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English Medieval Floor Tiles
What can be said with a lot more certainty, though, is that they have found the remains of the Grey Friars’ church and friary, one of the most important ecclesiastical institutions in late medieval Leicester. (And, in my opinion, that’s the more important part of the findings anyway.) What has been dug up includes parts of the walls of both the church and the chapter house, fragments of window tracery and some inlaid floor tiles, presumably dating from the 14th century:
Now I must admit that I couldn’t care less about the bones of some long dead monarch – even if he has been immortalized in Blackadder by Shakespeare – but I’m utterly fascinated by medieval floor tiles! The thing about floor tiles is that they are generally simply overlooked by art historians, partly because they are usually not high art (most of them being a bit crude in execution and, what’s perhaps worse, mass-produced), partly because not all that many of them survive. Those that do survive are mostly isolated pieces kept (but not always displayed) in museums, but in the later Middle Ages tiled pavements adorned practically every church and every cloister, every chapter house and every refectory, and, in secular settings, every hall and every chamber. Most of the tiles were, of course, purely ornamental, but quite often they would also include figurative scenes such as the famous Tristan Tiles from Chertsey Abbey, now in the British Museum.
Only very few tiled pavements from the Middle Ages survive in their entirety, but I had the good fortune to get to see one of them only last week when I was travelling in the south-west of England. This particular pavement is preserved at Cleeve Abbey (Somerset), a Cistercian monastery founded in the 12th century:
Like Greyfriars’ Church in Leicester, the church of Cleeve Abbey was demolished in the wake of the English Reformation, but most of the other abbey buildings, including the dormitory and the chapter house, are still extant. While most of them date to the 13th century, the refectory range was rebuilt in the late 15th century. However, just to the south of it, the pavement of the original 13th century refectory was discovered and excavated in 1876. As you might be able to discern in the above photo, a sort of tent has now been installed to protect the pavement from wind and rain, but this is relatively recent and before that the pavement had been exposed to the elements for several decades, causing considerable deterioration…
It is still pretty well-preserved, though, and most importantly it still retains the original tile arrangement, something that is extremely rare in surviving medieval pavements. Presumably made in the 1270s by a Gloucestershire tilery, the refectory floor at Cleeve Abbey consists mainly of heraldic tiles, visualizing the abbey’s political affiliations and commemorating its most important lay patrons. There are the arms of the earls of Gloucester from the de Clare family…
… the arms of the earls of Cornwall…
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… and, more particularly, of Richard of Cornwall (1209-1272), the double-headed eagle in his crest alluding to his heavily contested stint as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire…
… and then, of course, there are the three well-known English lions, presumably commemorating extensive donations made to the abbey by king Henry III:
But there are even more 13th century tiles to be seen at Cleeve Abbey: Another batch of them survives in the south-western corner of what was once the abbey church. These too include some heraldic tiles, but for the most part they are merely ornamental. And, as is evident in the photo below, on the whole this particular patch doesn’t look as if it preserves the original arrangement…
Finally, a few more tiles from the church are on display in the small abbey museum, run by English Heritage. Most prominently among them is this pair of tiles which, according to the label in the museum, dates “from sometime between 1244 and 1272″ and was designed to be laid “on the risers of steps, perhaps in the presbitery of the church”:
So far, so good, but the label then goes on to say that “the design shows a legendary combat between Saladin (right) and King Richard I (left) during the Third Crusade” – and I can’t help but wonder: How do they know that? Of course, we know from written sources that the legendary combat of Richard and Saladin was a popular subject in 13th century England, especially in the decoration of royal palaces. And it also appears in the aforementioned Chertsey Tiles:
However, in the tiles from Chertsey, the Christian warrior to the left is clearly wearing a crown and sporting England’s Three Lions on his shield (see detail here). Also, at Chertsey, fragments of tiles spelling out the name RICARDUS have been found, so all in all there is a solid case for identifying the combatants as Richard and Saladin (or at least for identifying one of them as Richard and deducing that his opponent has to be Saladin). Unfortunately, no such thing may be said for the pair of tiles at Cleeve: Here, there is no inscription, and while the horseman to the right may be identified as a Saracen (if only by his round shield), his Christian adversary’s shield only shows the crusaders’ cross but not the arms of England. Nothing here suggests that this figure was intended to represent King Richard, and it might be wiser therefore to simply label the scene as something generic like Combat between a Christian Knight and a Saracen.
But regardless of its precise iconography, this fragmented combat scene is a dire reminder that – no matter how amazing the surviving refectory pavement may be – a similarly or perhaps even more amazing pavement must once have adorned the floors of the abbey church…
Thirteenth-Century Floor Tiles at Cleeve Abbey (and elsewhere)
From the New Liturgical Movement
The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, Volume 4
The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, volume 4 1849 to 1850
Edited with Notes and an Introduction by Margaret Belcher
Oxford University Press, £142.50
‘I am so sick of passing my life doing miserable buildings & getting abused for them afterwards,’ wrote A. W. N. Pugin dejectedly to John Hardman in 1849, ‘that I want to employ the few years of life left to make at any rate good designs, it is horrible to be taunted on all sides for buildings in which everything is cut down to the Last shilling – give me an employer with money & I will work for him – but no more poor jobs.’
This quotation is taken from the first letter in the fourth volume of Pugin’s Collected Letters for the years 1849-50. For the last ten years admirers of Pugin’s work have enjoyed the monumental endeavour of the publication of his correspondence, impeccably edited by Muriel Belcher. This constitutes one of the major achievements in the literature of the Gothic Revival. The present volume is not only the longest of the series so far published but also the most detailed in the range of Pugin’s work and preoccupations. In comparison with the success of his earlier years it records a professionally bleak period marked by the ebbing away of significant architectural commissions and their replacement by designs for stained glass, church furniture and metalwork, precious and base. The furnishing and decoration of the New Palace of Westminster dragged on. ‘To be architect to one grate or one fireplace’ was, so he assured Hardman, worse ‘than keeping a fish stall – for one may get a few shillings by a deal in whiting.’
No critic could be more savage in their estimation of his work than Pugin himself but he resented criticism because few knew the constraints under which he was sometimes forced to work. Accusations of thinness of structure, weak elevations, and poor materials were made regardless of circumstances. Even the consecration of St Augustine’s, Ramsgate, on 14 August 1850, disappointed him. ‘The church was blest this morning,’ he informed Hardman, ‘& mass sung, the altar Looked wretched, we had nothing, the weather dreadful, a heavy gale from the N. blowing everything into the church the moment a door was opened. … I have been a great fool ever to begin such a Large work without better materials to work it, the chairs &c Look beastly – & building has lost immensely inside by the benches …’. St Augustine’s crippled Pugin for the rest of his life; in the meanwhile, Mrs Pugin had to endure a course of cod liver oil which did little for domestic contentment. Yet here his beliefs, as an architect and Catholic, converged. In 1850 he had mellowed and wrote to John Rouse Bloxam, inviting him to Ramsgate, saying that ‘The interior of the church is most solemn & would delight you much’.
These were the years of reversals of Pugin’s principles not only by wary bishops but by zealous converts seeking authenticity in Baroque Catholicism. Of these the main culprits were the Oratorians who were disliked and feared by Pugin. ‘I never looked on a Puritan with half the disgust that I do on Oratorians, they are the worst enemies of religion that England has seen for many a day … we have never had such miserable prospects never so low in hopes.’ While in return Newman deplored Pugin’s ‘haughty and domineering tone’. It is, perhaps, ironical that the brass furniture on Newman’s coffin was designed by Pugin years before and made as a standard design by Hardman. Moreover, in 1849 Newman had bought Gothic church metalwork from his firm.
Pugin’s stained glass was used by many architects, including Carpenter, Butterfield, and Woodyer, among others, but the return was ‘nothing’; ‘the windows neither pay me nor you’, he observed to Hardman. Nevertheless, he was able to buy his boat, the Caroline, which gave him endless pleasure and he illustrated another of the letters to Hardman with the yacht in full sail. Today Pugin’s glass is regarded as one of his greatest achievements.
The survival of the Hardman archive has enabled the greater part of Pugin’s surviving letters to be preserved. But there is other correspondence, including personal letters to Jane, his wife, Crace, his decorator, architects, his clients and sundry correspondents, including bellicose letters to the press. He welcomed the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850. In 1849 he published Floriated Ornament, the most beautiful of his books, and towards the end of 1850 collected material for his treatise on Screens.
All of this activity was accomplished against the background of domestic security and comfort, the birth of his youngest child, Margaret, and the marriage of his eldest daughter, Anne, to J. H. Powell which further cemented the link between Pugin and Hardman. Pugin’s artistic touchiness found full expression in his letters, many written in a towering rage, and they are invaluable not merely for shedding light on his work but also his life and times. In the copious footnotes, which are marvels of scholarship, we further discover Pugin as he really was, rather than as the subject of prejudiced assumptions.
— Anthony Symondson SJ
From the City Journal
BRUCE S. THORNTON
Before the Culture Fades
Roger Kimball’s ongoing work of preservation
3 August 2012
The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, by Roger Kimball (St. Augustine’s Press, 360 pp., $35)Roger Kimball has long been one of America’s most learned commentators on intellectual history, contemporary politics, fine art, and architecture. Longtime editor of The New Criterion and more recently publisher of Encounter Books, Kimball authored two of the best exposés of the left-wing corruption of the American university: Tenured Radicals and The Long March. The 21 essays in Kimball’s new book, The Fortunes of Permanence, cover a remarkable range of topics: relativism, multiculturalism, radical egalitarianism, the enduring importance of tradition, the delusions of socialism, “democratic despotism,” the dangers of sentimental “benevolence,” and the cultural significance of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The essays also discuss a wide variety of individual writers: those unfairly demonized, like Rudyard Kipling; those insufficiently well known, like Leszek Kołakowski, Richard Weaver, and James Burnham; and those familiar yet still worthy of explication and reconsideration, like G. K. Chesterton and Friedrich Hayek.
In his essay on John Buchan, the now-forgotten inventor of the spy novel, Kimball shows easy familiarity not just with Buchan’s novels and other writings but also with his major biographers, his letters, his memoirs, and the estimations of his contemporaries, all punctuated with samplings of Buchan’s memorable prose. “It is a melancholy fact,” a character in Buchan’s novel John Macnab says, “that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.” Here is an author, Kimball makes clear, whose observations are relevant to where we find ourselves today.
Kimball’s survey articulates his two great themes. The first is the need to battle what he has elsewhere called “cultural amnesia”; the struggle requires recovering the great thinkers and writers of the past, “the salient figures whose works helped weave the great unfolding tapestry of our civilization” but “whose voices have been drowned out by the demotic inanities of pop culture or embalmed by the dead hand of the academy.” Second is the importance of “discrimination,” or what Kimball calls “the gritty job of intellectual and cultural trash collector,” in which one identifies and disposes of the faddish and politicized ephemera that make up most of the art and writing celebrated by the bien-pensant elite. These efforts are essentially educational. As Kimball writes in his preface, today’s students are taught to “regard education as an exercise in disillusionment” and to “look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.” His new book “aims to disturb that complacency and reaffirm the tradition that made both the experience of and striving for greatness possible.”
The book’s eponymous essay, “The Fortunes of Permanence,” establishes its framework. “Culture,” Kimball tells us, is in fact the activity of “cultivating,” which is what education should do. To be successful, this cultura animi, the “cultivating of the mind,” requires “time and continuity,” the “tips, habits, prohibitions, and necessities that have been accumulated from time out of mind and passed down, generation after generation.” In short, education requires tradition, what Kimball calls the “aegis of permanence.” Yet we live in a time when so much militates against tradition: “instantaneity,” a mania for the new and a suspicion of the past; the two-bit nominalism that argues against any intrinsic meaning in cultural products or values; the claim that truth is only a construct of power or language; and the multiculturalist claim that no value judgments can be made about different cultures. All lead not to “cultural parity,” Kimball writes, but to “cultural reversal,” the process whereby “culture degenerates from being a cultura animi to a corruptio animi,” as the wisdom of the past is disparaged or forgotten. And this corruption spreads throughout the whole of social and personal life, from today’s “pansexual carnival” to the Internet’s glut of disconnected information: “Data, data everywhere, but no one knows a thing.” The result is that we “neglect the deep wisdom of tradition and time-sanctioned answers to the human predicament.”
The recovery of this wisdom from Western culture animates all the essays here. Such wisdom is desperately needed these days, given the expansion of state power that has attended President Obama’s policies, with their explicit aim to institute radical-egalitarian “fairness” and to “spread the wealth around.” In such a fraught political moment, the essay “Friends of Humanity” is a timely reminder of political utopianism’s destructive consequences. Kimball nimbly surveys the ideas of socialist dreamers such as English novelist William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, both of whom “foresaw all manner of glorious things awaiting humanity now that the ‘priests and despots’ were on their way out.” Godwin’s screeds against “selfishness” and his sentimental raptures over “benevolence” are precursors of today’s progressive tirades against “Wall Street greed” and calls for “social justice.” And Godwin’s demonization of private property likewise finds its modern echo in the Obama administration’s dirigiste inclinations, its eagerness to divest the “rich” of their wealth and force them to “pay their fair share.” As Kimball dryly remarks of these eighteenth-century models: “Sounds pretty up-to-date, doesn’t it?”
Kimball finds an antidote to such fatuities in the work of Godwin’s contemporary, Thomas Malthus. Malthus countered the “Godwin-Condorcet brand of utopia”—which is “essentially disestablishing of the past and its legal, economic, and religious institutions”—with the sober reminder that the injustices wrought by those institutions were, in his words, “light and superficial in comparison with those deeper-seated causes of evil which result from the laws of nature and the passions of mankind.” As the bloody record of modern utopian political religions has shown, ignoring the irreducible complexity of human nature to construct schemes of abstract perfection always leads to slaughter of those who cling to their freedom and individuality.
Kimball’s “anatomy of servitude,” as he calls it—his analysis of cultural, educational, and political degeneration—doesn’t end on a Spenglerian note of inevitable decline. Such determinism would contradict the celebration of human freedom that recurs throughout these essays. We can choose a different course, and we have the resources to do so. First, there is “the depth and strength of the Anglosphere’s traditional commitment to individual freedom and local initiative against the meddlesome intrusion of any central authority.” Second, we can look to the new “revolt of the masses,” a “specter of freedom” whose “core motivation centers around the rejection of the business as usual: the big-government, top-down, elitist egalitarianism practiced by both major parties in the United States.” Another resource the author doesn’t identify is his own work, through which readers have been broadening their understanding of the Western heritage for a generation now.
Bruce Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at California State University Fresno. His most recent book is The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.
From the City Journal
EMILY WASHINGTON
The Secret Life of Parking Lots
Could all this paved space have better uses?13 July 2012ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, by Eran Ben-Joseph (MIT Press, 184 pp., $24.95)
In the iconic movie American Graffiti, the parking lot of a drive-in restaurant serves as a public space for teenagers, offering the freedom of being away from home at a low cost. The characters use the lot to show off their cars but also to socialize outdoors, in the way that urban planners seem to want people to use open space. In his book ReThinking a Lot, author Eran Ben-Joseph imagines parking lots along just these lines.
Even those who appreciate the utility of parking lots typically think of them as single-purpose. Ben-Joseph challenges this perception. He begins with an overview of city planners’ legal requirements for parking and how these rules have shaped the size and design of open-air parking lots. While he acknowledges that many such lots today are uninspired and unattractive, he suggests that they don’t have to be—perhaps they might become something like the version that appears in nostalgic movies.
Parking lots first became common in the suburbs in the 1920s, Ben-Joseph shows. Their prevalence soon prompted urban retailers to demand parking space of their own to compete with suburban businesses. Cities like Denver even attempted to revitalize their central business districts by supplying free parking on city-owned lots—as if parking lots themselves would attract customers to stores. Many cities also began requiring property owners to offer a minimum amount of free parking for their customers. The minimums were based on the properties’ square footage, a method that Ben-Joseph—like Donald Shoup, author of the urbanist classic The High Cost of Free Parking—criticizes: square footage is often not a good indicator of how many people will park somewhere and can inflate the estimates of needed space. But city planners don’t have the resources to develop requirements for parking on a lot-by-lot basis.
Following Shoup, Ben-Joseph argues that cities should stop telling property owners how much free parking to offer. Instead, he suggests, cities should require design standards for parking lots. Lot owners would then dedicate some of their parking space to landscaping, public art display, or other forms of beautification. “The surface parking lot has ravaged large swaths of the landscape,” Ben-Joseph writes. “It (along with the highway) was a key element in the destruction of the small-scale pedestrian urban fabric associated with ‘good’ cities.” Better-designed parking lots would help repair the fabric; so would the alternative uses for parking lots that Ben-Joseph highlights, from farmers’ markets and food trucks to basketball courts and makeshift bowling alleys.
Yet Ben-Joseph doesn’t explain why urban planners would be any better at producing design standards than they were at determining optimal parking allotments. He seems to struggle with his view of parking lots, seeing them simultaneously as blights and as positive contributions to communities’ open space. This prevents him from acknowledging that they can serve all these alternative uses only after they have become empty swaths of asphalt. He seems to believe that if parking lots were better designed, with landscaping to provide shade and public art to provide interest, they could meet diverse demands for public space. But some of his suggestions could actually diminish the potential for public uses that parking lots serve today. For example, if a lot’s most valuable alternative use is as a basketball court, city planners would do a disservice to the community by requiring the owner to landscape it.
Changing the focus of parking-lot regulations, as Ben-Joseph suggests, won’t solve the core problem: city planners can only arbitrarily determine the most valuable use for a piece of land. Still, Ben-Joseph’s book offers a solid history of how parking requirements evolved and will open eyes about the surprising potential of parking lots to be more than just places to park your car.
Emily Washington is associate director of state outreach at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
From the City Journal
BRUCE S. THORNTON
People MatterRobert Zubrin’s powerful critique of antihumanism
22 June 2012Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, by Robert Zubrin (Encounter, 328 pp., $25.95)
A ruling idea of the last two centuries has been materialism: the notion, as arch-materialist Daniel Dennett asserts, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” One consequence of this belief has been the rise of antihumanism—the stripping from people of their transcendent value and a reduction of them to mere things in the world to be studied, understood, reshaped—and ultimately controlled.
As Robert Zubrin shows in his valuable survey Merchants of Despair, antihumanism’s reductive view of human nature has underpinned movements like eugenics, population control, and radical environmentalism, all of which have been eager to sacrifice human life and well-being to achieve their dubious utopias. Zubrin, a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and fellow of the Center for Security Policy, has previously authored popular books on energy and space exploration. He shows an engineer’s sharp eye for things as they are and a scientist’s respect for the limits of knowledge, especially as regards various pseudoscientific fads.
Zubrin begins with Thomas Malthus, “the founding prophet of modern antihumanism,” who claimed in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population that any population always geometrically grows larger than the food supply. Malthus’s argument ignored humans’ creative ingenuity, but his theories had catastrophic consequences when applied to the real world. Believing that Ireland was overpopulated, for example, the British government allowed this food-exporting island to spiral downward into famine partly because, as Malthus himself urged, “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” Over 1 million Irish died of starvation and disease caused by malnutrition. Thirty years later, the same policy of neglect contributed to a famine that killed as many as 10 million people in India, again because of the Malthusian fallacy that, as Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”
Charles Darwin embraced Malthus’s apocalyptic theories, too. Overpopulation, he believed, would eventually be cured by natural selection, the “weeding out of ‘unfit’ individuals and races.” As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Like Malthus, Darwin had no patience with sentimental Christian or Enlightenment ethics that sought to alleviate suffering and improve human life with medical advances such as vaccinations, or with asylums and other social-welfare institutions that cared for the sick, insane, or poor. Because of this effort “to check the process of elimination,” Darwin maintained, “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” As Zubrin summarizes Darwin’s argument: “Peace, plenty, care, and compassion were interferences in the course of nature. All progress was based on death.”
The mixture of Malthusian and Darwinian theory soon conjured up racist eugenics. At the forefront of the early eugenics movement was Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who also decried humanist sentimentalism. The “unfit” must be kept from procreating, he argued, for “if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.” By the turn of the twentieth century, these ideas had become articles of faith among many liberals and socialists.
Such cruel pseudoscientific theories took a fatal turn in Germany, where eugenics found its deadliest champion in biologist Ernst Haeckel, “an extreme racist, virulent anti-Catholic bigot, anti-Semite, anti-Pole, pro-imperialist, Pan-German fanatic” as well as a “militant atheist.” Haeckel and his followers sought to replace Christian ethics with “Monism,” the aim of which was to further human evolution through Germany’s conquest of inferior races and the elimination of abnormal children and invalids. The ideas also took hold in America, championed by men like General Francis Amasa Walker, president of M.I.T. In 1896, Walker wrote in the Atlantic that Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, Italian, and Russian-Jewish immigrants were “beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence,” possessing “none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government.” Theodore Roosevelt would later agree, expressing his disdain for “the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like” as the product of “well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists.” These widespread prejudices, buttressed by biased I.Q. tests, ultimately led in 1924 to the discriminatory U.S. law that shut down immigration from countries considered inferior and provided a pseudoscientific justification for race-based segregation.
The Holocaust would discredit at least the public expression of eugenics. Zubrin shows that the ideas lived on, though, repackaged as “population control” and concern for the environment. Prewar eugenicists found a home in organizations like the postwar Population Council, whose founding roster, Zubrin writes, “reads like a eugenics movement reunion.” The same continuity exists between eugenics groups and environmental organizations, such as the British Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund. Particularly valuable is Zubrin’s examination of the eugenic roots of Planned Parenthood, whose founder, Margaret Sanger, wrote in 1919: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” These movements, Zubrin writes, soon made up “the imposing and influential population control establishment,” which became entrenched at the United Nations and in U.S. government agencies. The efforts of these groups were suspiciously concentrated in the developing world.
As Zubrin meticulously documents, the obsession with overpopulation has led to attacks on the economic and technological development that represents the best hope for improving human life around the globe. The alliance of radical environmentalism, population-control advocacy, and anticapitalist leftism continues to prolong the misery of the Third World. Rachel Carson’s scientifically challenged campaign against DDT led to the deaths of millions. Paul Ehrlich’s spectacularly wrong Malthusian predictions helped legitimize cruel policies, such as Lyndon Johnson’s withholding of food aid to India during the 1966 famine. Ehrlich wanted food aid tied to sterilization and birth-control programs and suggested adding “temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food,” with antidotes given only when the population reached the desired size. He also wanted “luxury taxes” imposed on cribs, diapers, and children’s toys. These neo-Malthusian theories ultimately led to the 1968 creation of the Club of Rome, whose influential study The Limits to Growth shapes attitudes to the present day—for example, in the animus against genetically modified foods. Now institutionalized in E.U. policy, the refusal to allow genetically modified food denies vital crops (containing nutrients and organic pesticides engineered into them) to the Third World.
The anti-global-warming crusade against carbon-based energy is the latest assault on progress and improvement. Zubrin is correct to call the climate-change movement a “global antihuman cult.” Its assaults against dissent, embrace of messianic leaders, and apocalyptic scenarios reveal a debased religious sensibility rather than scientific rigor: “Right thinking will be rewarded,” Zubrin writes of global-warming thought police like Al Gore and economist Paul Krugman. “Wrong thinking will be punished. Many will be sacrificed. All will be controlled. The gods will take back their fire.” The warmists’ growth-killing programs, if implemented, would lead to mass immiseration.
As Zubrin concludes, antihumanist ideas and programs represent a war against human freedom and global solidarity: “If the world’s resources are fixed with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide.” Contrary to the arguments of the “terrible simplifiers,” as historian Jacob Burckhardt called those who reduce people to mere matter, humans are capable of freedom, creativity, compassion, and love. We should cherish these unique qualities rather than succumbing to antihumanism and self-hatred.
Bruce Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at California State University Fresno. His most recent book is The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.
From the Catholic Voice
Rebuilding Catholic culture: sacred images
by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J.
In the eighth-century, St. John
Damascene posed a challenge to
Christians: If a pagan comes and
asks you to show him your faith,
take him to the Church and let him
see the sacred icons” (St. John
Damascene, Treatise on Images
against Constantine Caballinus,
95-309, quoted in Thomas Merton,
Disputed Questions, 158). We will
return to this question.The Church, Patron of the Arts
Beauty is a stepping stone to God, and the Church has
earned a lasting place in history for inspiring a beautiful
culture through the visual arts. By commissioning the finest
artists, the Church has stood as their foremost patron. When
illiteracy was common, the visuals served as catecheses
which, through their beauty, taught as well as inspired.
When vacationers travel to distant countries, among other
things, they want to see Catholic architecture that graces
large cities and dot the village countryside. Tourists first
experience Catholicism through externals. Our creed and
worship, our moral code are expressed through the senses.
Ours is a religion bolstered by reason and feeling that
convey the faith in a distinct texture, complex flavors, and
deep resonance. Our faith embraces a spectrum of tints,
hues, and shades. Men and women have been converted
through the sacred arts; such is their power to convince
through beauty. People size up the Church universal in the
particulars through edifices, great and small, regardless of
country or continent. Catholic architecture seeks unity in
diversity.
The Pontifical Councils for Culture (2006, 2008, 2011)
In 2006, the Pontifical Council for Culture published “The
Via Pulchritudinis, (way of beauty) Privileged Pathway for
Evangelization and Dialogue.” The document was entirely
devoted to the ways of beauty to evangelize and dialogue with
others. Critical of sacred art for its banality, superficiality,
and negligence in liturgical celebrations, the document
mandated “that beauty be returned in church buildings and
that churches be aesthetically beautiful in its decorations
and in its choice of music.” The document paraphrased
Paul VI’s address in 1964 as “the divorce between art and
the sacred that has characterized the twentieth century and
the ugliness of some churches and their decoration; their
desacralization is the consequence of this estrangement, a
laceration that needs to be treated in order to be cured.”
In March, 2008, the Pontifical Council for Culture devoted
its meeting to the challenges of secularization and the need
for the evangelization of culture. Of major concern was
and is the question of beauty. Monsignor Peter Fleetwood,
a consultor for the Council, spoke about “the blight of an
iconoclastic Puritan streak in North and North West Europe
which has inevitably had an effect on all forms of art,
including church architecture.” He also noted that, during
the utilitarian trends of the Soviet Empire, the Eastern
Churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, “seem to have
successfully stood their ground, with an amazing talent for
beautifying the insides of their utterably drab buildings.”
In January, 2011, Archbishop Gian-Carlo Ravasi, Prefect
of the same Pontifical Council addressed the faculty at the
University La Sapienza in Rome. In this lecture, he referred
to abstract church architecture in Italy as art that deforms
the liturgy. In these modern churches, “we find ourselves
lost as in a conference hall, distracted as in a sports arena,
packed in as at a tennis court, degraded as in a pretentious
and vulgar house.”Modern Art Forms in General
The twentieth century ushered in a crisis of meaning.
Modern artists, of whatever discipline, expressed the
iconoclastic spirit. They tended to reject traditional forms,
rules, methods of the past, and symbolic meaning. Still,
many successfully adapted the classical spirit to modernity
and continue to do so. The School of Architecture at the
University of Notre Dame is one such example. Today,
most modern art forms are characterized by asymmetry,
lines that are angular, disjointed, and anti-lyrical. Positive
emotional content is absent from most of these forms.
Accordingly, to ask what a form is, or what its symbolic
meaning is, is irrelevant. What does an art form
communicate? The totality of the form is its meaning, and
viewers may interpret the form as they wish. Contemporary
art forms make for stimulating visits to museums, and, after
the show, for lively conversation.
Utilitarianism and Fruitfulness: Minimalism in Church art
On entering an Orthodox and a Puritan-style church, a
visitor will be struck by the differences of their architectural
features and the atmosphere they express. One celebrates
the senses; the other does not. What if a church building has
been constructed like a machine? The house of God is not a
function, not a utility (uti), a thing to be used or controlled.
Together with the faithful, the Domus Dei symbolizes
fruitfulness (frui)–life and growth.
Referring to today’s crisis of meaning, R. Kevin Seasoltz,
O.S.B. writes that “unfortunately, traditional institutionalized
religious bodies in many ways seem unequipped to respond
to this crisis . . . . In fact, contemporary art forms often
simply image back to people the isolation and loneliness
they already know in their own lives.” (R. Kevin Seasoltz,
A Sense of the Sacred, 316).
A church building symbolizes the kingdom of God,
and sacred architecture can never be seen as primarily
functional, for its purpose is rooted in prayer, expressive of
beauty. There is a difference between functionality (uti) and
relationship (frui).
A church building reduced to its barest essentials – to
bare walls, bare sanctuary, and bare ceiling – may draw
visitors curious about its mass and proportion, but it is no
more a building for Catholic worship than is a gym or an
auditorium. If the Incarnation is the mystery of God in
flesh and blood, how can the Incarnation be expressed in a
bare building, presumed to be visual theology? We worship
like human beings, as the statement below affirms:
Houses of worship have traditionally been decorated
so as to provide a festal setting for the assembly and the
celebration: hangings, lights, and precious materials have
always been used for this purpose. Pictorial decoration in
the form of frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass
windows contribute to the festive atmosphere; in addition,
they function as a kind of prolongation of the liturgical
signs, with the emphasis especially on the heavenly and
eschatological aspect of the liturgy. This is why iconographic
themes cannot be left to chance; in the East, they are often
predetermined in great detail (The Church at Prayer, I:205.)
How do artisans craft their respective materials in order to
breathe Christ into their work? Their art forms must have
a human, sensate, and accessible component with wide
appeal, as well as a reserved component appealing to the
sublime, the spiritual aspect of the person. The forms touch
the senses and pass through them to affect the intellect, will,
memory, and imagination. Sacred art forms are intended to
give the Assembly a heightened sense of God’s presence
that is reserved and, yes, deeply enjoyable.The After effects of World War II
The widespread destruction of European countries
following World War II necessitated the building of new
churches. Professional architects, with or without faith, were
commissioned to design them. Gone were the nostalgia
and commitment for linking the past with the present. At
first, the reforms used simple abstract ornamentation in
sanctuaries and stained glass windows. Devotional objects
were rightly moved away from the sanctuaries, the main
focus of the liturgical action.
After Vatican II, church interiors underwent structural
reform mostly for liturgical reasons. In many cases, changes
were executed organically from the Church’s tradition. In
other cases, the stripping was excessive, reminiscent of
the cleansing of Catholic churches during the Protestant
Reformation.
Sanctuaries in many postconciliar churches were stripped–
denuded, without placing a minimum of decoration in them.
While praise abounded for purified architectural vitality,
critics were appalled that the church building and their
interiors signaled a desacralization, even a secularizing of
the church buildings.Machine-Church Architecture
A machine-church, whose functionalism takes priority
over form, may fascinate the eye and stimulate discussion
about the designer’s imagination, but this is a different issue
from the religious one. Verticality, harmony, symmetry
and balance, and proportion of the human form are deemphasized
or entirely absent. Emptiness and architectural
nihilism evoke not serenity but madness because the interior
is stripped of sensory religious symbolism. Even banks and
doctor’s offices, decorated with art forms, are not absolute
in their functional role.
Ultra-abstract church architecture combines secularized
Christian art and rationalized religion. Inseparably
connected as they are, here the sensory aspect of the
Incarnation is denied. Concern about modern architecture
is twofold: (1) whether an art form makes visible invisible
mysteries of Christianity and (2) the extent to which it does
or does not do so. Church architecture should mediate not a
Gnostic god but the Incarnate Word of God.Exaggerated Church Architecture
In 2000, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
published Built of Living Stones. This document restates
the Church’s acceptance of all forms of architecture, and
is ever open to embrace newer forms that have grown
organically from her rich heritage of artistic expression;
(but), architecture that draws more attention to its own
shape, form, texture or color than to the sacred realities it
seeks to disclose, is unworthy of the church building (Nos.
44-45).
Many contemporary churches “have grown organically”
from the Church’s “rich heritage.” The exterior shapes of
others however have been described as extreme. They are
exemplified in the church buildings mentioned below.
The famous shape of Notre Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp
(1955) has mystified observers. Designed by Le Corbusier,
it has been called a study in primitivism, an imitation of a sea
shell or sail boat, a nun’s cowl, Peter’s barque or Noah’s ark.
“A house is a machine for living in,” he writes; “it makes no
difference whether the building be sacred or profane.”
The Dominican Monastery of La Tourette at Evreaux
(1953), also designed by Le Corbusier, resembles a massive
rectangle that might be mistaken for an office building
or prison. According to Michael Rose, “its oppressive
structures drove out most the monks, but the defective
construction as well called for renovation, scheduled to
begin in 2005 (In Tiers of Glory, 103-04).
The Church of the Holy Trinity in Vienna, by Fritz Wotruba,
is constructed with concrete blocks, arranged in irregular
angular patterns. The church has been nicknamed, “a pile
of rocks.”
The Millennium Church of the Great Jubilee (2003) designed
by Richard Meier, is constructed of three sparkling, jagged,
white and steel concrete curvilinear panels with glass walls.
It is conspicuously located in the center of a poor village
just outside of Rome.
The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland (2008),
designed by Santiago Calatrava and Craig Hartman, is
composed of a ribbed, bone-like structure of steel, glass,
and concrete resembling a massive technological tent, a
clam shell, a rib cage, or even the belly of a whale. Some
see the dramatic form as hands joined in prayer. The same
general description applies to the chapel at Ave Maria
College, Naples, Fl (2004 Architect, E. Fay Jones) and to
the chapel at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado.
The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles
(2002) was designed by José Raphael Moneo. A study in
angularity, the cathedral’s warm interior mitigates its outer
severity.
The English minimalist, John Pawson was commissioned to
design the Trappist monastery of Novy Dvur in the Czech
Republic. According to current, and perhaps temporary,
photos, here cloistered monks will live out their entire lives
within bare walls, bare sanctuary, and bare ceiling.
The above-mentioned churches break completely with the
tradition of church. Extreme minimalist church architecture
cannot be discarded. Failing restoration or renovation, it
must be endured. Worse, this type of architecture invites
criticism from church leaders and beyond. The film, “Into
Great Silence,” proclaims that even the Carthusian Order,
the most austere in the Church, greatly values sensate
beauty.Open Questions
Finances and other practical issues in the building of new
churches remain outside the scope of this essay. Still,
wisdom, balance, and moderation are needed to raise the
standards of church architecture and re-apply ageless
principles to it. Discernment is an indispensable virtue in
choosing competent and devout architects who will build
our churches to last a thousand years.Once Again, St. John Damascene
Let us rephrase St. John Damascene’s challenge posed at the
beginning of this piece. Can a Catholic show a non-Catholic
our church architecture with pride: “See, this is our Catholic
faith.” While cheap pietistic visuals are not the answer to
incarnational theology, neither are antiseptically-stripped
churches. The Catholic ethos, deeply committed to cultural
history, is made for fruitfulness (frui) and not for utility (uti).
We are neither machines worshiping in a machine nor pure
spirits worshiping in a Gnostic temple. No one can destroy
our instinct for worshiping God in beautiful buildings, and
our leaders ought not be afraid of rebuilding a Church of
grace and beauty. We, the Body of Christ, deserve this. So
do those who have fled the Church and the church building!
The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los
Angeles (2002), the cathedral’s warm interior
mitigates its outer severity. This kind of church
structure breaks completely with the tradition of
the Church.Gorton Monastery
The Return of The Saints
After a 17 year exile, the Saints have come marching home. The twelve irreplaceable Saints of Gorton Monastery were finally reinstated in their original home in May 2012, after a precarious journey around the country that almost saw them lost forever. In 1994, the unique collection of 12 life-sized statues of Franciscan Saints were discovered listed for sale in a Sotheby’s auction catalogue. They had been removed from Gorton Monastery, a magnificent church designed by the famous architect Edward Pugin. Sadly, the church – a listed building – had closed in 1989 and stood empty and vandalised as its contents were stripped. At last, the fully restored Saints are back. This is their story.
A.W. N. Pugin’s Crucifixion Sculpture
Saint Mel’s Cathedral Rennovation Gets Go-Ahead
Plans to have St Mel’s Cathedral open for Christmas Eve Mass in 2014, just five years after the Cathedral’s interior was gutted in a fire, remain on track this week after builders received planning permission to go-ahead with the re-development plans subject to certain conditions.
Last April a local architect lodged an appeal against Longford Town Council’s decision to grant permission for works relating to the construction of a new roof and concrete sub-floor.
In its decision announced this week, the An Bórd Pleanála conditions stated that there should be a glue-laminated roof structure, which is a structural timber product composed of several layers of dimensioned lumber glued together.
This was one of the detailed options put forward by back in January of this year, when the St Mel’s Diocesan Trust lodged the application.
Speaking this week on Shannonside FM, the chairman of the St Mel’s Cathedral Project Committee Seamus Butler said the committee felt vindicated by the decision.
“It’s very timely. We were hoping the appeal would not be kicked on down the road. We feel it was an unnecessary appeal; there was a little bit of a hold -up but work has not been held up.”
He added, “A 30-day notice to begin work will be erected in the coming days. Work has already begun on site in relation to Section 57 works in the Cathedral, which will see the replacement of the limestone columns and pilasters with like for like replacements. This did not require planning permission.”
Mr Butler also confirmed, “A separate planning application relating to the interior of the cathedral was lodged last month with Longford Town Council and is pending a decision.”
Currently Saint Mary’s Church in Athlone is serving as the interim cathedral for the diocese of Clonmacnois and the Bishop’s Chair has been placed in the sanctuary there.
It is hoped to return it to St Mel’s cathedral in Longford for Christmas Eve in 2014.
Bishop angry at ‘delaying tactics’
AN ANGRY bishop has lambasted parishioners fighting to save a Catholic church in Aberystwyth from demolition.
In a hard-hitting pastoral message to all parishioners of St Winefride’s Church on Queens Road, The Bishop of Menevia, Thomas Matthew, said the “delaying tactics” of a small group of protesters had wasted so much time, energy and resources that they might not be able to afford to build a new church in Penparcau.
And he said he might have to close St Winefride’s down for health and safety reasons, leaving Aberystwyth with no Catholic church at all.
Ceredigion County Council planners have already approved plans by the Diocese to build a new church, presbytery and hall along with a housing development on land near the Tollgate pub in Penparcau.
But plans to demolish St Winifride’s Church and the neighbouring presbytery and hall, which are in a poor state of repair, and replace them with blocks of flats, have still not been approved because of objections by parishioners and others.
Bishop Thomas Burns warns campaigners over St Winefride’s church
Campaigners fighting to save their Catholic church have been warned to “politely back off” by a bishop or risk being left without a place of worship.
The Bishop of Menevia, the Right Reverend Thomas Burns, wants to demolish St Winefride’s in Aberystwyth on safety grounds.
There are plans to build a new church outside the town centre with the sale proceeds.
But an objector said some parishioners do not want to move out.
Our Lady of the Angels and St Winefride’s was built in the 1870s and is said to have a congregation of about 150 for its Sunday morning service.
In a pastoral message, Bishop Burns, who is based in Swansea, said the church was not fit for purpose and could be closed on health and safety grounds.
Plans are to demolish St Winefride’s and sell the land for housing.
Bishop Burns said a small number of objectors had already contributed to the project’s heavy costs of £100,000.
He said: “My dear people, the above tactics that the protesters have used, including petitions and submissions to their local councillors, have brought us to a serious moment. Throughout these last few years, the structure of St Winefride’s church has continued to weaken. It is in such a bad state that our insurers can no longer provide suitable cover for the deteriorating walls and roof if they should collapse. I am increasingly concerned about health and safety matters. Masonry and other bits and pieces have been coming down. I may soon have to make a decision about closing the church, to prevent risks to life and limb.”
The church site in Queen’s Road, which includes a dilapidated parish hall and presbytery, would cost the diocese more than £2.6m renovate, added the bishop.
‘Risk’
But objectors claimed they had been shown no evidence the church was structurally unsound.
Appealing to his parishioners, Bishop Burns added: “Tell the protesters politely to back off. Speak to them, or write to them. You know who they are, and you also know that they do not represent your parish. They have contributed to the heavy costs that have already been incurred, amounting to over £100,000. Please tell them that enough is enough. They risk leaving Aberystwyth with no Catholic parish church at all.”
Objectors said moving the church out of the town centre to Penparcau would make it difficult for older members of the congregation to attend services.
But the bishop said church services would be tailored to bus schedules, where possible.
An objector to plans for St Winefride’s, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “The old church (St Winefride’s), which has been there since the 1870s, is planned to be demolished because they say it’s not fit for purpose. Some parishioners go along with this and others do not. We don’t want the church to move out of the town centre.”
The objector also questioned whether the church was structurally unsound although agreed it was in need of repair.
Some interesting new publications recently reviewed in the Irish Arts Review:
Liam McCormick – Seven Donegal Churches [Paperback]
Liam McCormick, Seven Donegal Churches by Carole Pollard
Published: Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Written and researched by Carole Pollard, a compendium of eight books on Liam McCormick and his Seven Donegal Churches has been published by Gandon Editions. The book will be launched on 25 July at St Conal’s Church, Glenties and forms part of the MacGill Summer School. The set of books comprises one book on each of the seven churches and an eighth volume which describes McCormick’s career during that period and provides biographies of the artists who collaborated with him on the churches. Each of the eight books contains an essay by contributors: Catherine Croft, Marianne O’Kane Boal, William Cumming, John Graby, Paul Larmour, Angela Rolfe, Joy McCormick and Shane O’Toole. The books are available as a set, enclosed in a specially designed slipcase. They may also be purchased individually. The books will be for sale in local shops in Donegal, and also from good bookshops nationwide. Gandon Editions are managing sales and distribution. The prices are €33 for the set or €5 for individual volumes. http://www.gandon-editions.com
Consecration of the Abbatial Church of St. Michel de Kerganon in Brittany
conducted by Bishop Raymon Centenes, Bishop of VannesThe church was destroyed by fire five years ago:
Prayers answered as faithful flock to help save church
THEY arrived in their hundreds throughout the day after the church doors were unlocked for the first time in six years.
Despite the recent tribul-ations of the Catholic Church, anyone who feared for its future will be heartened by the support shown to a group of priests who aim to restore a city church to its former glory.
There is no doubt that the young priests, who belong to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, have a lot of work to do at the Sacred Heart Church in Limerick which they re-opened at the weekend.
The church, which had been on the market for more than €4m, was sold last week to the community of priests for €700,000.
There are no pews or statues, water from the roof drips into confessional boxes, the tabernacle needs to be repaired and an altar must be built.
Nevertheless, people returned in their droves at the weekend, when candles were lit and the organ sounded for the first time since 2006.
The Jesuits vacated the church six years ago citing an aging clergy, but their successors are hopeful that Latin Mass will be celebrated as early as next month.
French Canon Wulfran Lebocq (38) said yesterday that the church will be open before Christmas “hopefully in October or November”.
“I was very happy today to see how many candles were lit in such a short time,” he said. “People are coming here to pray and thank God for this great haven for Limerick.
“We must reorganise many things. Everything that was here was sold — there was a big auction and there was no maintenance here for many years.
Expensive
“We need to do urgent repairs on the roof. The gutters need to be changed — there are many leaks.
“The heating system will be very expensive — repairing that, finding pews and repairing gutters are our priority.”
More than €100,000 is needed for repairs and refitting.
Founded in 1990, the Institute of Christ the King is a Catholic order with 64 priests worldwide who traditionally celebrate Mass in Latin.
John O’Connor (12), from Creeves Cross, Co Limerick, who hopes to serve at Latin Mass, arrived with his father David and sister Therese (11).
“I’m a qualified altar server and familiar with the Latin Mass.
“I think it is a much better Mass — it’s more traditional,” he said.
Eva McManus travelled all the way from Westport, Co Mayo, to help clean up.
“I hoped to lend a hand but because of the insurance rules they can’t have people coming in working, so it all has to be done during the week,” she said.
“But I will absolutely have to make an effort to come back and help out.
“I am really looking forward to the first Mass. The Sacred Heart is a beautiful church and I hope people help the order to restore it.”
– Barry Duggan
The Jesuit Church in Limerick
The church will be reopened to the public on Saturday morning next at 10 am and will remain open until 6pm.
A Question for the Conservation Officer of Limerick City Council
If I am correct, the Planning and Development Acto of 2000 (and as subsequently amended) gives protected status to building on the list of protected structures and that protection includes the external and internal parts of the buildings as well as to fittings and fixtures of the building.
That being the case: how can the Limerick City Council explain its failure to prevent the spoliation of the interior of the Sacred Heart Church and the disappearance of most of its fittings and fixtures?
Most notable among the disappearances is the panel from the front of the mensa of the High ALtar. This panel was inserted into a Volksaltar built sometinme in the 1970s/1980s but disappeared after the sale of the church when the Volksaltar (which was also under the protection of the Planning and Development Act) was demolished and the panel re-appeared in a new Volksaltar installed in the church at Ballynahinch? Also missing are two angels from the reredos of the High ALtar and the tabernacle with its door.
How did Limerick City Council allows matters to go from this:
to this
From today’s Irish Times
Landmark Limerick church returning to serve as place of traditional worshipKATHRYN HAYES, in Limerick
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/images/2012/0828/1224323097469_1.jpg?ts=1346142957
MASS IN Latin will soon be heard again at a historic Limerick church that has been sold to a community of priests for one-sixth of its open-market asking price.
The Sacred Heart Church, located at the Crescent in Limerick city centre, which was on the market for more than €4 million, has been sold for €700,000 to a community of priests called the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.
Also known as the Jesuit church after the order that built it and occupied it for many years, the Sacred Heart has been vacant for the last six years following its sale to the late John O’Dolan, a developer from Galway.
Mr O’Dolan, who died in 2009, had planned to convert the building into a leisure centre and bar.
But now the church, which was in danger of falling into disrepair, is to return to its original function following its sale to the religious community led in Limerick by 38-year-old French man Canon Wulfran Lebocq, the institute’s choirmaster, who has lived in Ballingarry since 2010.
He said the group was able to acquire the church “with the help of numerous friends from Ireland, the United States and continental Europe”.
“These were not rich people, just people who loved the church and wanted to see it restored to its original use,” he said.
“With God’s help we will repay all the loans we received. Many repairs need to be done in the residence but we hope to move in there soon. We will be meeting with the local parish priest and the diocese but we hope to be able to offer our Latin Mass there to the public soon,” he added.
The Institute of Christ the King has had a residence in Limerick since 2009.
Four members of the community in Limerick offer Mass in Latin every Sunday at St Patrick’s Church on the Dublin road, and they also work in neighbouring dioceses.
Founded in 1990, the institute belongs to the Roman Catholic tradition and says its mission is “to spread the reign of Christ in all spheres of human life”. It operates in 12 countries at more than 50 locations. It takes its motto from St Paul: “Live the truth in charity.”
The organisation puts particular emphasis on harmony between faith and culture, and has acquired a reputation for promoting the arts, especially sacred music and architecture.
The institute has a seminary in Gricigliano, in the Italian diocese of Florence, where 80 seminarians are training for the priesthood.
The Sacred Heart premises in Limerick has a floor area of 25,000sq ft and comprises the church, Georgian living quarters and an enclosed garden.
Canon Lebocq said he hopes the “architectural jewel” could work as a centre everyone can use.
“We truly desire to reopen this church for the benefit of all, in close collaboration with the local civil and ecclesiastical authorities. In this way, yet another sign of a brighter future will come alive in Limerick,” he said.
Pat Kearney, managing director of selling agent Rooney Auctioneers, said the sale will “breathe new life” into the area.
The church will open to the public on Saturday between 10am and 6pm.
