Luzarches

Oswald,

Go away and read ‘The Spirit of the Liturgy’ by the current holy father and then come back and tell is that beautiful Cobh cathedral needs to be mutilated like every other great church in Ireland at the service of a bankrupt liturgical ethos.

It is an utter disgrace that anyone could issue a death threat against the bishop and whoever has done such a thing should feel abject shame.

But I would also pay tribute to those who have organised the true campaign, the organisers of the FOSCC. For them this has always be an arguement as to the prudence of the current reordering plans. I would never justify the crazed reaction of a very small minority, but a large measure of the ill will produced by this saga has originated in the less than plain dealings of the chancery as documented thoroughly elsewhere.

For my own part I do not doubt the right of the bishop to do as he pleases with the church within the law of the church and of the land, but I do question the merit on the grounds of architecture and liturgy.

One of the fruits of the Second Vatican Council is that, if ever the laity were passive and credulous, now we have members of the church who fully, actively and consciously live their faith and ask, in charity and love, for their voices to be heard on prudential questions by those who have been chosen to shepherd them.

Re the last article:

“Our plans aren’t always His,” said the Rev. John Magee, bishop of Cloyne, Ireland.

Freudian slip?

I found this on the subject of kneeling a book, Sacred Signs, by Romano Guardini, a leading contributor to the thought of the Liturgical Movement. It serves as a timeles rebuke to those who would covertly or overtly attempt to reduce the frequency of this gesture in the liturgy:

KNEELING

WHEN a man feels proud of himself, he stands erect, draws himself
to his full height, throws back his head and shoulders and says
with every part of his body, I am bigger and more important than
you. But when he is humble he feels his littleness, and lowers
his head and shrinks into himself. He abases himself. And the
greater the presence in which he stands the more deeply he abases
himself; the smaller he becomes in his own eyes.

But when does our littleness so come home to us as when we stand
in God’s presence? He is the great God, who is today and
yesterday, whose years are hundreds and thousands, who fills the
place where we are, the city, the wide world, the measureless
space of the starry sky, in whose eyes the universe is less than
a particle of dust, all-holy, all-pure, all-righteous, infinitely
high. He is so great, I so small, so small that beside him I seem
hardly to exist, so wanting am I in worth and substance. One has
no need to be told that God’s presence is not the place in which
to stand on one’s dignity. To appear less presumptuous, to be as
little and low as we feel, we sink to our knees and thus
sacrifice half our height; and to satisfy our hearts still
further we bow down our heads, and our diminished stature speaks
to God and says, Thou art the great God; I am nothing.

Therefore let not the bending of our knees be a hurried gesture,
an empty form. Put meaning into it. To kneel, in the soul’s
intention, is to bow down before God in deepest reverence.

On entering a church, or in passing before the altar, kneel down
all the way without haste or hurry, putting your heart into what
you do, and let your whole attitude say, Thou art the great God.
It is an act of humility, an act of truth, and everytime you
kneel it will do your soul good.

Although, if you look at the O’Neill scheme with the cathedra placed diagonally and against the crossing pier, he will have his back to all those people in the transept facing the altar. Maybe they should divide the seating into ‘Full’, ‘Conscious’ and ‘Active’ Participation categories?

Perhaps Prof O’Neill should take the trouble to read Gamber on the probable table arrangements at the Last Supper. But then other great artists like Dan Brown have been inspired by Leonardo to great effect and to no small commercial advantage. Who are we to judge?

The architect has fifty-one years of experience. That begs the question, what was he experiencing? If one looks at the plans at a larger scale then it is evident that no thought whatsoever has been given to the meeting of the new lturgy stage and the remaining mosaics. The geometry is simply severed, as if overidden my his ‘intervention’. But that’s not a surprise. Exactly the same thing can be seen at the same ‘conflict point’ between old and new in the Milanese duomo mentioned already on the thread.

This explicit similarity with Cobh is even seen in the asymetrical treatment of the cancelli balustrade, ananlogous to the rails in St C’s. C O’N has the entrance to one of the side chapels entirely blocked by a bit of chopped up rail. This is evident in the larger scale drawings, which the hapless planning officer called the finest planning drawings he’d ever seen. In Milan there are 3 No bays of rail/cancelli on one side of the sanctuary and 2 or 1 No on the other side.

For Cobh, only the finest architectural precedents will do.

Re: The Cathedral of St. Carthage, Armidale, Australia.

Interesting sanctuary grille, it looks more like a cage for a wild animal. Are they trying to protect the people from the old altar or the other way round? The liturgical consultant involved has poetically described the dichotomy between the active prescence of Christ in the mass and His abiding prescence in the tabernacle. I know I find the presence of Christ in the tabernacle to be the single most distracting thing when I go to mass.

O’Connell in ‘Church Building & Furnishing’ traces the development of the rail from cancelli, but that the latter were merely barriers rather than a kneeling place for communion. He says that, in England, the rail as we now know it came in in the 15th/16th Centuries. However he groundlessly infers that the absence of rails prior to this demonstrates that the normal posture for receiving communion was to stand. I gather that there is evidence in illuminated MSS that in the sarum use of the Roman Rite the hausling cloth was stretched across the sanctuary by two servers so as to catch any falling particles of the sacred species whilst the people knelt to receive.

Rails certainly are not and never have been required by church law, as far as I understand. The rail primarily makes it easier and more comfortable for the people to kneel, to contemplate the eucharist prior to reception and to make an act of thanksgiving thereafter.

These are the pictures.