Elipandus
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A propos of early Irish Neo-Gothic exemplars I offer the attached for your consideration: St. Mary’s, Buttevant, Co. Cork built by Charles Cottrell (of Hanover St., Cork) 1832-1836.
Graceful, proportionate massing, evoking York minster’s west facade, sans towers.
Until recently such beauty was considered humanly possible and worthy of the sacrifice of a few prelates’ new all-wheel-drive Porsches. Elas
As Anscar Chupungco or others among the inculturation fraticelli might, let me suggest that a cross-cultural perspective be taken to the wanton destruction of our churches. To this end I suggest a quick virtual tour of the neo-gothic gem of San Lorenzo’s parish, in Gijon, from Spain’s Asturian coast http://www.slorenzo.com/ . You get the full round by scrolling down and clicking on “visita virtual” on the bottom left. Not too bad at first, right, then get a good look at that Ascension sculpture. This church was more or less a total loss at the end of the Civil War (1939), and had to be almost completely re-constructed. The poverty at the time was heartbreaking, yet the parishoners gave more than they probably should have at a time when even staples like milk and eggs were frequently unavailable. Well, come 1966 (if memory serves) one Don Urbano (pious late grandfather) sees statues and pictorial representations of the via crucis being carried out of the Church, the flunkies striking attitudes only slightly less contemptuous than the anarchists that torched it. A few days later he meets the parish priest in the street, “Father what’s this all about? Those are OUR statues, I paid 50 pesetas toward these icons.” “Well” he warbles “I was on vacation during the renovation.” In Gijon it occurred during a dictatorship, what’s the excuse in St. Saviour’s case?
Poor thing, San Lorenzo’s still looks graceful, but imagine how it must have looked before the reorder-ers got their hands on it.
Rhabanus wrote:Thanks to the investigative skills of Fearg, it has been determined that the peek-a-boo tabernacle is located in a northern chapel. In a Gothic shuch this constitutes a solecism at the very least, a gaucherie at least, and perhaps even a blasphemy, if not an outright sacrilege. Follow, for but a moment, the internal logic of a Gothic church, with its liturgical directions firmly in place. The East, whence riseth the morning sun, affords a natural icon of the Risen Christ who is the Sun of Justice. The East conjures up in the Catholic imagination the garden of Eden, Paradise (St Cyril of Jerusalem) and the place from whence shall come the Lord of all who will judge the quick and the dead. (Byzantine and Romaneque churches would depict Christ the Pantocrator in an apsidal fresco or mosaic – for He is Lord of All and will return on the Eighth Day.Just so. This sacramental awareness of our and the liturgy’s orientation in the worship space was an organic inheritance, appropriated by each new generation that was born into a world in which the sun rose in the east. I am put in mind of the magnificent Gothic Cathedral of Toledo which itself underwent serious renovation in the course of the 18th century. Narciso Tome’s late Baroque (Churrigueresque) “Transparente” skylight violently disrupts the symmetry of the Gothic ambulatory with a gaggle of puti that seem to float unsupported, dancing in the un-stained sunlight. It was considered a monstrosity at the time but today it just about “works.” Why? Because this partial demolition of the ambulatory sought to meet Christ’s presence “in situ,” in the tabernacle toward which the longitudinal nave marches. It was an alteration that sought (even if some feel misguigedly) to serve the cultic functions of the church, rather than to reform them. The Archibishop Don Rodrigo from the 13th century and Narciso Tome in the 18th were both agreed that the faithful come to the heavenly Jerusalem only through the presence of Christ, bathed in the rising sun of the east. The latter only sought to light our way.
