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From the City Journal, November 2010:
Anthony Paletta
Urban Renewal’s Human Costs
A history of postwar Manhattan developments shows the pitfalls of mass planning.
5 November 2010
Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, by Samuel Zipp (Oxford University Press, 488 pp., $34.95)Samuel Zipp packs into the title of his new book not only a pun about the atom bomb but also a direct mention of the Cold War. When a book that isn’t actually about the atomic project does this, it’s usually cause for alarm, a signal that sweeping generalizations about a “climate of fear†and the “military-industrial complex†lie ahead. Happily, Manhattan Projects is actually an excellent account of the process leading to the construction and clearing of land for four projects in postwar New York: the United Nations complex, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and several public-housing developments in East Harlem.
Zipp convincingly demonstrates that Cold War rhetoric played a significant role in these undertakings. Take the construction of Lincoln Center. George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, lamented that “the breath of one-party control blights the growth of genuine culture†and extolled Lincoln Center as an exemplar of the accomplishments of a free society. From a different quarter, Fortune publisher C. D. Jackson called cultural achievements “positive, dynamic, and essential assets in the great and dangerous international game that we must play today.†Lincoln Center, he assured the magazine’s readers, would be just such a “new, visible, artistically impeccable, majestic, cultural asset.â€
Arguments about the federal Housing Act of 1949—which provided federal support for slum clearance, the construction of new public housing units, and expanded mortgage insurance—came similarly couched in Cold War rhetoric. Zipp quotes Gerald J. Carey, the head of the New York City Housing Authority, who asserted that “public housing might not be the one weapon, or even the most important weapon, with which we will defeat Communism in general, or the Soviet Union in particular.†Carey went on to say that “the strength that comes from unity of purpose and equality of sacrifice is needlessly sapped†by objections to public housing. He asked: “Why then do we casually decimate a program that not only helps provide the decent shelter so necessary to our long-term strength and well being, but that also demonstrates our ability to democratically solve a difficult problem?†The Cold War mentality wasn’t confined to one side of the housing issue; Zipp notes that the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards described public housing as “the cutting edge of the Communist front.†Hyperbole in both cases, to be sure, but also a reflection of the publicity struggles shaping “renewal,†as large-scale urban redesigning was called.
Too often, historians examining New York’s struggles with urban renewal during the forties, fifties, and sixties simplify them into a story of Robert Moses’ hubris and comeuppance—or, a little later, into every preservationist’s favorite David-and-Goliath tale: Moses versus Jane Jacobs. The debate about Moses continues to play out, most recently with Kenneth Jackson’s part-apologia Robert Moses and the Modern City, a presumed retort to Robert Caro’s earlier, more damning The Power Broker. The past year has seen more of the same, with new books by Roberta Brandes-Gratz and Anthony Flint. These accounts all have something to recommend them, but as Zipp shows, they tend to diminish both the extent of support for urban renewal independent of Moses’ influence and the significance of grassroots resistance to it that preceded Jacobs’s famous Greenwich Village stand. Zipp documents public housing’s national underpinnings—most crucially through Titles I and III of the Housing Act, which, respectively, furnished funding to local development agencies to acquire and clear land and authorized the construction of over 800,000 new public-housing units. Without understating Moses’ importance, Zipp makes clear just how uniform support was for the large-scale model of urban renewal—and how blithely its potentially negative human consequences were dismissed.
While Zipp admirably situates New York urban renewal in the national and international context, the book’s greatest strength is its portrayal of the very local circumstances and consequences of these projects. It includes numerous newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, and poster illustrations surrounding the development efforts. Metropolitan Life Insurance’s photography of the 24-block Gas House District, demolished to make way for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, could hardly be more unflattering. The photographs, some taken in the grimy aftermath of a deep snow, show dilapidated tenements, jumbles of trash cans, and streets roamed by tattered children. In demolishing this, a New York Times editorial proclaimed, “the middle classes are all set for a smashing victory.†A left-wing paper, PM, offered a different perspective: photos of churches, shopkeepers standing in front of their tidy businesses, and residents who would be forced to leave the neighborhood.
The mass displacement of residents from these areas produced neighborhoods starkly richer or poorer than their predecessors, exacerbated racial divisions, and severed residents’ connections with the neighborhoods that they had inhabited. Zipp points to a June 1945 Community Service Society study that “determined that no more than 3 percent of the 3,000 Gas House District families would be able to afford Stuyvesant Town, and only about 22 percent would be eligible for public housing.†About 2,250 families had incomes too high for public housing but too low for Stuyvesant Town; they were forced to relocate to scattered corners of the city. Around Lincoln Square, a mixed-race, working-class community of over 7,000 residents was decimated; most of the neighborhood’s available housing was far beyond their economic reach.
In East Harlem, the George Washington Houses produced similar demographic stratification. “The project was open only to family units of two or more persons, so a large group of single adults had been eliminated,†Zipp writes. “The widows and widowers; bachelors and spinsters; single aunts, uncles, and cousins of neighborhood families; boarders, transients and other ‘free-floating’ people who had made up a significant portion of the neighborhood were not eligible for the project.†The number of children under age five accordingly doubled in number. Zipp continues: “In a pattern playing out all around east Harlem in areas where NYCHA projects were built, a mixed community of all ages with a small but crucial middle class was being replaced by a collection of young and poor families.â€
Only 9 percent of Washington Houses residents had lived on the project’s footprint previously. An astonishing 41 percent were refugees from other renewal sites—many compelled to take the only housing assignment they could find, far from traditional neighborhoods, including many Puerto Ricans fleeing the path of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Racial stratification increased. Those living nearby, whose incomes were often slightly too high to be eligible for the projects, began leaving the neighborhood.
Small businesses were another casualty. While residents in the path of the projects moved elsewhere, most businesses simply vanished. Minimal aid was provided in each case, almost always insufficient to sustain relocation. Six hundred businesses were located on the Lincoln Square development plot; federal law required a $2,500 reimbursement for moving and fixtures, but most businesses’ estimated moving costs were far higher than that. A 1955 study in East Harlem found that ten projects had put at least 1,500 stores out of business entirely, eliminating some 4,500 jobs. These were businesses that anchored their communities, helping create, as Jane Jacobs put it, “an urban neighborhood instead of a dormitory.â€
Zipp tells the familiar story of how mass planning produces mass stratification, bleaching variety out of the urban experience and crafting narrow and uniform enclaves: the middle-class wonderland of Stuyvesant Town, the cultural fortress and high-income housing of Lincoln Square, and the towering slums of East Harlem. Resistance was, on the whole, muted. It came from an assortment of neighborhood groups, most dismissed as parochial. A flyer that a Lincoln Square residents’ group printed in 1957 predicted: “We will have to hunt for apartments in the midst of a housing shortage—We will be forced to pay higher rents—Many of us will have to take smaller and poorer apartments—We will have to travel longer distances to our jobs—Many will be forced to move into worse slums, as has been the experience of displaced families in other areas.†All true.
Fortunately, enthusiasm for such large-scale efforts eventually declined as urban renewal’s human costs became apparent—and very apparently a miserable symbol of democratic decision-making in the Cold War. Yet similar impulses endure. While it is harder today to remove residents, there seem to be few obstacles to forcing out local businesses—whether from the site of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn or in the Bloomberg administration’s Willets Point redevelopment proposal. The lure of massive redesigns has diminished but not vanished.
Anthony Paletta is the senior editor of MindingTheCampus.com, a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University.
More on Tadao Ando:
who would you like to design something for?
I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.
I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources,
to move into the future.
although now we are more and more governed by the american way
of thinking, money, the economy…
I hope that now people will shift to a more european way (of thinking),
culture, individuality, and that people move towards new goals.
so for me to be able to contribute to this would be great.Full interview here:
On Tadao Ando:
Third impression [made by an Ando building] is the emptiness, because only light space surround the visitor in Tadao Ando ‘s building……The “enso”, which is mysterious circle drawn by zen-budhists and symbolizing emptiness, loneliness, oneness and the moment of englightment.
See here:
http://architect.architecture.sk/tadao-ando-architect/tadao-ando-architect.phpand here:
San Michele Archangelo, Anacapri near Naples
A superb exercise in decorative tiled flooring:
San Michele Archangelo was built in 1719 to designs by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro as part of a conventual complex. The church is to a central central plan with cupola over an octagonal floor-plan and six radial chapels with apses. The original baroque altars in painted wood and a choir gallery positioned over the vestibule at the entrance.
The magnificent tiled floor depicts the account in the book of genesis of Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden where the garden is portrayed in terms the messianic prophecy of the Book of Isaiah. It was manufactured in 1761 at Naples by Leonardo Chiaiese, a tilemaker from the Abruzzi, to designs drawn by the Neopoltan painter Francesco Solimena.
And another which may explain (if there be an explanation) the mess made in places such as St Nicholas’ Killavullen, Co. Cork by John Lynch:
Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space [Hardcover]
Jin BaekRoutledge; 1 edition (September 23, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0415478533This book explores the influence of the Buddhist concept of nothingness on Ando’s Christian architecture, and sheds new light on the cultural significance of the buildings of one of the world’s leading contemporary architects.
Specifically, this book situates Ando’s churches, particularly his world-renowned Church of the Light (1989), within the legacy of nothingness expounded by Kitaro Nishida, the father of the Kyoto philosophical school.Linking Ando’s Christian architecture with a philosophy originating in Mahayana Buddhism illuminates the relationship between the two religious systems, as well as tying Ando’s architecture to the influence of Nishida on post-war Japanese art and architecture.
An interesting book:
Stephen Semes:
The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation (Hardcover)
W. W. Norton & Company (November 9, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0393732443A review by: R. Hardy
Our cities have many problems, of course, but architect Steven W. Semes, who looks carefully at urban buildings and urban growth, sees the particular problems of preservation. He has detailed the history of those problems, the philosophies of their solution, and his own proposals for respectful progress in a beautifully illustrated book, _The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation_ (Norton). The great difficulty is that old buildings fall down or fall to desuetude, and are continually replaced by new ones, resulting in clashes of style. Semes, in a comprehensive historical text, shows that this is nothing new; Andrea Palladio himself in 1545 repudiated the Gothic style by cladding the medieval town hall of Venice with classical stone columns and sculpture. It looks all in place to us now after all these centuries, but no length of time will make Semes’s examples of modernist buildings imposed among older ones look fitting. It is the modernist imposition that Semes is trying to explain and oppose, although he repeatedly explains that he admires modernist buildings in their place: “This book is not an argument against modernism or in favor of classicism; rather, it is an argument for _continuity and wholeness_ regardless of style.” For those of us who are not architects, this might seem a tiny and particularized dispute, but not only is Semes’s argument convincing, it convinces the reader of the importance of the issue to the well-being of our cities.
Historical buildings, Semes demonstrates, can be thought of as documents of a time which have esthetic interest but little relevance to how buildings are now designed; or they can be considered living entities that can gradually be adapted for contemporary use while also providing examples for contemporary design. He proposes that a common ethic unite the “now disparate fields of architecture, urbanism, and historic preservation.” The essential reason he is urging a change in attitude is the century-long break of the Modern Movement, modernism that with “breathtaking speed and thoroughness” took over architectural practice, academics, and construction. There are beautiful modernist buildings, Semes agrees, but modernism deliberately rejects history and reverses principles of traditional architecture. Sensibly, he proposes “that the proper place for new modernist buildings is with other modernist buildings, not as interventions within historic districts.” There are different philosophies of how to bring new buildings into old. One which has been used for centuries is simply to replicate a building; copying a nearby building means inherently that the copy will fit the style around it, though Semes shows how this is to be done sensibly without infringing on the character of the original. Another way is to stay within an older style but invent within it. The Louvre and the United States Capitol were both originally old buildings that have been repeatedly added to sensitively because the architects kept to the ideas (not necessarily the measurements or the materials) of the original buildings. Less successful are new buildings that make references to their neighbors, by quoting a detail or by assuming identical proportions without assuming their style itself. Worst is the new building that deliberately opposes its older neighbors. On the cover of Semes’s book is a picture of the expanded Soldier Field in Chicago, showing the original classic Doric colonnade now dwarfed by the extended bleachers above them, as if it is being crushed by a huge flying saucer. The modern addition resulted in the original building losing its listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Semes also condemns the preservationists who think they are victorious when a façade of a building is preserved while the inside is gutted for contemporary use. Not only does this stress the superficial elements of historic architecture (Semes calls it “a crude form of architectural taxidermy”), but it represents “a narrow focus of preservationists on material fabric in disregard of a building’s formal design, structural integrity, use, interior space, or urban context.”
By the time one gets to the end of the book, the examples of “façadism” or the rectangular metal-and-glass structures abutting classical ones (and there are many examples in photographs here) look truly horrifying. Semes takes care, though, to present counter-examples, additions and new buildings that take into account what has gone before and what exists around them, good-looking places that promote neighborliness. The illustrations in this handsome book go a long way to show how correct Semes’s argument is, and how ugly can be the results of disregarding the past or insisting that contemporary architecture must be pure and untainted by previous styles. Semes shows that modernism is not the only modern style. The technical aspects of his argument need to be understood and followed by professional architects and preservationists; most of the lay public, which likes old buildings and neighborhoods, is already on Semes’s side.
Some examples of Spanish Romanesque churches:
San Pedro de la Nave near Zamora which dates from around 670:
The original as published by Sandro Magister on his blog Chiesa:
ROMA, 16 novembre 2010 – Tra due giorni uscirà nelle librerie italiane la nuova edizione ampliata delle memorie del cardinale Giacomo Biffi, 82 anni, milanese, arcivescovo di Bologna dal 1984 al 2003.
La prima edizione del libro, uscita nel 2007, ebbe una forte risonanza. Nella Quaresima di quello stesso anno Benedetto XVI aveva chiamato Biffi a predicare gli esercizi spirituali in Vaticano.
Di quel primo volume colpirono i giudizi con cui il cardinale criticava l’ingenuità di Giovanni XXIII, i frutti negativi del Concilio Vaticano II, i silenzi sul comunismo, i “mea culpa” di Giovanni Paolo II, e tante altre cose ancora.
Anche questa nuova edizione farà sicuramente rumore. Nel ripercorrere la sua vita, Biffi ha aggiunto nuovi capitoli e nuove riflessioni. Sempre col suo stile pungente, ironico, anticonformista.
Le pagine in più sono un centinaio, delle quali sono anticipati più sotto tre brani: sulle aberrazioni del dopoconcilio, sulla Chiesa e gli ebrei, sull’ideologia dell’omosessualità .
*
Ma c’è molto altro ancora di nuovo, in questa seconda edizione del libro.
Un intero nuovo capitolo è dedicato, ad esempio, alla “sfida della castità “, con riflessioni originali e sorprendenti sulla risposta cristiana – compreso il celibato “per il regno dei cieli” – alle teorie e alle pratiche sessuali dominanti.
Un’altra ampia “digressione” riguarda la concezione che il cristianesimo ha della donna, rivoluzionaria rispetto a quelle prevalenti in vari tempi e in varie culture.
Altre pagine rivisitano un papa molto criticato, Pio IX, con osservazioni acute sulle scelte lungimiranti da lui compiute.
Inoltre, da milanese purosangue qual è, il cardinale Biffi non tace sulle vicissitudini del rito ambrosiano, l’antichissimo e splendido rito liturgico in uso nella diocesi di Milano dai tempi di sant’Ambrogio.
Dopo aver seriamente rischiato di essere abolito subito dopo il Concilio, il rito ambrosiano è stato adattato alle novità conciliari con un imponente lavoro del quale Biffi è stato uno dei protagonisti, quand’era vescovo ausiliare di Milano.
Di recente, però, è capitato qualcosa che lo stesso Biffi ha già denunciato pubblicamente, e che così riassume nella nuova edizione delle sue memorie:
“A partire dal 2008, la serie dei libri ambrosiani ha cominciato a essere accresciuta dei volumi di un sorprendente lezionario offerto ai cultori della liturgia milanese.
“Vi si trova di tutto: archeologismi vani e talora anche forvianti; avventurose iniziative rituali; prospettive teologiche poco fondate ed equivoche; proposte pastorali senza buon senso e perfino qualche curiosa amenità linguistica.
“È un’impresa di grande respiro, audace senza alcun dubbio e ambiziosa: più audace che saggia, più ambiziosa che illuminata. Rimarrà viva a lungo nella memoria allibita della nostra Chiesa.
“Adesso possiamo solo affidarci alla speranza che un ‘opus singulare’ come questo non divenga il primo esempio di una nuova serie di testi liturgici, elaborati con analoga improntitudine e con lo stesso deplorevole risultato”.
*
Un altro riferimento alla diocesi di Milano è in un capitolo che il cardinale Biffi ha aggiunto verso la fine del libro, per confortare chi teme un declino o perfino una scomparsa del cristianesimo nel mondo.
Per mostrare che Dio “può sempre capovolgere a favore dei credenti le situazioni che si dimostrano più disperate”, Biffi porta due esempi.
Il primo è la nomina di Ambrogio nel 374 a vescovo di Milano:
“Dopo il ventennio di episcopato di Aussenzio, un uomo dalla fede inquinata, ammanicato con l’ariana imperatrice Giustina e docile strumento delle invadenze della corte nella vita della ‘nazione santa’, umanamente parlando nessuno avrebbe puntato un soldo sulla ripresa del cattolicesimo milanese. Ma venne Ambrogio e tutto cambiò. ‘Dopo la tarda morte di Aussenzio – scrive san Gerolamo nel suo ‘Chronicon’ – a Milano diventa vescovo Ambrogio e tutta l’Italia tornò alla vera fede'”.
Il secondo esempio è l’arrivo di Carlo Borromeo nel 1566 alla guida della diocesi:
“Nella seconda parte del secolo XVI, dopo il lungo periodo della irreperibilità ‘de facto’ dei pastori nominati (con l’episcopato, tra l’altro, dei due mondani prelati ferraresi, Ippolito I e Ippolito II d’Este) nessuno poteva decentemente sperare in un rifiorire della cristianità ambrosiana. Ma arrivò nel 1566 Carlo Borromeo, un cardinale ventisettenne, e incominciò la vera ‘Riforma cattolica'”.
Commenta Biffi:
“In ambedue i casi il ‘miracolo’ fu compiuto utilizzando le storture comportamentali degli uomini. La scelta episcopale di Ambrogio, un leale e abile funzionario imperiale, era nei piani di Valentiniano I per accrescere la sua inframmettenza politica nella vita ecclesiale. La carriera di Carlo Borromeo originava dal deplorevole nepotismo del papa Pio IV, fratello della sua mamma.
“È, ancora una volta, l’umorismo di Dio, che si diverte a ricavare il bene dal male. Come si vede, anche nelle stagioni più deprimenti, il popolo dei credenti può sempre guardare in alto, pregare con animo sereno e sperare”.
Sui vescovi di Milano degli ultimi trent’anni non una parola, in questo capitolo. Ma basta leggere l’intero suo libro di memorie per capire come Biffi li giudichi.
Per lui, l’epoca luminosa dei grandi vescovi di Milano del Novecento – eredi genuini di sant’Ambrogio e san Carlo Borromeo – si è conclusa con Giovanni Colombo. Mentre i suoi successori Carlo Maria Martini e Dionigi Tettamanzi non hanno affatto brillato. Dopo di loro, c’è solo da sperare in un altro “miracolo”.
*
Infine, un altro capitolo nuovo di questo libro del cardinale Biffi riguarda Giuseppe Dossetti, politico e poi sacerdote, uomo chiave del Concilio Vaticano II, personalità straordinariamente influente nella cultura cattolica degli ultimi decenni, non solo in Italia.
Biffi conobbe bene Dossetti, che viveva nella diocesi di Bologna. Lo definisce un “autentico uomo di Dio” e un “discepolo generoso del Signore”. Ma alla domanda: “È stato anche un vero teologo e un affidabile maestro nella sacra dottrina?”, la risposta del cardinale è no.
Un no molto argomentato. Che farà sicuramente discutere. Ma su questo http://www.chiesa tornerà in un successivo servizio.
Ecco intanto tre assaggi delle molte novità contenute nella seconda edizione delle memorie del cardinale Biffi.
__________
CONCILIO E “POSTCONCILIO”
(pp. 191-194)
A fare un po’ di chiarezza nella confusione che ai nostri giorni affligge la cristianità , è incombenza preliminare e ineludibile distinguere con ogni cura l’evento conciliare dal clima ecclesiale che ne è seguito. Sono due fenomeni diversi ed esigono un apprezzamento differenziato.
Paolo VI sinceramente credette nel Concilio Vaticano II e nella sua positiva rilevanza per l’intera cristianità . Ne fu un decisivo protagonista, seguendone con attenzione quotidiana i lavori e le discussioni, aiutandolo a superare le ricorrenti difficoltà dei suoi percorsi.
Egli si aspettava che, in virtù del comune impegno sia di tutti i titolari del carisma apostolico sia del successore di Pietro, un’epoca benedetta di accresciuta vitalità e di fecondità eccezionale dovesse da subito beneficare e allietare la Chiesa.
Invece il “postconcilioâ€, in molte sue manifestazioni, lo preoccupò e lo deluse. Allora con ammirevole schiettezza rivelò il suo accoramento; e l’appassionata lucidità delle espressioni colpì tutti i credenti; quelli almeno la cui vista non fosse troppo obnubilata dall’ideologia.
Il 29 giugno 1972, nella festa dei santi Pietro e Paolo, parlando a braccio, arriva ad affermare “di avere la sensazione che da qualche fessura sia entrato il fumo di Satana nel tempio di Dio. C’è il dubbio, l’incertezza, la problematica, l’inquietudine, l’insoddisfazione, il confronto. Non ci si fida della Chiesa… Si credeva che dopo il Concilio sarebbe venuta una giornata di sole per la storia della Chiesa. È venuta invece una giornata di nuvole, di buio, di ricerca, di incertezza… Crediamo in qualche cosa di preternaturale (il diavolo) venuto nel mondo per turbare, per soffocare i frutti del Concilio Ecumenico e per impedire che la Chiesa prorompesse nell’inno di gioia di aver riavuto in pienezza la conoscenza di sé”. Sono parole dolenti e severe sulle quali non bisogna stancarsi di riflettere.
Come è potuto succedere che dai pronunciamenti legittimi e dai testi del Vaticano II sia derivata una stagione così diversa e lontana?
La questione è complessa e le ragioni sono multiformi; ma senza dubbio ha avuto il suo peso anche un processo (per così dire) di aberrante “distillazioneâ€, che dal “dato†conciliare autentico e vincolante ha estratto una mentalità e una moda linguistica del tutto eterogenee. È un fenomeno che nel “postconcilio†affiora qua e là , e continua a riproporsi più o meno esplicitamente.
Potremo, per farci capire, avventurarci a indicare il procedimento schematico di tale curiosa “distillazioneâ€.
La prima fase sta in un accostamento discriminatorio del dettato conciliare, che distingua i testi accolti e citabili da quelli inopportuni o almeno inutili, da passare sotto silenzio.
Nella seconda fase si riconosce come prezioso insegnamento del Concilio non quello in realtà formulato, ma quello che la santa assemblea ci avrebbe elargito se non fosse stata intralciata dalla presenza di molti padri retrogradi e insensibili al soffio dello Spirito.
Con la terza fase si insinua che la vera dottrina del Concilio non è quella di fatto canonicamente formulata e approvata, ma quella che sarebbe stata formulata e approvata se i padri fossero stati più illuminati, più coerenti, più coraggiosi.
Con una metodologia teologica e storica siffatta – non enunciata mai in forma così palese, ma non per questo meno implacabile – è facile immaginare il risultato che ne deriva: quello che viene in maniera quasi ossessiva addotto ed esaltato non è il Concilio che di fatto è stato celebrato, ma (per così dire) un “Concilio virtualeâ€; un Concilio che ha un posto non nella storia della Chiesa, ma nella storia dell’immaginazione ecclesiastica. Chi poi si azzarda pur timidamente a dissentire, è segnato col marchio infamante di “preconciliareâ€, quando non è addirittura annoverato coi tradizionalisti ribelli o con gli esecrati integralisti.
E poiché tra i “distillati di frodo†dal Concilio c’è anche il principio che ormai non c’è errore che possa essere più condannato entro la cattolicità a meno di peccare contro il dovere primario della comprensione e del dialogo, diventa oggi difficile, tra i teologi e i pastori, il coraggio di denunciare con vigore e con tenacia i veleni che stanno progressivamente intossicando l’innocente popolo di Dio.
A very interesting piece published by Shawn Tribe on the new LiturgicaL Movement webpage, with regard to the former Archbishop of Bpologna, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi’s comments on the “spirit of Vatican II” – which we have come across on several occasions in the past:
by Shawn Tribe
Today on Chiesa, Cardinal Biffi again arises, but this time in relation to a book of his memoirs. In that book, published in Italian, one of the topics addressed is the matter of the postconciliar era, and the matter of the so-called “spirit” of the Council which has ignored parts of the actual conciliar documents on the one hand, over-emphasized others and also imparted certain things to the Council not to be found there. As Biffi notes it, it is as though a kind of “virtual Council” has taken the place of the actual Ecumenical Council.
As Biffi describes it, “The first phase lies in a discriminatory approach to the conciliar pronouncements, which distinguishes the accepted and usable texts from the inopportune or at least unusable ones, to be passed over in silence.
“In the second phase what is acknowledged as the valuable teaching of the Council is not what it really formulated, but what the holy assembly would have produced if it had not been hampered by the presence of many backward fathers insensitive to the breath of the Spirit.
“With the third phase, there is the insinuation that the true doctrine of the Council is not that which is canonically formulated and approved, but what would have been formulated and approved if the fathers had been more enlightened, more consistent, more courageous.”
Biffi concludes with what must be one of the take-home quotes, doubtless to be re-quoted from henceforth by many: “what is adopted and exalted in an almost obsessive manner is not the Council that in fact was celebrated, but (so to speak) a “virtual Council”; a Council that has a place not in the history of the Church, but in the history of ecclesiastical imagination.”
To which he adds: “Anyone who dares to dissent, however timidly, is branded with the infamous mark of “preconciliar,” …”
One cannot help but note today, that there is a growing chorus of critiques of this co-opting of the Council; of what we might even call the manipulation of the Council. This critique is not rooted in — as the rupturist school would like to spin it — a rejection if the Council, nor in a going backward, but rather in precisely an opposite motivation which aims to take possession of and enact the Council proper, understood both literally from it’s texts and implemented within the school of continuity that, while not opposed to developments, venerates our Catholic inheritance, traditions and identity.
Here is a section in translation from Biffi’s book, provided by Chiesa:
COUNCIL AND “POSTCOUNCIL”
(pp. 191-194)
In order to bring a bit of clarity to the confusion that afflicts Christianity in our time, one must first distinguish very carefully between the conciliar event and the ecclesial climate that followed. They are two different phenomena, and require distinct treatment.
Paul VI sincerely believed in Vatican Council II, and in its positive relevance for Christianity as a whole. He was one of its decisive protagonists, attentively following its work and discussions on a daily basis, helping it to overcome the recurrent difficulties in its path.
He expected that, by virtue of the joint effort of all the bishops together with the successor of Peter, a blessed age of increased vitality and of exceptional fecundity must immediately benefit and gladden the Church.
Instead, the “postcouncil,” in many of its manifestations, concerned and disappointed him. So he revealed his distress with admirable candor; and the impassioned lucidity of his expressions struck all believers, or at least those whose vision had not been clouded over by ideology.
On June 29, 1972, on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, speaking off the cuff, he went to the point of saying that he had “the sensation that through some fissure, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, trouble, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation. The Church is not trusted . . . It was believed that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the Church. What has come instead is a day of clouds, of darkness, of seeking, of uncertainty . . . We believe that something preternatural (the devil) has come into the world to disturb, to suffocate the fruits of the Ecumenical Council and to prevent the Church from bursting into a hymn of joy for having regained full awareness of itself.” These are painful and severe words that deserve painstaking reflection.
How could it have happened that from the legitimate pronouncements and texts of Vatican II, a season followed that was so different and distant?
The question is complex, and the reasons are multiform; but without a doubt one influence was a process (so to speak) of aberrant “distillation,” which from the authentic and binding conciliar “reality” extracted a completely heterogeneous mentality and linguistic form. This is a phenomenon that pops up here and there in the “postcouncil,” and continues to advance itself more or less explicitly.
We can, in order to make ourselves understood, hazard to illustrate the schematic procedure of this curious “distillation.”
The first phase lies in a discriminatory approach to the conciliar pronouncements, which distinguishes the accepted and usable texts from the inopportune or at least unusable ones, to be passed over in silence.
In the second phase what is acknowledged as the valuable teaching of the Council is not what it really formulated, but what the holy assembly would have produced if it had not been hampered by the presence of many backward fathers insensitive to the breath of the Spirit.
With the third phase, there is the insinuation that the true doctrine of the Council is not that which is canonically formulated and approved, but what would have been formulated and approved if the fathers had been more enlightened, more consistent, more courageous.
With such a theological and historical methodology – never expressed in such a clear fashion, but no less relentless for this reason – it is easy to imagine the results: what is adopted and exalted in an almost obsessive manner is not the Council that in fact was celebrated, but (so to speak) a “virtual Council”; a Council that has a place not in the history of the Church, but in the history of ecclesiastical imagination. Anyone who dares to dissent, however timidly, is branded with the infamous mark of “preconciliar,” when he is not in fact numbered among the traditionalist rebels, or the despised fundamentalists.
And because the “counterfeit distillates” of the Council include the principle that by now there is no error that can be condemned in Catholicism, except for sinning against the primary duty of understanding and dialogue, it becomes difficult today for theologians and pastors to have the courage to denounce vigorously and tenaciously the toxins that are progressively poisoning the innocent people of God.
For those interested in church salvage, here is a link to an extraordinary company in As Horssen in Holland, called Fluminalis, where almost anything can be found:
St Joseph’s Cathedral, Sioux City; South Dakota
Another work of Emmanuel Louis Masqueray who Built the Basilica of St Mary in Minniapolis, the cathedral is currently undergoing a re-reordering under the direction of Duncan Stroik:
http://www.stroik.com/portfolio/st-joseph-cathedral-restoration/
Sankt Rafael in the 21st Gemeindebezirk – Floridsdorf – in Vienna.
Praxiteles though the worst had already been seen as far as the nadir of western church architecture was concerned. However, such was not to be. Praxiteles attention has been drawn to the work of the Austrian architect Ottokar Uhl who, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, became to Austria and Franconia something of what Richard Hurley became to Ireland – a miopic visionary and prophet of ecclesiastical modernism.
What must be Uhl’s worst composition is Sankt Rafael in the Siemansstrasse in Vienna. It is, and has all the appearance of a pre-fabricated hutch. He describes it as a “demontierbaren Interimskirche”, something of a further degeneration of the concept of immediate post-war germany’s “Notkirche”. It was begun in 1963 and completed in 1964. Looked at by the unsuspecting by-passer, it has all the signs and appearance of a porta-loo. Fortunately, it has been abandoned as a “place of worship” and, in what may reflect the current state of Vienese Catholicism, it has not yet been dismantled.
Praxiteles is not sure whether it was folly or ironic Vienese hyperbole that caused Uhl to be awarded the Österreichischer Staatspreis für Architektur fur this junk box.
The Abbey Church of St Hildegard at Eibingen near Rudesheim in the Rheingau, re-founded by the Prince of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg in 1900, and a masterpiece of the Buerese school:
From the City Journal, November 2010
Anthony Paletta
Urban Renewal’s Human Costs
A history of postwar Manhattan developments shows the pitfalls of mass planning.
5 November 2010
Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, by Samuel Zipp (Oxford University Press, 488 pp., $34.95)Samuel Zipp packs into the title of his new book not only a pun about the atom bomb but also a direct mention of the Cold War. When a book that isn’t actually about the atomic project does this, it’s usually cause for alarm, a signal that sweeping generalizations about a “climate of fear†and the “military-industrial complex†lie ahead. Happily, Manhattan Projects is actually an excellent account of the process leading to the construction and clearing of land for four projects in postwar New York: the United Nations complex, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and several public-housing developments in East Harlem.
Zipp convincingly demonstrates that Cold War rhetoric played a significant role in these undertakings. Take the construction of Lincoln Center. George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, lamented that “the breath of one-party control blights the growth of genuine culture†and extolled Lincoln Center as an exemplar of the accomplishments of a free society. From a different quarter, Fortune publisher C. D. Jackson called cultural achievements “positive, dynamic, and essential assets in the great and dangerous international game that we must play today.†Lincoln Center, he assured the magazine’s readers, would be just such a “new, visible, artistically impeccable, majestic, cultural asset.â€
Arguments about the federal Housing Act of 1949—which provided federal support for slum clearance, the construction of new public housing units, and expanded mortgage insurance—came similarly couched in Cold War rhetoric. Zipp quotes Gerald J. Carey, the head of the New York City Housing Authority, who asserted that “public housing might not be the one weapon, or even the most important weapon, with which we will defeat Communism in general, or the Soviet Union in particular.†Carey went on to say that “the strength that comes from unity of purpose and equality of sacrifice is needlessly sapped†by objections to public housing. He asked: “Why then do we casually decimate a program that not only helps provide the decent shelter so necessary to our long-term strength and well being, but that also demonstrates our ability to democratically solve a difficult problem?†The Cold War mentality wasn’t confined to one side of the housing issue; Zipp notes that the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards described public housing as “the cutting edge of the Communist front.†Hyperbole in both cases, to be sure, but also a reflection of the publicity struggles shaping “renewal,†as large-scale urban redesigning was called.
Too often, historians examining New York’s struggles with urban renewal during the forties, fifties, and sixties simplify them into a story of Robert Moses’ hubris and comeuppance—or, a little later, into every preservationist’s favorite David-and-Goliath tale: Moses versus Jane Jacobs. The debate about Moses continues to play out, most recently with Kenneth Jackson’s part-apologia Robert Moses and the Modern City, a presumed retort to Robert Caro’s earlier, more damning The Power Broker. The past year has seen more of the same, with new books by Roberta Brandes-Gratz and Anthony Flint. These accounts all have something to recommend them, but as Zipp shows, they tend to diminish both the extent of support for urban renewal independent of Moses’ influence and the significance of grassroots resistance to it that preceded Jacobs’s famous Greenwich Village stand. Zipp documents public housing’s national underpinnings—most crucially through Titles I and III of the Housing Act, which, respectively, furnished funding to local development agencies to acquire and clear land and authorized the construction of over 800,000 new public-housing units. Without understating Moses’ importance, Zipp makes clear just how uniform support was for the large-scale model of urban renewal—and how blithely its potentially negative human consequences were dismissed.
While Zipp admirably situates New York urban renewal in the national and international context, the book’s greatest strength is its portrayal of the very local circumstances and consequences of these projects. It includes numerous newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, and poster illustrations surrounding the development efforts. Metropolitan Life Insurance’s photography of the 24-block Gas House District, demolished to make way for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, could hardly be more unflattering. The photographs, some taken in the grimy aftermath of a deep snow, show dilapidated tenements, jumbles of trash cans, and streets roamed by tattered children. In demolishing this, a New York Times editorial proclaimed, “the middle classes are all set for a smashing victory.†A left-wing paper, PM, offered a different perspective: photos of churches, shopkeepers standing in front of their tidy businesses, and residents who would be forced to leave the neighborhood.
The mass displacement of residents from these areas produced neighborhoods starkly richer or poorer than their predecessors, exacerbated racial divisions, and severed residents’ connections with the neighborhoods that they had inhabited. Zipp points to a June 1945 Community Service Society study that “determined that no more than 3 percent of the 3,000 Gas House District families would be able to afford Stuyvesant Town, and only about 22 percent would be eligible for public housing.†About 2,250 families had incomes too high for public housing but too low for Stuyvesant Town; they were forced to relocate to scattered corners of the city. Around Lincoln Square, a mixed-race, working-class community of over 7,000 residents was decimated; most of the neighborhood’s available housing was far beyond their economic reach.
In East Harlem, the George Washington Houses produced similar demographic stratification. “The project was open only to family units of two or more persons, so a large group of single adults had been eliminated,†Zipp writes. “The widows and widowers; bachelors and spinsters; single aunts, uncles, and cousins of neighborhood families; boarders, transients and other ‘free-floating’ people who had made up a significant portion of the neighborhood were not eligible for the project.†The number of children under age five accordingly doubled in number. Zipp continues: “In a pattern playing out all around east Harlem in areas where NYCHA projects were built, a mixed community of all ages with a small but crucial middle class was being replaced by a collection of young and poor families.â€
Only 9 percent of Washington Houses residents had lived on the project’s footprint previously. An astonishing 41 percent were refugees from other renewal sites—many compelled to take the only housing assignment they could find, far from traditional neighborhoods, including many Puerto Ricans fleeing the path of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Racial stratification increased. Those living nearby, whose incomes were often slightly too high to be eligible for the projects, began leaving the neighborhood.
Small businesses were another casualty. While residents in the path of the projects moved elsewhere, most businesses simply vanished. Minimal aid was provided in each case, almost always insufficient to sustain relocation. Six hundred businesses were located on the Lincoln Square development plot; federal law required a $2,500 reimbursement for moving and fixtures, but most businesses’ estimated moving costs were far higher than that. A 1955 study in East Harlem found that ten projects had put at least 1,500 stores out of business entirely, eliminating some 4,500 jobs. These were businesses that anchored their communities, helping create, as Jane Jacobs put it, “an urban neighborhood instead of a dormitory.â€
Zipp tells the familiar story of how mass planning produces mass stratification, bleaching variety out of the urban experience and crafting narrow and uniform enclaves: the middle-class wonderland of Stuyvesant Town, the cultural fortress and high-income housing of Lincoln Square, and the towering slums of East Harlem. Resistance was, on the whole, muted. It came from an assortment of neighborhood groups, most dismissed as parochial. A flyer that a Lincoln Square residents’ group printed in 1957 predicted: “We will have to hunt for apartments in the midst of a housing shortage—We will be forced to pay higher rents—Many of us will have to take smaller and poorer apartments—We will have to travel longer distances to our jobs—Many will be forced to move into worse slums, as has been the experience of displaced families in other areas.†All true.
Fortunately, enthusiasm for such large-scale efforts eventually declined as urban renewal’s human costs became apparent—and very apparently a miserable symbol of democratic decision-making in the Cold War. Yet similar impulses endure. While it is harder today to remove residents, there seem to be few obstacles to forcing out local businesses—whether from the site of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn or in the Bloomberg administration’s Willets Point redevelopment proposal. The lure of massive redesigns has diminished but not vanished.
Anthony Paletta is the senior editor of MindingTheCampus.com, a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University.
A course on Catholic Aesthetics at the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham
The information supplied, however, is rather scant when describing the course curriculum or bibliography and the recurrent emphasis on “holistic” is somewhat worrying:
Art, Beauty and Inspiration in a Catholic Perspective.
This part-time, distance-learning, one-year course explores the beauty and depth of visual art from a Catholic perspective. It introduces the riches of the whole Christian tradition and its continued inspiration in both the East and the West up until the present day, rooted above all in the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery.The course is for both practising artists and for those interested in art, including its role in Christian life, liturgy and catechetics. The course does not presume, nor require, any specific abilities or skills in art. Nonetheless, the course aims to stimulate and inspire a new wave of Catholic artists to create a new ‘epiphany of beauty’ in religious art, according to the vision of Pope John Paul II (see his Letter to Artists).
Included in this course is the role of art in liturgy and in catechesis, as well as how artists have drawn inspiration for their work in the light of grace, the daily life of the Church and the action of the Holy Spirit. The course explores the ways that visual art forms can reflect timeless truths and a holistic Catholic world view that can speak to the needs that today’s men and women have for beauty, goodness and truth.
This programme is characterised by a holistic approach which encourages students to draw together the personal, religious, artistic and intellectual dimensions of their lives into a coherent focus. It aims to unite theology and art so as to contribute richly to each person’s development.
Those completing the course successfully receive a Maryvale Certificate in Art, Beauty and Inspiration. It is intended that the modules taken will be credit-rated at undergraduate level.
Click here for application form
>
The use of the term “domus ecclesiae”, much loved by the more archaeologising varieties of the modern liturgist, is a term which Mr. Beeseley might wish to be careful of and most especially in applying it to pre-Constantinian church building. In literary sources, the term itself only appears in Eusebius of Caeseria (died 339) at at date not earlier than 313 AD.
On the origins of Christian architecture:
a recent thesis from the University of St. Andrew’s
Dedication of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona by Benedict XVI on Sunday, 7 November 2010
The homily preached at the ceremony:
Dear Brothers and Sisters in the Lord, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep. … The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Neh 8:9-11). With these words from the first reading that we have proclaimed, I wish to greet all of you taking part in this celebration. I extend an affectionate greeting to their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain who have graciously wished to be with us. I extend a thankful greeting to Cardinal LluÃs MartÃnez Sistach, Archbishop of Barcelona, for his words of welcome and for his invitation to me to dedicate this Church of the Sagrada Familia, a magnificent achievement of engineering, art and faith. I also greet Cardinal Ricardo MarÃa Carles Gordó, Archbishop Emeritus of Barcelona, the other Cardinals present and my brother bishops, especially the auxiliary bishop of this local church, and the many priests, deacons, seminarians, religious men and women, and lay faithful taking part in this solemn ceremony. I also extend a respectful greeting to the national, regional and local authorities present, as well as to the members of other Christian communities, who share in our joy and our grateful praise of God.
Today marks an important step in a long history of hope, work and generosity that has gone on for more than a century. At this time I would like to mention each and every one of those who have made possible the joy that fills us today, from the promoters to the executors of this work, the architects and the workers, all who in one way or another have given their priceless contribution to the building of this edifice. We remember of course the man who was the soul and the artisan of this project, Antoni GaudÃ, a creative architect and a practising Christian who kept the torch of his faith alight to the end of his life, a life lived in dignity and absolute austerity. This event is also in a certain sense the high point of the history of this land of Catalonia which, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, has given an abundance of saints and founders, martyrs and Christian poets. It is a history of holiness, artistic and poetic creation, born from the faith, which we gather and present to God today as an offering in this Eucharist.
The joy which I feel at presiding at this ceremony became all the greater when I learned that this shrine, since its beginnings, has had a special relationship with St Joseph. I have been moved above all by GaudÃ’s confidence when, in the face of many difficulties, filled with trust in divine Providence, he would exclaim, “St Joseph will finish this church”. So it is significant that it is also being dedicated by a Pope whose baptismal name is Joseph.
What do we do when we dedicate this church? In the heart of the world, placed before God and mankind, with a humble and joyful act of faith, we raise up this massive material structure, fruit of nature and an immense achievement of human intelligence which gave birth to this work of art. It stands as a visible sign of the invisible God, to whose glory these spires rise like arrows pointing towards absolute light and to the One who is Light, Height and Beauty itself.
In this place, Gaudà desired to unify that inspiration which came to him from the three books which nourished him as a man, as a believer and as an architect: the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture and the book of the liturgy. In this way he brought together the reality of the world and the history of salvation, as recounted in the Bible and made present in the liturgy. He made stones, trees and human life part of the church so that all creation might come together in praise of God, but at the same time he brought the sacred images outside so as to place before people the mystery of God revealed in the birth, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this way, he brilliantly helped to build our human consciousness, anchored in the world yet open to God, enlightened and sanctified by Christ. In this he accomplished one of the most important tasks of our times: overcoming the division between human consciousness and Christian consciousness, between living in this temporal world and being open to eternal life, between the beauty of things and God as beauty. Antoni Gaudà did this not with words but with stones, lines, planes, and points. Indeed, beauty is one of mankind’s greatest needs; it is the root from which the branches of our peace and the fruits of our hope come forth. Beauty also reveals God because, like him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity; it calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness.
We have dedicated this sacred space to God, who revealed and gave himself to us in Christ so as to be definitively God among men. The revealed Word, the humanity of Christ and his Church are the three supreme expressions of his self-manifestation and self-giving to mankind. As says Saint Paul in the second reading: “Let each man take care how he builds. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:10-11). The Lord Jesus is the stone which supports the weight of the world, which maintains the cohesion of the Church and brings together in ultimate unity all the achievements of mankind. In him, we have God’s word and presence and from him the Church receives her life, her teaching and her mission. The Church of herself is nothing; she is called to be the sign and instrument of Christ, in pure docility to his authority and in total service to his mandate. The one Christ is the foundation of the one Church. He is the rock on which our faith is built. Building on this faith, let us strive together to show the world the face of God who is love and the only one who can respond to our yearning for fulfilment. This is the great task before us: to show everyone that God is a God of peace not of violence, of freedom not of coercion, of harmony not of discord. In this sense, I consider that the dedication of this church of the Sagrada Familia is an event of great importance, at a time in which man claims to be able to build his life without God, as if God had nothing to say to him. In this masterpiece, Gaudà shows us that God is the true measure of man; that the secret of authentic originality consists, as he himself said, in returning to one’s origin which is God. GaudÃ, by opening his spirit to God, was capable of creating in this city a space of beauty, faith and hope which leads man to an encounter with him who is truth and beauty itself. The architect expressed his sentiments in the following words: “A church [is] the only thing worthy of representing the soul of a people, for religion is the most elevated reality in man”.
This affirmation of God brings with it the supreme affirmation and protection of the dignity of each and every man and woman: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple? … God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:16-17). Here we find joined together the truth and dignity of God and the truth and dignity of man. As we consecrate the altar of this church, which has Christ as its foundation, we are presenting to the world a God who is the friend of man and we invite men and women to become friends of God. This is what we are taught in the case of Zacchaeus, of whom today’s gospel speaks (Lk 19:1-10), if we allow God into our hearts and into our world, if we allow Christ to live in our hearts, we will not regret it: we will experience the joy of sharing his very life, as the object of his infinite love.
This church began as an initiative of the Association of the Friends of Saint Joseph, who wanted to dedicate it to the Holy Family of Nazareth. The home formed by Jesus, Mary and Joseph has always been regarded as a school of love, prayer and work. The promoters of this church wanted to set before the world love, work and service lived in the presence of God, as the Holy Family lived them. Life has changed greatly and with it enormous progress has been made in the technical, social and cultural spheres. We cannot simply remain content with these advances. Alongside them, there also need to be moral advances, such as in care, protection and assistance to families, inasmuch as the generous and indissoluble love of a man and a woman is the effective context and foundation of human life in its gestation, birth, growth and natural end. Only where love and faithfulness are present can true freedom come to birth and endure. For this reason the Church advocates adequate economic and social means so that women may find in the home and at work their full development, that men and women who contract marriage and form a family receive decisive support from the state, that life of children may be defended as sacred and inviolable from the moment of their conception, that the reality of birth be given due respect and receive juridical, social and legislative support. For this reason the Church resists every form of denial of human life and gives its support to everything that would promote the natural order in the sphere of the institution of the family.
As I contemplate with admiration this sacred space of marvellous beauty, of so much faith-filled history, I ask God that in the land of Catalonia new witnesses of holiness may rise up and flourish, and present to the world the great service that the Church can and must offer to humanity: to be an icon of divine beauty, a burning flame of charity, a path so that the world may believe in the One whom God has sent (cf. Jn 6:29).
Dear brothers and sisters, as I dedicate this splendid church, I implore the Lord of our lives that, from this altar, which will now be anointed with holy oil and upon which the sacrifice of the love of Christ will be consumed, there may be a flood of grace and charity upon the city of Barcelona and its people, and upon the whole world. May these fruitful waters fill with faith and apostolic vitality this archdiocesan Church, its pastors and its faithful.Finally, I wish to commend to the loving protection of the Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, April Rose, Mother of Mercy, all who enter here and all who in word or deed, in silence and prayer, have made this possible this marvel of architecture. May Our Lady present to her divine Son the joys and tribulations of all who come in the future to this sacred place so that here, as the Church prays when dedicating religious buildings, the poor may find mercy, the oppressed true freedom and all men may take on the dignity of the children of God. Amen.
