Luzarches

Incidentally Chuck, it is an academic convention to refer to an author by their surnane when discussing or quoting them in writing. What was Rhabanus meant to have done? Refer to him as Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was when he wrote the book referred to, but is no longer? Or as Pope Benedict, which he is now but wasn’t then? Or perhaps he should write ‘the then Cardinal Ratzinger’ every time he mentions a piece of his?

Re: Post 1299 and the Augustinians in Galway.

At least the altar rails are still there. It is reversible… ultimately. What does the new table look like. You can’t see it in the virtual tour.

@Sirius wrote:

Let us pray that Bishop Adrian of Cobh and the Elders of FOSCC will reflect on todays Gospel (Mark 7):

‘It was of you hypocrites that Isaiah so rightly prophesied in this passage of scripture: This people honours me only with lip-service, while their hearts are far from me. The worship they offer me is worthless, the doctrines they teach are only human (planning) regulations. You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human(architectural) traditions.’

Sounds like the sort of scriptural gobbet that Martin Luther or John Calvin would have directed at the Roman Church ‘in Babylonish captivity’.

Presumably the church was born in 1965? I remember now. We’d lost the true spirit of worship, the old mass, the nursery of saints, was an organized hypocricy, sterile, rubrical and dead. We know we must now be worshiping in a spirit of truth because the numbers so doing have declined. Real Christians must have, after all, an authentic gnosis, a superior one to the infantile kneeling and mumbled rosaries that stunted the spiritual maturity of our grandparents and theirs’.

They were idoloters, too, these people: That’s why the stautues have to be removed, lest these simpletons get the wrong idea.

I would imagine that destruction and hurtful alterations to the products of a living faith, a faith that has not changed, equals a cleansing.

Hello Brian,

I’m interested in how much imput you yourself had in the design of the altar itself (It seems de riguer to farm out the most exciting part of the reordering to an artist.That was the plan for Cobh anyway…). How were the dimensions and shape determined? I’m sorry I haven’t yet caught up with you on my rather elliptical broadside against some, but not all, of the work on your website. I have to say that, in spite of primitive examples of square and even partially circular altar mensae I just cannot be doing with a square altar and especially in a Gothic church. In a large neo-Gothic church the altar should be a third of the total width of the main vessel, both for aesthetic reasons and so that the people, not all of them sitting in the extra special active participation zone near the sanctuary, can clearly see it. (IMHO)

Even if it is not intended, having four equal sides implies a fear of hierarchy and a dogmatic preference for equality over a nuanced expression of liturgical difference. Perhaps an equality of function between the ordained clergy and the laity? Even the primitive and Romanesque altars that were of this shape had one privileged side that was indicated perhaps with a higher level of richness or some other iconographical indicator.

The smallness of the altar, an alter Christus, becomes, I would imagine, even more noticable when a mass is being concelebrated. The altar, the objective ‘trunk’ is partially hidden in a thicket of branches of the vested clergy. Surely such a spectacle is more clericalist than of old. Then all approached the literally high altar with trepidation, a certain right-minded fear of the Lord?

I think that the quality of numinousness is present in some of Schwarz’s churches, especially the earlier ones. Despite his co-opting of the Modernist aesthetic, his churches were never ‘machines for praying in’. In terms of his use of space, extravagent heights and expressive surfaces I think that the sacred purpose of these buildings would have struck their parishioners as evident. Even in his least ‘expressivist’ church, Corpus Christi, Aachen, there is a transliteration of the tradition of sacred architecture. Here we have the High Altar, a rectangular slab of black marble at the summit of eleven steps, also black. The altar is free-standing, bu there is only the slightest of spaces between it and the back wall. This huge sheer wall of white render functions conceptually almost like a baroque ‘potra caeli’ reredos. We are being invited to turn our minds beyond the immanent, the church has become a conduit through which we look beyond. This gap between the altar and this wall was not occupiable to Schwarz, the idea of versus populum here anathema. Although this may strike Prax as quite fanciful, I think that the faithful then could only have seen this wall as a reredos, accustomed as they would have been then to altars attached to retables, and it’s whiteness seen not as an extension of the Post Enlightenment attempt to sanitze (and neutralize) the Church but more as like the whiteness of the garments on Mount Tabor.

I’m getting a bit carried away here. I think I’ll stop….

I know that Prax isn’t too much of a fan of Schwarz. He is right to point to the problem of the ‘legibility’ of liturgical symbolism and Schwarz could be accused of fabricating arbitrary categories. However, I think that a complete reading of Schwarz’s oeuvre and works show that he always had, or came to have, a settled preference for the priest to stand before the altar, with the people either disposed processionally behind him or around him. Read his salient self criticism of the ‘sacred inwardness’ model in Vom Bau Der Kirche.

If you look at Schwarz’s churches, the ones that have been reordered since VII, these have been as undermined liturgically as many historical churches receiving the same treatment.

I’m pretty sure that Schwarz was an ad orientem man. He would make a useful figure to reclaim onto the side of liturgical continuity rather than that of rupture.

As I understand it it is the terminology of the planning act that refers to ‘requirement’. Surely, in canon law, there is no mention of liturgical ‘requirements’ at all other than discharging obligations to the GIRM and the rubrics therein.

It is therefore somewhat a sleight of hand to import a certain interpretation of the liturgical law under the guise of a requirement, which is why Dr Reid’s contribution was of such use. In all deference to the authority to the bishop others in the diocese have been well reminded that the church is at once particular to a place and also universal. Given the terms of the act the apellants had no choice other than to engage with the applicants on this issue.

Some on this thread ought to wake up to the fact that there is a legitimate, current and scholarly conversation taking place within the church on the nature and practice of the liturgy. In particular, the question on the position of the priest at the altar has been highlighted by the public reception given by the new Sri Lankan Secretary of Divine Worship to the italian edition of Michael Lang’s book Turning Towards The Lord. I note that today the same Archbishop has made pretty acute observations on the radicalism and experimentalism that has seeped in the liturgy after the Council. There is a view gathering strength that a return to the ad orientem position of the celebrant during the eucharistic prayer would more fully exemplify and symbolize the full, conscious and active participation of the faithful and therefore conform the liturgy more truthfully to the spirit of the council.

It is the modernists of the 60’s and 70’s who now find themselves recast by events as conservatives. This is exemplified by the reaction of, say, Bishop Trautmann in America to the very mild corrective to the vernacular texts of the ordinary. He’s worried that the people will, after 30 years of the current version, be upset, confused and angry at the rupture in their routine. His ideological predecessors didn’t have a mind to similar concerns between 1964-70.

A measured response to the current climate and new pontificate would be to hang on and see what results are produced and not to fight the irrelevant and fatuous debates of the 60’s & 70’s. It is clear that the renewal needs recalibration, to be reset according to an hermeneutic of continuity with the Church’s sublime Tradition. People who characterize others who take hope in these murmurings are not, in general, Tridentine fundamentalists or haters of the modern liturgy. This straw man argument is a sign of fear and a symptom of dishonesty and hypocrisy. Politicised communitarianism, a wilful distortion of the council documents, will no longer be permitted to be the prime criterion by which liturgy and the architecture that envelopes it is judged.

In this time of transition the prudent make themselves themselves via caution.

Re St James’ Antwerp.

I knew of this church by way of a pre WW1 guide written on the churches of Belgium by the rather wonderful T Francis Bumpus. In it he expresses the hope that the ecclesiastical authorities would resist the temptation to remove this roodscreen (on the grounds of architectural taste rather than liturgical requirements…).

I’m pleased to discover that his wish has been granted.

If you follow Praxiteles’ link on Mechelen Cathedral you will find that the reordered altar in the crossing has a glass mensa. I wonder whether whichever bishop consecrated this altar consulted the GIRM or other relevant documents as to what constitutes an altar in liturgical law?

But then liberals don’t care about these sorts of technicalities and I would probably be denounced as some sort of pharisee for pointing this type of thing out.

Who cares eh? After all, we all know that the bishop is pope in his own diocese.