Praxiteles
Forum Replies Created
- Posts
And here is another example of what can be done when the right people are in charge:
The continuing restoration of St. Patrick’s Coleldale, Tasmania which is in the very competent hands of Brian Andrews.
James 1852!
Have you seen this recently built church in the diocese of La Cross in the USA?
Another example of the way things are moving in the United tates – despite what the oldie fogies like Kevin Seasoltz and Paddy Jobnes would have us believe.
This time the example is that of St. Theresa’s in Sugaland, Texas, in teh dicoese of Galveston-Houston.
Before:
After;
Fury as historic church gutted without permit
Share Digg del.icio.us Google Stumble Upon Facebook Reddit Print Email Text Size
NormalLargeExtra LargeLocals were disgusted when a 120-year-old Methodist church was partially demolished without permission on Jones’s Road, near Croke Park
Irish Independent
Thursday October 16 2008
Allison Bray
Gardai and Dublin city Council have both launched separate investigations into an incident that saw a 120-year-old Methodist church partially demolished yesterday without planning permission.
Gardai and Dublin City Council have begun inquiries into the incident at Jones’s Road near Croke Park in north Dublin which saw the church virtually destroyed, even though workers at the site were served with an order from Dublin City Council on Tuesday night to cease demolition immediately.
Furious neighbours rang gardai early yesterday morning when they were awoken by the sound of a JCB smashing through the church wall at 6am yesterday, despite being ordered to stop work the previous evening. A worker at the scene was allegedly seen running from the site when approached by gardai.
Officials from the council’s Dangerous Buildings Unit will be surveying the damage today to see whether the decommissioned church can be salvaged.
Last night Labour TD Joe Costello said the people responsible for the demolition of the Victorian-era church without planning permission should be made to reconstruct it.
He said area residents are disgusted by the brazen act which has all but ruined the local landmark regarded as “an architectural gem.”
The private owners of the land do not have planning permission to demolish the building or develop the land, he said.
– Allison Bray
Thursday, October 16, 2008Council to decide if former church must be rebuilt
In this section »
Waterford Crystal to shed 280 jobsDesmond case against ‘Irish Mirror’ allowedLocal residents Bill Byrne (left) and James Ryan at the Methodist Church on Jones’s Road, Dublin, which was partially demolished early yesterday morning without planning permission. The Garda was called to the site twice as attempts were apparently under way to begin demolition.Photograph: Alan BetsonKITTY HOLLAND FRANK McDONALD andDUBLIN CITY Council will decide today whether a former church in Dublin will have to rebuilt following its partial illegal demolition early yesterday morning.
A notice ordering the cessation of the demolition of the former Methodist Church and schoolhouse at Jones’s Road was issued on Tuesday night following complaints from local residents that demolition had begun.
The enforcement notice requires the owner of the structure to cease further demolition, to reinstate parts of the building that were demolished “by April 14th, 2009” and to reinstate the cast-iron front boundary railings.
John Reilly, buildings inspector with the council, said yesterday that despite the notice being issued, “apparently at about 6am this morning, the front of the building was attacked with a JCB. It is now unsafe and the priority has to be to make it safe, which will probably mean taking it down piece by piece”.
The Garda was called to the site twice on Tuesday night as attempts were apparently under way to begin demolition. There was concern last night the building would be a safety hazard as crowds passed it on their way to last night’s international soccer match at neighbouring Croke Park.
Mr Reilly said the structure was not a listed building, but since new rules were introduced in June, permission was required to demolish an industrial building greater than 100sq m. The building is about 400sq m. It dates back to 1881 and until a fortnight ago, was used as a leather-furniture salesroom.
He said planning permission for its demolition probably would have been granted, but an attempt had clearly been made to circumvent the process. Anthony Gannon of Meena Plant Hire, who was contracted to carry out the demolition, was at the site yesterday morning. He said his intention was to comply with the notice and had arrived on-site at 8am yesterday with council officers to assess how compliance would be achieved.
“And this is the mess that was here. I don’t know who did this,” he said. The front and left-hand side of the building had been razed. One JCB was visible inside and another adjacent to the building. He said he didn’t know who owned them.
A member of the Garda was at the site yesterday and the demolition of the front facade is now under criminal investigation.
Mr Gannon said he had not been able to get in touch with the owner. “I can’t contact him at the moment.” Attempts by The Irish Times to contact the owner were also unsuccessful. The plan for the site was to build apartments, Mr Gannon said.
Local Sinn Féin councillor Christy Burke said it was “nothing but thuggery and vandalism”. He said if the council deemed it necessary for the building to be taken down, it would be “playing into the hands of cowboys”.
© 2008 The Irish Times
And on a point of curiosity: are we correct in thinking that we have here an example of 21st century liturgy in a 21st century (domestic) sanctuary – the sort of thing that we can all look forward to as an answer to our deepest aspirations and desires?
The latest issue of the Journal of the Institute of Sacred Architecture can be found here:
This will give you an idea of what happened at Milwaukee Cathedral. Just note the usual old guff about a liturgical theology of the Second Vatican Council:
It is said hat every heresey eventually makes its way to Ireland – to die!
Well, ther may well be truth in this given the “liturgical” guru, Kevin Seasoltz’s latest expedition to Ireland and to the Ballincollig Liturgy/Heritage conference sposnored by Cork County Council. Indeed, some of the guff wheezing out of him would easily give one the impression taht he was well advanced in his house-hunting in Ireland.
Imagine, just when he is telling us that we should follow the hacker Wakelnad in Milwaukee and wreck the interior of Cobh Cathedral, we find that back home in the states they have recovered from the heresy of iconoclasm and we are beginning to find “restorations”.
One in particular is teh Cathedral of St. Patrick in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Here the original Hoigh ALtar has recently been restored to the chance of the Cathedral, a tabernacle has been brought back to the centre of the reredos etc.
You can read all about here:
And a revied of Aidan Nichols recent book on aesthetics from the same issue of the Journal Of Saced Architecture:
To Manifest Transcendence
Sacral Aesthetics
by Daniel McInernyRedeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics
by Aidan Nichols, OP
2007 Ashgate Publishing Company, 149 pages, 34.95Readers of this journal, passionate about the ability of architecture to “speak†the glory of God, have every reason to rejoice at this new publication by Aidan Nichols, O.P. For this is a book about the way in which the arts serve as epiphanies of divine transcendence and, above all, of Christ Himself. It is thus a book on a theme central to the continued renewal of Christian culture, rich in historical knowledge of Christian art and profound in its theological assessment of how that art magnifies the Lord. It is an exciting book for which the reader must be sincerely thankful.
In pursuing his theme, Fr. Nichols takes various “soundings,†or samplings, of what he calls in his subtitle “sacral aesthetics.†He is interested in the variety of ways in which Christian theologians and artists have reflected upon or put into practice the Christian artist’s mission to manifest the Beautiful. There are three kinds of soundings that Fr. Nichols takes, corresponding to the three parts of the book.
In the first part, Fr. Nichols sounds the theologies of art developed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, on the one hand, and in the Iconoclast controversies, on the other. In the second part he examines three twentieth-century theologians of the image: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pope Benedict XVI. In the third part Fr. Nichols turns to some difficulties involved in the actual practice of Christian art, taking up, first, the conflict in the last century involving the French Dominicans and the Journal L’Art sacré, and second, the uses made of Jacques Maritain’s Thomist aesthetics by the British Catholic artists Eric Gill and David Jones.
The first audience for at least some of these chapters was that of the scholarly book and journals in which early versions of the chapters first appeared. Thus the argument of the book often demands of the reader a fair amount of philosophical and theological sophistication, a demand made even higher by the fact that the style is at times overwrought. Yet even in its most demanding moments the book repays attention. The opening chapters on Augustine and Aquinas and on the Iconoclast controversies alert the reader to how long and how subtly the Church has pondered the meaning of art and the role of sacred images. It is fascinating to see, in part 2 of the book, how the ecumenical resolution in favor of sacred images proclaimed at the Second Council of Nicaea (787) was still being both critiqued and reformulated by theologians in the twentieth century. The chapter on Balthasar serves as a useful introduction to that writer’s disclosure of the artistic character of Revelation. The following chapter on the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov reveals Bulgakov’s attempts to place the resolution at Nicaea II on an even firmer theological foundation. The chapter on Benedict XVI discusses his argument that all sacred art takes its ultimate meaning from the Resurrection and the Second Coming.
The last part of the book focuses on practical applications of theological aesthetics involving thinkers and artists who are perhaps still unknown to many readers. The mistakes committed in the post–World War II era by certain French Dominicans anxious to make modernity relevant to sacred art serve as a sad preview of so much of what has happened with sacred art, not least sacred architecture, since that time. It is a fascinating but cautionary tale. The final chapter on Eric Gill’s and David Jones’s appropriations of Maritain’s aesthetics tells a happier story, showing us two artists who with no little success incorporated the insights of Aquinas as creatively thought through by Maritian into artworks that both reflected and criticized modernity.
The book’s conclusion is no perfunctory epilogue. It takes up the broad question: Why are the arts important? Fr. Nichols’s reply is that the arts serve to manifest transcendence. They do this by opening up larger questions of life’s meaning, questions that inevitably lead to talk about “a supreme rationale.†But at their best the arts go beyond even this; they serve as “a kind of epiphany of divine presence, of divine light.†In the final paragraphs Fr. Nichols beautifully links this understanding of art as epiphany with Christ as Work of Art: Christ realizes “those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends. Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesized with finite form, the cave-painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him though they realized it not.â€
Fr. Nichols ends with the suggestive claim that in order for the arts once again to make a substantial contribution to culture, they must be “baptized†in sacred settings, most of all in the liturgy: “In the modern West, the Muses have largely fled the liturgical amphitheater, which instead is given over to banal language, poor quality popular music, and, in new and re-designed churches, a nugatory or sometimes totally absent visual art. This deprives the wider Christian mission of the arts of essential nourishment.â€
This insight alone would be enough to send this reviewer, at least, to the rest of Fr. Nichols’ works.
Dr. Daniel McInerny is associate director of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.
A very ntresting article fromt he Journal of Sacred Architetcure which may help analize the iconoclasm which we have experienced in Irish church architecture and decoration over the past 40/50 years.
The Christian Scandal in Dialogue
A Return to Sacred Images
by Paul G. MonsonFor centuries, three signs have encompassed the convergence of cultures around the Mediterranean. The cross, the star, and the crescent identify the intermingling of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic civilizations. In our day, a fourth dominant sign has emerged, at least in the West. It is the sign of secular nothingness. This “sign†stands for the abolition of the other three, assuming a sort of immunity from them as it asserts itself as intellectually and culturally superior. It maintains that it is not only the culture but the one and only rational culture, a culture of the cult of humankind. In our postmodern age it has come to permeate human life, so that one often must straddle a cultural fence in schizophrenia, assenting to faith while functioning in a secularized society severed or a least hostile to religious influence.
On September 12, 2006, in Regensburg, an Italianized German called secularism’s bluff. In his address, Pope Benedict XVI pinpoints secularism’s false objectivity as it holds reason hostage and presupposes its incompatibility with faith. Moreover, Benedict calls the bluff of those within the Church who seek something similar in relegating religion to morals rather than doctrines. This he names a process of “de-Hellenization†or the eradication of reason from faith. His point is that, if there is to be any cultural dialogue not only among the sons of Abraham but also across the divide to the secular world, Christianity, for its part, must remain steadfast to its Greek integration of faith and reason, manifested in its conviction that God’s own reason and word, his logos, became incarnate as the Son of God.
Benedict’s speech was met with a cacophony of reactions, especially with respect to his use of a Byzantine emperor to articulate his point. Rarely, however, was the questions asked, Why a Byzantine? Surely another supposed bigot from another unenlightened era could serve a similar purpose. However, I believe there is something deeper lying underneath this figure. Indeed, the use of a Byzantine in an essay on de-Hellenization is, well, quite appropriate. Merely setting foot in the Hagia Sophia one awes at the Byzantine achievement of integrating faith and reason in communicating the human with the divine. As pontiff of the West, Benedict, I believe, was pointing to this “second lung†of Christianity as one not to be forgotten. Our lingering image of Byzantium is the triumph of its iconography, and it is this aspect of Eastern Christianity upon which I wish to expound.
Amid a sort of iconoclasm in the West in the past half-century, Christianity, or at least Catholic Christianity, has compromised its authenticity in abandoning or at least hesitating from its tradition of sacred images. Yet intercultural dialogue depends upon genuine respect, and respect comes not from obscurity but clarity to one’s identity. Thus, as the religion of the Incarnation, embracing the mystery of the logos assuming flesh, Christianity must uphold and restore the prominence of sacred images if is to gain credibility with other religious cultures and avoid appearing as just another façade of creeping secularism. Christianity is and should be a scandal among the three religious signs, embodying not just a sign, but an image of the invisible God who became incarnate, the splendor of the Father in Christ, the true Imago Dei.
In this article, I wish to identify iconoclasm as a particular aspect of the process of de-Hellenization within the Church and remedy it through a Byzantine approach. It is to make a case for the restoration of sacred images, i.e., icons, statues, mosaics, carvings, stained glass and paintings. My emphasis is a return to the creedal anticipation of the “resurrection of the body†as made manifest in our art, the mirror of our identity. Thus, we shall first examine the bizarre iconoclasm of our day, proceed to recall the theology of St. John of Damascus to free us from this quagmire, and thereby relate this to Benedict’s call for authentic dialogue.
The Confustion
About forty years ago, Loraine Casey walked into her small parish church in rural North Dakota to discover the high altar missing. It was simply gone. No warning, no reason, no discussion. For a woman who had prayed her whole life in front of the altar’s crucifix with its humble adornment of small statuettes, the absence of the church’s centerpiece, replaced by a bare sturdy table, was agonizing. The side altars were also missing, along with Mary and Joseph. The scapegoat for such an abomination became the faceless edicts of a distant “Vatican II,†which came to figure a sort of culprit in her mind.
From the Eternal City to this prairie outpost, the state of the liturgical reforms in the past half-century can only be described as utter confusion. The questions swirling around the removal of sacred images in the Catholic world, especially in the West, progressed from a dumbstruck “What happened?†to a more earnest “Why?†The answer concocted to both questions I call the “doctrine of distraction,†a pseudo-teaching that has become almost sacred itself. Its adherents maintain that sacred images are dangerous distractions from the Mass. They obscure the deeper spiritual meaning behind the Eucharist. Both little Johnny in the pew, as well as his father, get lost in the figures of saints and angels soaring above them, failing to concentrate on the ambo and the altar. A misinterpretation of the “noble simplicity†of Sacrosanctum Concilium became the license for a fresh coat of whitewash.Today little has changed. In 2007 we are not only confused but strangely bipolar. In the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, the cathedral’s interior directs one’s gaze to a magnificent baldacchino below mosaics of the sacraments. At the opposite end of the same boulevard, the new altar of the renovated seminary chapel purposely directs attention away from the apse frescos toward a new organ where once the portal stood. More often than not, church renovations trump restorations and continue to cleanse sanctuaries of statuary, paintings, altarpieces, and stained glass. Alcoves stand bare. Crucifixes, pietas, monstrances, and stations of the cross are remnants left for auctions and eccentric art collectors. Even in the erection of new cathedrals, bare, chic designs neglect thought of color and image. Almost everyone knows of at least one old gothic church razed for the construction of a cube (to use a Weigelian image). An inescapable discontinuity emerges between, say, St. Patrick’s in New York and Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Our architecture may be advanced, but do we advance our faith? We speak no longer of domus Dei but of a “gathering space.†The fear of the distraction from the Lord ’s Supper has ironically shifted our focus away from the heavenly banquet in the New Jerusalem to the guy sitting across from us. Do we worship in a house of God or a house of man for God?
Perhaps one could go further to ask, Is our age one of neo-iconoclasm? Some would contend that this is too severe. Regardless, contemporary Catholicism is at least iconophobic. It hesitates in fear of offending the doctrine of distraction. Although we have not gone to the extend of the imperial iconoclasts of the 6th century, smashing icons and torturing monks, the rejection of sacred images in past decades reeks of a similar elitism. Decisions to whitewash or minimize images, such as experienced by Mrs. Casey, are usually the incentive of a zealous pastor, an esteemed liturgist, or a forgotten committee, rarely the consensus of the parishioners. It is a top-down approach, the assurance that “we know better than you.†Oddly enough, Emperors Leo III and Constantine V took similar stances. The desecration of the apse mosaic of the Theotokos in the Hagia Sophia was, after all, an imperial decision. In the West, Charlemagne and the Libri Carolini adopted a similar, albeit less severe, position. Yet the notion of sacred images as the liber pauperum, the book of the poor, holds a significant degree of truth. Icons have always enjoyed the devotion of the masses over the learned. The icondules were irate monks, not court bureaucrats. So it is today that the cult of icons has caught our attention once again, as John Paul II notes this in his apostolic letter, Duodecimum saeculum (1987). Oddly enough, however, we do not know why they are good, why they should be loved, if they are to be venerated and not hidden in a closet. We need a reason for our faith tradition and its iconography. For this, let us turn to a Byzantine, St. John of Damascus, for a theology that, as Benedict asserts it should, inquires into the “rationality of faith†and provides an antidote to our iconophobia. Here I do not attempt to reinvent the wheel but rather point to the fact that the tire is flat, and St. John offers the method to patch the hole.
A Ressourcement to the Byzantine
In On the Divine Images, St. John of Damascus counters the ramped iconoclasm of his day. As a monk in Palestine, John encountered the abolition of icons in both the Empire and Islam. The iconoclastic controversy centered on a similar concern for distraction, only its focus was on the nature of worship. Let us recall the arguments of the iconoclasts. First, the prohibition of “graven images†in Ex. 20:4 is to be heeded. Likewise, Paul’s command to worship God in “spirit†(Phil. 3:3) points to God’s invisibility and incomprehensibility, whereby the spiritual is superior to matter. A true image, moreover, must have the same essence of Christ if it is to be venerated, which the icon certainly does not possess. Finally, icons tend toward the heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches, confusing and dividing Christ’s divinity and humanity in depicting one nature to the detriment of the other.In contrast, John constructs his apologia for icons upon Dionysius the Areopagite’s notion of creation as a theophany as well as St. Basil’s distinction that “the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the hypostasis [or person] represented.†John develops these theologies to lay the framework for the Second Council of Nicea in 787, articulating both a distinction of types of worship as well as insisting that the Christian must venerate icons in light of the Incarnation.
In regard to the iconoclasts’ first point, John asserts that God’s command was against idols and not strictly images, such as the seraphim of the ark. Likewise, with the coming of Christ, “we have received from God the ability to discern what may be represented and what is uncircumscript.†John’s argument echoes that of Benedict, that through Christ, God’s logos, Christianity is a religion of faith and reason, and reason helps direct our faith. In response to the iconoclasts’ second objection, John is not trepid but rather boisterous of his joy in the Incarnation:
[N]ow when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God.This leads us to John’s third counterargument, that there are “different degrees†of worship. One “bows down before†the icon – a proskynesis – that venerates the sacred image with the honor reserved for kings in Scripture, while absolute worship or latreÃa (adoratio) is reserved for God alone. Likewise, veneration of an image passes through to its “prototype,†that is Christ, the image of the Father. The icon is not a stationary block of painted wood; it is a window into heaven. The window, however, does not depict a human nature, but the person of Christ, the union of both his divine and human natures. The icon thus portrays not the nature but the hypostasis, the personhood of Christ as articulated at Chalcedon. All the more, in communicating the person of Christ, the icon is not only licit, but required. The Christian is compelled to worship the union through veneration of its image, for, as John quickly adds, “The man who refuses to give this image due…honor, is an upholder of the devil and his demon hosts…†Instead, the icon “brings us understanding†of the union and our salvation. It is indeed “necessary†for understanding the invisible, that we “are able to construct understandable analogies.†It is this understanding which leads to the reason behind our faith, which is to set us free in our worship of what we cannot see. Thus John exhorts us to, “Fear not; have no anxiety; discern between the different kinds of worship.†These words resonated at Nicea after his death.
Another man known to exhort the faithful to “fear not†is the late John Paul II, who revisited the iconodule triumph in Duodecimum Saeculum, marking the anniversary of Nicea in 1987. He insists that for Catholics, “Church art must aim at speaking the language of the Incarnation and, with the elements of matter, express the One who ‘deigned to dwell in matter and bring about our salvation through matter’ according to Saint John Damascene’s beautiful expression.†The Polish pontiff further advances the theology of icons as a needed testament to human dignity in a secular age:
The rediscovery of the Christian icon will also help in raising the awareness of the urgency of reacting against the depersonalizing and at times degrading effects of the many images that condition our lives in advertisements and the media, for it is an image that turns towards us the look of Another invisible one and gives us access to the reality of the eschatological world.
This eschatological world is none other than the communion of saints partaking in the same adoration of Christ. Paragraph 135 of the U.S. bishops’ Built of Living Stones states: “Since the Eucharist unites the Body of Christ, including those who are not physically present, the use of images in the church reminds us that we are joined to all who have gone before us, as well as to those who now surround us.†Sacred images provide the context for the Eucharistic feast, calling to mind the presence of something eternal. The Church is not only here but beyond.
Bavaria and Beyond
Benedict concludes his Regensburg address with an invitation to a dialogue of cultures based on an integration of faith and reason. What do sacred images have to do with cultural dialogue? If we pay attention to Benedict’s use of a Byzantine and his warning against de-Hellenization, both inside and outside the Church, then the tradition of images becomes essential to the face of Christianity in any dialogue, especially with other religions.We must ask the question, What have we inherited from Byzantium? Benedict’s answer is the marriage between faith and reason. In the West, he fears, this synthesis is being culturally submerged in a flood of secularism. Yet, if one were to point to an explicit borrowing of Byzantium, let us look none other than to the domes of the Hagia Sophia and St. Peter’s. Some architects postulate that Michelangelo adopted the Byzantine prototype for what became the largest dome of Christendom. Both ring out with the joy of the incarnation in mosaic iconography. Today, however, this intrinsic aspect of our religious identity has given way to an apologetic secularism within the Church in the form of iconophobia, a fear of displaying sacred images so as not to risk offending other religions. This is not a mere matter of ascetic tastes. Rather, confusion abounds in distancing ourselves from images, one that, at least according to Byzantines such as John, risks our understanding of faith, and thus the rationality of our faith. It furthermore threatens our very soteriology, a much greater risk. We loose sight of the creed, our fundamental belief in the resurrection of the body. We forget the goodness and reasonableness of creation. We forget that Christ came to redeem us in our entirety and that in his resurrection he makes creation anew. Art can convey this; bare concrete cannot.
At this point we come to the heart of the connection between an authentic Christianity and fruitful dialogue. What were those supposedly preposterous words of the Byzantine emperor again? “[N]ot acting reasonably [literally, without logos] is contrary to God’s nature.†As Benedict explicates, the emperor speaks of God’s logos, which means “both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication…†For the Christian, this is Christ. Our mission as Christians is to communicate this reason of God, and, in light of the Byzantine theology of John, we can justly see that the sacred image, literally, the eikon, serves this very purpose. We communicate the doctrine of the Incarnation and the redemption of creation through sacred images. Thus Benedict reminds us that “between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exist a real analogy.†This, moreover, extends to Christian worship, which he describes as “logic latreÃa – worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.†To be in harmony with the Word is to recall His Incarnation. Thus, this harmony is found in our faith in sacred images, communicating the reality of God’s logos incarnate, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Here we are brought to what Benedict calls an “encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion,†and based on the Incarnation, Christianity’s faith is enlightened through images.
Thus we come to a fork in the road, a choice between submission and scandal. If the Church follows secularism’s push toward a de-Hellenization, to an exclusion of reason from the divine, toward an unintelligibility of her faith, she cannot meet other faiths in “genuine dialogue.†As Benedict notes, secularism is incompetent of such dialogue, for “[a] reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.†Without images, we too are deaf to the divine and succumb to an empty, moralistic religion. We become a body without Christ. Unless we our authentic to our religion we cannot be authentic with other religions. We become hollow, like the cult of secularism, confused about who we are. Our sign, the cross, is to be more than a quaint plus sign; it is to be an intersection of faith and reason with the human and the divine. It is to be the scandal, in the words of St. Athanasius, that “God became man so that man might become God.â€
Paul G. Monson is a graduate student in theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
And another set of vestments from the sacristy of Halberstadt Cathedral in Germany. These are 16th century vestments and belong to the Cardinal Albrect von Brandenburg, Archbishpop and Prince Elector of Mainz.
@Praxiteles wrote:
A strong rumour has it that the Cloyne HACK is about to have a love-in with Cork County Council early in October. A telephone call to Cork County Council caused a certain blush with no very straightforward answers coming from that side of the house. Attempts to contact the HACK “chairperson”, John Terry, aka Alwahabi in Kanturk, have proved fruitless as he never sems to be at home.
Just in case anyone has forgotten, we re-print some fo the familiar faces fromt he HACK – especially as the season of long wintery nights is fast approaching and we might not want to run into these characters in the dark:
The following have all been sitting on the HACK:
1. Canon Séan Cotter, aged c.70 parish priest of Charleville.
2. Rev. Robert Forde, aged 85, retired parish priest of Milford.
3. Mr. Dick Haslam, aged c. 90, retired County manager for Limerick (1970-1988).
4. Mr. John Lynch, an architect based in Donoughmore and responsible for the wreckage of the interior and the palladian sancturay of Killavullen church and for its refitting in a style of blank buddhist anonymity.
5. Fr. Daniel Murphy, aged c.38, a liturgical “expert” who recommended the whole scale destruction of the interior of St. Colman’s Cathedral in a discredited document entitled Liturgical Requirements.
6. Mr. Peter Murray, aged 51,director of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork.7. Mons. Denis Reidy, aged 73, parish priest of Carrigtwohill, Co. Cork, and the real eminence grise behind the whole escapade to wreck Cobh Cathedral.
8. Canon John Terry, aged 76, parish priest of Kanturk, Co. Cork who is not known for his regular contributions to Appollo but acts as “chairperson” of the Cloyne HACK.
9. Mr. Alex White, aged c. 70, an architect better known for having built, among other things, some holiday cottages in West Cork.and on to this we have to add
10. Fr. Jim Killeen, guff-biter to the Cloyne diocesan communications office.
Below we have Top row (l to r) Jim “Guff-bite” Killeen, Bob “I’m a winner” Forde, and Danny “I’m a Liturgist” Murphy,
Second Row (l to r) Denny Reidy, Peter Murray and John “I didn’t do it” Lynch,Just a quick update on the state of the wreckovators swarming over Cobh cathedral.
And from the sacristy of the Siena Convent in Drogheda, the Kirwim chasuble dating from c. 1730. French silk probably form Lyons.
An altar frontal from the sacristy of the Domincan Convent in Galway. White French satin irish embroidery work in coloured silk and metal threads. It is the work of Sr. Margaret Joyce, OP, and was completed on 1 May 1726.
The central panel depicts Our Lady giving the rosary to St Dominic and St Catherine.
An altar frontal from the scaristy of the Dominican Convent in Galway -founded by the Nuncio Rinucini in 1642 – in white French satin with Irish handwork depicting the exhaltation of the Holy Cross. It dates from the early 18th. century. The lions and unicorns in the bottom section refer to the Messianic kingdom foretold by the Prophet Isaiah.
From the sacristy of the Poor Clare Convent in Galway, an altar frntal dating from the early 18th century, in French satin with irish handwork embroidery influenced in its iconography of the Immaculate Conception by the school of Saville, and ultimately by Juam Pacheo’s tract on painting whihc exercised an enormous influence on Sevillian painting of the 17 th century.
