Praxiteles

1. THE CORK COUNTY COUNCIL PLANNING DEPT. CHRISTMAS BONANZA

The Results:

On December 1, 2008, Praxiteles posted the following:

Also worth keeping an eye on is a planning application in relation to the Church of the Nativity at Ballyhooly by Pugin and Ashlin (1869) for changes to the interior roofing and porches. A further information response was made to Cork County Council on 9 November 2008 – all in time, no doubt, for a stocking filler coming up to Christmas!

The planning register no. here is Cork County Council no. 08/7602.

And so it came to pass, Santa Claus came rather early:

Conditionl permission has been granted for this development on 9 December 200. We shall take a closer look at this in due course and bring you the “consodered” results of the Cork County Council’s Conservation and Planning Departments.

St Lachteen’s Donoughmore, Co. Cork

A view of the liturgical south and north internal elevations:

A pathetic outsized bungalow!

However, the professionalism with which this work has been carried out may be guaged from the the following pictures which show the lazy abandonment of scaffolding in the Baptistery. As you can see,. it has been just dumped against the door itself and against the walls – with what effects on the Portland stone we just cannot imagine. Most laughable of all is the door itself. Having removed the strapwork and opened some 40-50 holes in the timber and the “restorers”, quite clearly, had not previously worked out a system to protect the unfortunate congregation from the bitter wind gusting around the Cathedral for the past few months. However, the locals have taken matters into their own hands and solved the problem by inserting newspaper into the holes. Could we say that the protection procedures employed in this operation have been less than effective or perhaps even dangerous in this case? I do notice that no safety measures have been put in place with regard to pprotecting the public from that scaffolding falling on someone or some chile climbing onto it.

Speaking of Baptisteries, Praxiteles was recently sent these photographs of the Baptistery in Cobh Cathedral. They say quite a lot about the professionalism of the persons involved in the works currently being carried out to the doors and screes on the west side of the Cathedralc – to nothing of the respect they display for the building itself.

In the porch of the Cathedral, the following notice is displayed. Can anyone interprete its meaning?

Please note that those responsible for these works are; Chris Southgate of TKB and Associates; P. J. Hagerty and Sons -from whom one would have expected better; and a Cobh group called Cornerstone Construction.

Pace the New Liturgical Movement Webpage, the following, on the subject of the orientation of liturgical prayer, may ne of interest to readers:

Benedict XVI on Liturgical Orientation: Salient Quotes
by Fr. Thomas Kocik

One of our readers thinks it would be helpful, and time-saving, to provide a collection of quotations from then-Cardinal Ratzinger on the subject of orientation in liturgical prayer. With gratitude to Michael Kowalewski, here it is:

Despite all the variations in practice that have taken place far into the second millenium, one thing has remained clear for the whole of Christendom: praying toward the east is a tradition that goes back to the beginning.
— The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2000), pg. 75.

As I have written in my books, I think that celebration turned towards the east, towards the Christ who is coming, is an apostolic tradition.
— Looking Again at the Question of Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, ed. Alcuin Reid (St. Michael’s Abbey, 2003), pg. 151.

The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself. The common turning toward the east was not a “celebration toward the wall”; it did not mean that the priest “had his back to the people”: the priest himself was not regarded as so important. For just as the congregation in the synagogue looked together toward Jerusalem, so in the Christian liturgy the congregation looked together “toward the Lord”…. They did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another; but as the pilgrim People of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ who comes to meet us…. [A]common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord.
— The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 80-81.

Moving the altar cross to the side to give an uninterrupted view of the priest is something I regard as one of the truly absurd phenomena of recent decades. Is the cross disruptive during the Mass? Is the priest more important than the Lord? This mistake should be corrected as quickly as possible; it can be done without further rebuilding.
— The Spirit of the Liturgy, pg. 84

n St. Peter’s [Basilica], during the pontificate of St. Gregory the Great (590-604), the altar was moved nearer to the bishop’s chair, probably for the simple reason that he was supposed to stand as much as possible above the tomb of St. Peter…. Because of topographical circumstances, it turned out that St. Peter’s faced west. Thus, if the celebrating priest wanted–as the Christian tradition of prayer demands–to face east, he had to stand behind the people and look–this is the logical conclusion–toward the people…. The liturgical renewal in our own century took up this alleged model and developed from it a new idea for the form of the liturgy. The Eucharist–so it was said–had to be celebrated versus populum (toward the people). The altar–as can be seen in the normative model of St. Peter’s–had to be positioned in such a way that priest and people looked at each other and formed together the circle of a celebrating community. This alone–so it was said–was compatible with the meaning of the Christian liturgy, with the requirement of active participation. This alone conformed to the primordial model of the Last Supper. These arguments seemed in the end so persuasive that after the Council (which says nothing about “turning toward the people”) new altars were set up everywhere, and today celebration versus populum really does look like the characteristic fruit of Vatican II’s liturgical renewal. In fact it is the most conspicuous consequence of a reordering that not only signifies a new external arrangement of the places dedicated to the liturgy, but also brings with it a new idea of the essence of the liturgy–the liturgy as a communal meal.
— The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 76-77

In addition to the above, I add the following:

[T]he positive content of the old eastward-facing direction lay not in its orientation to the tabernacle…. The original meaning of what nowadays is called “the priest turning his back on the people” is, in fact–as J.A. Jungmann has consistently shown–the priest and people together facing the same way in a common act of trinitarian worship…. Where priest and people together face the same way, what we have is a cosmic orientation and also an interpretation of the Eucharist in terms of resurrection and trinitarian theology. Hence it is also an interpretation in terms of parousia, a theology of hope, in which every Mass is an approach to the return of Christ.
— The Feast of Faith (Ignatius Press, 1986), pg. 140

[T]he cross on the altar is not obstructing the view; it is a common point of reference. It is an open “iconostasis” which, far from hindering unity, actually facilitates it: it is the image which draws and unites the attention of everyone. I would even be so bold as to suggest that the cross on the altar is actually a necessary precondition for celebrating toward the people.
— The Feast of Faith, pg. 145

[A]mong the faithful there is an increasing sense of the problems inherent in an arrangement that hardly shows the liturgy to be open to the things that are above and to the world to come.
— Foreword to U.M. Lang’s Turning towards the Lord (Ignatius Press, 2004), pg. 11

As promised, we begin our analysis of St Lachteen’s Church at Donughmore, Co. Cork.

We begin with an interesting piece of information – the foundation stone. By now, it tell a story, as they say and most of the people mentioned on it will probably not want to know each other at this dyachronic point in salvation history.

However, the names of the archicts who must be made to take responsibility for this monstrosity are carefully recorded on it McCarthy Lynch. The Lynch mentioned here is our friend who has featured on the noteworthy iconoclasts thread – John “I should have been a liturgist” Lynch who seems to specialize in something like a Buddhist-auto-dissolve-into-nothingmness style, most completely seen in St Nicholas’ Church Killavullen, Co. Cork which he gutted and wrecked some years ago.

This is St Lacteen’s Church at Stuake, Donoughmore, Co. Cork in the diocese of Cloyne. It was built in 1999 and one of the architects involved in its construction is the local John Lync.h – whom we have featured before in his role as a member of the Cloyne HACK and who played a very interesting role at the October 2008 Ballincollig Conference organised jointly by the Chairman of Cork County Council, Cllr. Harrington from Bantry, and Bishop John Magee – whom he probably will not want to know just at the moment. Our would be liturgist friend, J. Lynch, also featured in relation to a buddahisation of the church of St Nicholas at Killavullen, also in Co. Cork.

The essay in church building at Donoughmore affords us a wonderful example of how NOT to build a church. It exhibits quite a number of half-baked pseudo theological “thoughts” couppled with others that are not baked at all and all held together by the sleek domesticization of a large family bungalow – one some times wonders whether these peole build anything other than bungalows.

Praxiteles is currently preparing a detailed study of St Lacteen’s which will be posted over the next few days and allow us the opportunity of either weeping or laughing at plain idiocy

Happy New year to all!

Oohh that is a nice terms and should be patented!!

BTW did anyone see the state of the interior of the church of the Holy Redeemer in Bray, Co. Wicklow on the midnight Mass broadcast by RTE on Christmas Eve? What a devastation on what must have been a rather nice neo romanesque church.

Meetings of the restoration committee continue amid the present Cloyne crisis and a number of HACK members have been encouraging the bishop to, it is rumoured, to stand his ground since we cannot have the newspapers appointing bishops!!!