the same time fear of kitsch had become a major artistic motive, prompting the impressionist and cubist revolutions as well as the birth of atonality in music.
It is not only in the world of art that we observe the steady advance of kitsch. Far more important, given its influence on the popular psyche, has been the kitschification of religion. Images are of enormous importance in religion, helping us to understand the Creator through idealised visions of his world: concrete images of transcendental truths. In the blue robe of a Bellini virgin we encounter the ideal of motherhood, as an enfolding purity and a promise of peace. This is not kitsch but the deepest spiritual truth, and one that we are helped to understand through the power and eloquence of the image. However, as the puritans have always reminded us, such an image stands on the verge of idolatry, and with the slightest push can fall from its spiritual eminence into the sentimental abyss. That happened everywhere in the 19th century, as the mass-produced votive figures flooded ordinary households, the holy precursors of today’s garden gnomes.
Kitsch is a mould that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in. It is not only Christian civilisation that has undergone kitschification in recent times. Equally evident has been the kitschification of Hinduism and its culture. Massproduced Ganeshas have knocked the subtle temple sculpture from its aesthetic pedestal; in bunjee music the talas of Indian classical music are blown apart by tonal harmonies and rhythm machines; in literature the sutras and puranas have been detached from the sublime vision of Brahman and reissued as childish comic-strips.
Simply put, kitsch is a disease of faith. Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture. The Disneyfication of art is simply one aspect of the Disneyfication of faith -and both involve a profanation of our highest values. Kitsch, the case of Disney reminds us, is not an excess of feeling but a deficiency. The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world, in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them. It is no accident that the arrival of kitsch on the stage of history coincided with the hitherto unimaginable horrors of trench warfare, of the Holocaust and the Gulag – all of them fulfilling the prophecy that kitsch proclaims, which is the transformation of the human being into a doll, which in one moment we cover with kisses, and in the next tear to shreds.
Those thoughts return us to my earlier argument. We can see the modernist revolution in the arts in Greenberg’s terms: art rebels against the old conventions, just as soon as they become colonised by kitsch. For art cannot live in the world of kitsch, which is a world of commodities to be consumed, rather than icons to be revered. True art is an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm that other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails. Others exist in this realm not as compliant dolls but as spiritual beings, whose claims on us are endless and unavoidable. For us who live in the aftermath of the kitsch epidemic, therefore, art has acquired a new importance. It is the real presence of our spiritual ideals. That is why art matters. Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.
The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore of its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. Konstanze and Belmonte in Mozart’s opera are ready to sacrifice themselves for each other, and this readiness is the proof of their love: all the beauties of the opera arise from the constant presentation of this proof. The deaths that occur in real tragedies are bearable to us because we see them under the aspect of sacrifice. The tragic hero is both self-sacrificed and a sacrificial victim; and the awe that we feel at his death is in some way redemptive, a proof that his life was worthwhile. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice – whether the petits soins that bind Marcel to Saint Loup, or the proof offered by Alcestis, who dies for her husband. Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.
Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that “bears looking atâ€, and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion. It is also the recurring theme of art. When, in the carnage of the Great War, poets tried to make sense of the destruction that lay all around, it was in full consciousness that kitsch merely compounded the fault. Their effort was not to deny the horror, but to find a way of seeing it in sacrificial terms. From this effort were born the war poems of Wilfred Owen and, later, the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten.
So there, if we can find our way to it, is the remedy. It is a remedy that cannot be achieved through art alone. In the words of Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo: “you must change your lifeâ€. Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter; and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it. The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration, is one sign of this.
To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair. It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only – or even at all – in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way. The art, literature and music of our civilisation remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial. And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.
© Roger Scruton 2009. Extracted from Beauty, published by Oxford University Press on March 26 at £10.99. To buy it for £9.49 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst . Scruton will debate whether “Britain has become indifferent to beautyâ€, at the Royal Geographical Society, London, on March 19 (020-7494 3345
This story was from 2007..doe’s anyone know what the eventual outcome of this was?
Anger at developer’s plan for church.Three applications for purchase were lodged.
One was to a developer who wanted to turn the church into a pub and restaurant
one was for a traditionalist group who wanted to offer the Tridentine Mass there
and another was by Galway developer John O Dolan to turn it into a leisure centre complete with spa and swimming pool.The Jesuit Order has sold the church to John O Dolan instead of the Traditionalist Catholic group. The Church will now be used as a swimming pool instead of traditional Latin Masses.
Plans to turn a Limerick church into a €12 million leisure centre have attracted the anger of local Catholics.
They have denounced as ‘‘grotesque’’ proposals to celebrate Mass around a swimming pool in the former Jesuit church.
John O’Dolan, a Galway-based auctioneer, bought the Sacred Heart church from the Jesuits in March 2006 for more than €4 million.
He is now submitting proposals for a €12 million leisure centre development to include a 20-metre swimming pool, spa, 15,000 square foot gym and restaurant. O’Dolan said he had been in pre-planning talks with Limerick Corporation and expected to submit his proposals within the next three to four weeks.
O’Dolan told the Limerick Chronicle last year that a number of ideas had been suggested for the protected building, including keeping it as a church, turning it into a restaurant or converting it into offices. His new proposals involve the retention of much of the original building, including the five altars, sanctuary and organ.
‘‘It was important that any proposals we submitted for the building were very respectful of the structure’s past as a place of worship,†said O’Dolan.
‘‘It will be a top-of-the-range development with a sauna and a beautician in the spa, a restaurant with seating for about 80 people and a fully-equipped gym. At the same time, it’s going to be reasonably priced and won’t be reserved for a select few.
‘‘There should be no reason why people can’t still come here and pray. I’m going to be talking to the Latin Mass Society about the possibility of holding Latin services here once a month.â€
But Vicky Nestor, the chairman of the Limerick branch of the Latin Mass Society of Ireland (LMSI), has reacted angrily to suggestions that the leisure centre complex could be used for Mass.
‘‘It’s grotesque to think that we could fit the most sacred ceremony of the Catholic faith around a swimming pool,†she said.
There are also doubts as to whether Church law would allow Mass to be celebrated in the venue, even if the altar and the organ remained in place. Canon law only allows Mass to be celebrated in a ‘‘suitably dignified’’ place and forbids ‘‘sordid use’’ of former churches.
The LMSI has rejected the developer’s offer of further talks.
‘‘After our only meeting with him, last May, it became clear that there is nothing to talk about, unless he has retracted his previous bizarre proposal for Mass to be held on a covered swimming pool,†said Nestor.The Dutch bishops, have a policy that no church may be sold for use for any other purpose. Superfluous churches must be demolished. The land may then be sold, why do we not have a similar arrangement for unrequired churches here?
See recent Limerick Leader article “Owner of former Jesuit Church diesâ€
An interesting contrast here where the Jesuits sold their Church to a private developer for €4 million, where as the Franciscans on the other hand donated their Church to the Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick).
See also “Departure of the Franciscan Communityâ€
Images from DerHur Album “Churches and Graveyardsâ€
The reason for insisting on the demolition of churches is that this is the canonical means by which a church loses its sacred character. The removal of the walls is the same as the removal of its consecration. See Pietro Gasparri’s de Sanctissima Eucharistia published in Paris in 1897 on this subject.
Praxiteles regards this policy as excessive and short sighted. What may be a depopulated part of a city not requiring a church to-day, may well be tomorrow’s fashionable icon of urban regeneration requiring a church or worse left without one.
Indeed, the various conservation conventions stress the importance of the use and function for which a building was built. In teh case of churches, where one religious order, for exmple the Franciscans or Jesuits in Limerick, no longer require a church, then they should seek to give it to one of the more flourishing younger religious orders – in Limerick, one could think of the Friars of the Atonement, for example, who up to recently had no chapel.
The chapel of the Palazzo Massimo in Rome.
The palace was designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi in 1532-1536 on a site of three contiguous palaces owned by the old Roman Massimo family; built after arson of an earlier structure during the Sack of Rome (1527). In addition the curved façade was dictated by foundations built upon the stands for the stadium (odeon) of the emperor Domitian.
The entrance is characterized by a central portico with the six Doric columns. Inside there are two courtyards, of which the first one has a portico with Doric columns as a basement for a rich loggia, which is also made of Doric columns. The column decorations gave name to the palace (alle Colonne). The façade is renown as one of the most masterful of its time, combining both elegance with stern rustication. The reccessed entrance portico differs from typical Palazzo models such as exemplified by the Florentine Palazzo Medici. In addition, there is a variation of size of windows for different levels, and the decorative frames of the windows of the third floor. Unlike the Palazzo Medici, there is no academic adherence to orders, depending on the floor On the opposite side of this palace, opening on to the Piazzetta dei Massimo, the palace connects with a frescoed façade of Palazzetto Massimi (or Istoriato). For many centuries, this used to be the central post office, a Massimo family occupation. To the left of the palace is the Palazzo di Pirro, built by a pupil of Antonio da Sangallo.
The interior ceilings and vestibules are elaborately ornamented with rosettes and coffered roofs. The entrance ceiling is decorated with a fresco by Daniele da Volterra, who represented “Life of Fabio Massimo”, the supposed classic founder of the Massimo family.
The chapel on the 2nd floor was a room where the 14 year old Paolo Massimo, son of Fabrizio Massimo, was recalled briefly to life by Saint Philip Neri in March 16, 1583. The interior of the palace is open to public only on that day. Other notable events in the palace of the 16th century including various intrafamilial murders.
Again you’re right Praxiteles..it would be excessive and short sighted to send in the bulldozers when there is always going to be a logical alternative..I was sorry to read of John O Dolan’s tragic departure… I would’nt of posted that piece had I known. The Franciscan Church donated to the University of Limerick looks to be a very impressive building indeed…
The Fras gave it to Mary Immaculate College the extent of whose wit for the use of the church appears not to have gone beyond turning it into a library repository – and all of this bankrolled, we are led to understand, on a “Catholic” basis by John Ganley of Libertas ! I should have thought that an institution like Mary I would have had the social consciousness to keep the church functioning as a church – afterall, I do not think that the University of Limerick has a College Chapel of any significant dimension. But , no, it had to be library.
Word has it in Cobh that the FOSCC, aka The Friends of St. Colman’s Cathedral, is preparing to put a big spanner in the political machinery of the Town Council in the run up to the June local elections. Election candidates can expect some pretty tough questioning from FOSCC which still has one or two outstanding matters of business with the Town Council.
So far, the Labour Party has announced that it is fielding John Mullvihill jnr, Hughie O Rielly, Jim Quinlan, Finbarr O’Driscoll.
The Fianna Fail position is confused. nitially it was touting Domhnall MacCarthaigh, Jack Gilmartin,Ger Curley,Mick Martin, a female school teacher, and another. Jack Gilmartin Ger Curley have withdrawn. So they are busy trying to find replacements.
Fine Gael is still unclear wht it’s going to do.
Sinn Fein also has an interest and then an array of independents.
The return to Lent after the St. Patrick’s Day relief:
Gregorio Allegri’s setting of Psalm 50 done for the Sixtine Chapel c. 1635.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLUafMBLtzo&feature=related
Sixto/Clementine Vulgate edition
Psalm 50
50 1 In finem. Psalmus David, 2 cum venit ad eum Nathan propheta, quando intravit ad Bethsabee.
3 Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam ;
et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.
4 Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea,
et a peccato meo munda me.
5 Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco,
et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
6 Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci ;
ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis,
et vincas cum judicaris.
7 Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum,
et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
8 Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti ;
incerta et occulta sapientiæ tuæ manifestasti mihi.
9 Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor ;
lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
10 Auditui meo dabis gaudium et lætitiam,
et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.
11 Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis,
et omnes iniquitates meas dele.
12 Cor mundum crea in me, Deus,
et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.
13 Ne projicias me a facie tua,
et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.
14 Redde mihi lætitiam salutaris tui,
et spiritu principali confirma me.
15 Docebo iniquos vias tuas,
et impii ad te convertentur.
16 Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meæ,
et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam.
17 Domine, labia mea aperies,
et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
18 Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique ;
holocaustis non delectaberis.
19 Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus ;
cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.
20 Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion,
ut ædificentur muri Jerusalem.
21 Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiæ, oblationes et holocausta ;
tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.Bishop Challoner’s revision of the Rheins Douay of 1742
Psalms Chapter 50
Miserere.
The repentance and confession of David after his sin. The fourth penitential psalm.
50:1. Unto the end, a psalm of David,
50:2. When Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had sinned with Bethsabee. [2 Kings 12.]
50:3. Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity.
50:4. Wash me yet more from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
50:5. For I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me.
50:6. To thee only have I sinned, and have done evil before thee: that thou mayst be justified in thy words, and mayst overcome when thou art judged.
50:7. For behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me.
50:8. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.
50:9. Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.
50:10. To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.
50:11. Turn away thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
50:12. Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels.
50:13. Cast me not away from thy face; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
50:14. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and strengthen me with a perfect spirit.
50:15. I will teach the unjust thy ways: and the wicked shall be converted to thee.
50:16. Deliver me from blood, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall extol thy justice.
50:17. O Lord, thou wilt open my lips: and my mouth shall declare thy praise.
50:18. For if thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would indeed have given it: with burnt offerings thou wilt not be delighted.
50:19. A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
50:20. Deal favourably, O Lord, in thy good will with Sion; that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up.
50:21. Then shalt thou accept the sacrifice of justice, oblations and whole burnt offerings: then shall they lay calves upon thy altar.
German “Fastentuecher” – or large (linen) painted scenes from the life of Christ gradually lowered before the sanctuary during Lent.
[Einst in Europa weit verbreitet, sind Fastentücher u. a. durch den reformatorischen Bildersturm selten geworden. Erhalten geblieben sind einige dieser Zeugnisse mittelalterlicher Frömmigkeit nur noch in Kärnten, Tirol, im westfälischen Münsterland und Zittau. Zu den bedeutendsten gehören die bemalten Fastentücher von Gurk (1458) und Haimburg (1504) in Kärnten sowie das Große Zittauer Fastentuch (1472) und das Kleine Zittauer Fastentuch (1573). Interessant sind auch die bestickten Fastentücher im Münsterland wie z. B. das von Teltge (1623)]
A first example comes from Zittau where they have two such “Lent-cloths”, the large one and the small one. Here you can inspect the small one:
http://www.zittauer-fastentuecher.de/frame_kleinesfastentuchflash.htm
And here we have the large one which begins the Heilsgeschichte with the Genesis Creation narrative:
http://www.zittauer-fastentuecher.de/frame_grossesfastentuchflash.htm
The Fastentucher of the Cathedral in Gurk (Austria) in full destension and displaying the Heilsgeschichte (or History of Salvation) starting with Creation narrative, going though the Creation of Adam and then of Eve, Cain killing his brother Abel, Noah, and s on up to Christ, his passion, death and resurrection and his post resurrection appearances:
Lenten Veils (Fastentücher, also called Hungertücher [“hunger veils”]) or vela quadrigesimalia, curtains that have been used (since the 10th century) to veil altars during Lent, interpreted as a symbol of the separation of the repentant sinner from the Church. Painted Lenten veils were particularly frequent in the Alpine regions of Austria, while embroideries were preferred in Germany. One of the most valuable and artistic Lenten veils in Austria is the one at Gurk painted by Konrad von Friesach in 1458, which is also the largest and oldest of the nine completely preserved Lenten veils in Carinthia. The Lenten veil now exhibited in the Austrian Folklore Museum in Vienna (around 1640) was probably also made in Carinthia.
A further example of a Fastentuck:
The 16th century Millstatt (Carinthia, Austria) Fastentuck as currently displayed in the church and with examples of the panels on it: the Last Judgement, the Circumcision of Our Lord, and Pentecost. In this case the, Heilsgieschichte (or history of salvation) extends from the creation (top left) to the Last Judgement (bottom right).
The Fastertuck or Velum Quadrigesimale of Gurk Cathedral
SOme of the scenes showing: Johnah in the belly of the fish, Noah in the Arch, the condemnation of Christ.
@pandaz7 wrote:
I enjoy following this thread and agree that much of the re-ordering of Irish churches has been inappropriate, unnecessary and has ripped the soul from many of these venerable buildings. However, much of the more recent material seems in my view to suggest that old = good and new = bad. What is the role of modern architecture and design in church building? Is tradition so fundamental that it must always be slavishly followed?
Pandaz7! Forgive the delay in relying to your question. Clearly, as posed, it represents an over simplification. Praxiteles is not saying that contemporary creative powers are incapable of achieveing contempory work on a par with the masterpieces of the past. Neither is Praxiteles saying that the past is to be followed slavishly. When it comes to Church architecture, the creative powers of the present require a certain discipline both in terms of objective (a church building must reflect a theology, unlike some modern architects it is not an opportunity for continuing the idea that the artist in self expression is the source of beauty -an idea coined by the romanticism of the 19th. century), and also of stimulation (this in practical terms means a thorough knowledge of the Christian tradition of architecture if he is to be able competently to percieve and extract extract the principles undelying that tradition and succeed in vesting them in a contemporary idiom).
The likes of the stuff produced by Hacker Hurley is a clear example of what happens when both of these conditions are simultaniously absent. Hurley’s acquaintance with the Christian tradition of architecture hardly extends beyond the house churches of the early Christian community. This is an important aspect of that tradition but it remains only a seminal element of the tradition. It is of course very handy to canonize this particular diachronic segment of a much wider continuum since practically nothing of it actually exists and written accounts of it are fairly scarce too – which leaves us in the happy position of being able to “invent” what the early house church looked like and how it functioned. That handy convenience leads us to the second problem with the Hurley school: the typical 19th view of romanticism that the artist is the source of beauty. Hurley’s productions are sufficient evidence to show just how wrong and derailed that notion is.
In this matter, Praxiteles would recommend a little book written in 1967 by the French theologian and liturgist Louis Bouyer which has just been republished by the Editions du Cerf in Paris: Architecture et Liturgie.
Attached are some pages which perhaps better phrase the problematic raised by Pandaz7.
@Praxiteles wrote:
Lenten Veils (Fastentücher, also called Hungertücher [“hunger veils”]) or vela quadrigesimalia, curtains that have been used (since the 10th century) to veil altars during Lent, interpreted as a symbol of the separation of the repentant sinner from the Church…
You say the veils are to demonstrate the “separation of the repentant sinner from the Church.” Why is it to show the separation of “repentant sinners” and not just “all sinners”? Why would they emphasize the separation of those who have repented? Or, is it to show that even our repentance is fruitless without the sacrifice of Christ?
Also, the below post of the Lenten Veil in Carinthia allows the altar (and thus the whole Sacrifice of the Mass) to be seen only blocking the “rood” (or cross.) Yet, the Lenten Veil hanging in the Gurk Cathedral seems to block the whole sanctuary. Is this because it is not hanging as it once would have?
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
