fgordon

Wow, this thread just gets better (or worse) – now it’s ghastly, deathly-pale German Church interiors! No wonder Catholicism is gasping for air in that country! How did Benedict survive unscathed?

It is interesting that with the eclipse of European culture, comes the de-sacralization of architecture and the consequent alienation of the language. Reading Richard Hurley’s apologia for his various soulless productions, one hears a vocabulary that is wholly alien to anyone with an inkling of what the Sacred Liturgy means in the Catholic economy. So we hear the inane patter of the sociologist and the barely disguised superciliousness of the behaviourist. The people are to be control-processed in a non-threatening “gathering place”, before entering the tame and void “Eucharist room” (I ask you!), through a “mall”. How appropriate – “malls”, the new Cathedrals of modern Europe. The family setting – where’s the fireplace and the scrabble board? – emphasises the Eucharist as meal, we are told. And what emphasises its more fundamental aspect – that of sacrifice, or, if you insist, sacrificial meal?

In any case, Liturgy detached from its theological and historical, its symbolic and cultic fundaments becomes a floating free-for-all, the play thing of ideologues, charlatans and the semi-educated; unaware even of their own ignorance of that which they pretend to be masters and teachers. All “kudos” to those trying to save Cobh from the dying gasps of this iconoclastic hiccup in the Church’s history. Like all iconoclasm, it will eventually be overcome by the return of common sense, that is, the return to the sacred.