Praxiteles

St. Mary’s Basilica, Minniapolis

It should also perhaps be remembered that the John Ireland who build St. Mary’s was born on 11 September 1838 at Burnchurch, in the parish of Danesforth, diocese of Ossory in Ireland. He studied in the minor seminary at Meximieux and at the College de Montbel in Toulouse before ordination for the diocese of St Paul in Minniapolis on 21 December 1861. From 1862-1863 he was a military chaplain. Appointed coadjutor of St Paul in 1875 he was consecrated on 21 December 1875. He succeeded to the See in 1884. He was promoted first Archbishop of St Paul’s in 1888. He died 25 September 1918.

A descriptive tour guide of St Mary’s is available here:

A new church in the Romanesque idiom:

The architect is Franck and Lohsen

http://francklohsen.com/#/portfolio/ecclesiastical/st-john-the-apostle/

New St. John’s in Leesburg, Virginia Respects Central Mystery of the Faith
by James P. Lucier

On October 2, under a beautiful and providential sky, St. John the Apostle Parish in Leesburg, Virginia, broke ground on its new, French Gothic-inspired church and fellowship hall complex. As the Most Rev. Paul S. Loverde, Bishop of Arlington in Northern Virginia sprinkled the holy ground, St. John’s schola sang a Latin Te Deum marking the culmination of years of effort by the parishioners to build a church large enough and worthy enough in which to worship. The building will seat a congregation of 1,100, and cost an expected $13 million.

“You need to have a building to have a living presence in the world,” said the bishop in his homily. “Go forth from the Real Presence so that you can become that living presence.”

There was an extraordinary run-up to this event. Fundraising for the new buildings began in fall, 2008, just as the nation began to slip into the worst economic downturn since the great depression. Even as the economy tanked, as millions nationwide were out of work and losing their homes, and as local area businesses ground to a halt, St. John’s parishioners pledged $9 million over eight months, so inspired were they by the vision of a mini-Chartres rising on a low hill on the edge of Leesburg’s historic district. No millionaires were available to underwrite the construction. The average pledge was nearly $9,000 per donor.

How did this happen? “God never compels our love,” St. John’s pastor, the Rev. John P. Mosimann, told the assembled crowd. “He never twists our arm. But he responds when our love is freely given.”

Sometimes fundraising efforts are divisive, but this one seemed to bring together the parish on a spiritual level. A campaign of prayer was considered more important than the campaign for funds. The congregation at every mass recited an especially composed prayer humbly begging for the success of the effort. A systematic solicitation of participation by prayer groups, school children, and ordinary parishioners recorded 1.86 million Hail Marys recited. As a result, the town’s notorious, obstacle-strewn process of obtaining engineering, architectural and historic district approvals—even detailed reviews of the number of trees that would be planted—seemed to melt away under Our Lady’s prodding.

Another reason for the success was the vision articulated by the appointment of a new, dedicated—and young—pastor, Fr. Mosimann. In meetings with parish leaders, it was decided that the new church must respect the central mystery of the faith–the Eucharist–and show the unity of the Crucifix, altar and tabernacle as the elements representing this mystery. The exterior of the new building therefore is cruciform, with a 130-foot tower and steeple, three front portals, a rose window, and a shorter tower linking to a separate fellowship hall with the same French gothic elements. Inside, attention is focused forward to the altar, located under a rood beam carrying a group of the crucified Christ, the Blessed Mother, and St. John the Apostle, the parish patron.

After interviewing a number of architects, the parish found what it wanted in the Washington D.C. firm of Franck & Mohsen. Although the firm never had a commission in the Arlington Diocese before, it has a reputation for classical design and has been responsible for important projects around the country such as the Franciscan Friary and chapel at Hanceville, Alabama, adjacent to the Monastery of Our Lady of the Angels. Michael Franck and Art Mohsen accepted the challenge of St. John’s.

In a special statement to newliturgicalmovement.com, the two architects explained their thinking. “So as to accommodate the large congregation, it was necessary to beak up the massing of the building both in plan and elevation,” they said. “This was achieved by the use of transepts, shrines, and the baptistery that are expressed on the exterior; and the towers, spires and a fellowship hall building to help mitigate the scale of the new church with the much smaller houses across the street.”

Another element underpinning the parish enthusiasm for the building program is the fact that “it looks like a church.” In other words, it reaches back into the long artistic and ecclesiastic tradition of Catholic worship to support the needs of modern Christians. Indeed, an earlier program to build a church stalled out after raising $4 million—far short of the needed goal. The plan of that building was oval, with seating that sloped down into a pit where the altar was located. The fundraising narrative described it as a “worship space.”

Franck & Lohsen raised a rhetorical question to a reporter: “Why shouldn’t it look like a church? Should it look like a gambling casino? It’s important for people who are going to church to experience something that is very different than their other experiences during the day, to transcend the immediate and to enter something that reaches upward toward the heavens. Contrasts of light and darkness, of low and high spaces, a hierarchy of spaces all help make this new church something different and unique.”

At the same time, Leesburg is a different and unique town. Founded in 1758 and named after Richard Henry Lee of Stratford Hall by his two sons, it is the county seat of Loudoun County, and boasts a fairly intact collection of 18th and 19th century buildings. The town is 35 miles west of Washington, D.C. Up until the 1960s the size of the county’s population was virtually unchanged from the first census in 1796. Thirty years ago, it was still a quiet agricultural center where the biggest businesses were the stockyard and the feed mill, and the genteel tone was set by a score of 19th century plantation houses, some of which are now held in public trust.

Then Dulles International Airport was built over the plantation of one of the Lee sons, and high tech industry moved in. AOL and MCI flourished long enough to build up a high concentration of highly educated IT engineers and other technical specialists. The global root server of the World Wide Web was established at an undisclosed location in the county. Hundreds of military and intelligence contract startups bloomed after 2001, as well as huge, but nameless government agencies. A new and larger branch of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum was built next to Dulles. A center for cancer and other medical research arose on the fields of Janelia Farm. Tens of thousands of houses were built on the green pastures. Loudoun County became the fastest growing county in the nation.

St. John’s original church was built on the edge of town in 1878 when the parish had 80 members. By the 1960s Catholics remained sparse in the county, and the parish still registered only 200 families. Now the number of families has passed 2,500 and is heading towards 3,000. A decade ago, the diocese bought Oakcrest Manor, a large estate across the street from the original church, and built a modest-size education building with a 500-seat hall, where five Masses on weekends and a Spanish Mass are still inadequate to prevent the need for people standing around the walls. The Manor, parts of which are believed to date back to 1790, sits in its own landscaped parkland filled with century-old trees. The new church faces on the north side of the protected parkland, incorporating it as its “front lawn.”

The 1878 Little Church was a humble wooden building built by local carpenters in the days before electricity came to town. In 1936, it was completely transformed by a wealthy parishioner into a version of a medieval French country church, with windows purportedly brought from France, half-timbered porches, statues based on the elongated proportions seen in the portals of Chartres Cathedral, a crucifixion group attached to the rood beam, wrought steel chandeliers in the shape of royal French crowns, and French folk-art motifs stenciled on the beams and pews. The Little Church is still used for two packed daily Masses, weddings, perpetual adoration every Thursday, and Mass in the usus antiquior, that is, the Latin Mass in the Extraordinary Form, on the first and third Sundays.

“The architectural style of the existing historical church,” say Frank and Lohsen, made it “appropriate to recognize that established tradition in the design of the new church.” Moreover, they added, “this timeless way of building helps to ensure that the new church will not look dated in a few years, and it is therefore both beautiful and sustainable.”

James P. Lucier is a journalist, editor and policy analyst who has been a member of St. John’s parish for 43 years.

Maynooth College Chapel:

Some further pictures of the College Chapel at Maynooth:

The Sanctuary floor of the College Chapel:

[Photographs: John Briody]

The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin: Volume 3: 1846 to 1848, edited by Margaret Belcher, Oxford University Press, £126.

Reviewed by Fr. Anthony Symondson, S.J.

One of the most remarkable feats of modern scholarship is Margaret Belcher’s edition of the collected letters of A. W. N. Pugin, the Victorian architect. Scrupulously edited and annotated, they are not only indispensable for the study of Victorian architecture and ecclesiastical life of the period, but reveal Pugin in his own, sometimes raw, words. The third volume (the longest so far) brings the record to 1848.

The years 1846-8 find Pugin at the zenith of his work and influence. His two major churches – St Giles’s, Cheadle, and St Augustine’s, Ramsgate – are finished; the first part of the House of Lords is open; and he makes his only visit to Italy. He also married for the third time. His bride, Jane Knill, brought happiness after four years of misery, poor health, and disappointment following the death of Louisa, his second wife, in 1844, leaving him with six children and the burden of running an expanding practice with little assistance.

Much of his correspondence was with the colleagues who executed his work. With Myers, his builder, Hardman, his metalworker and glass-painter, Crace, who executed his domestic furniture, wall paper and diapering, and, less so, Minton, his ceramist. Much of this correspondence is professional, associated with architectural projects, but some is personal and discloses the good terms of friendship established by Pugin with them; the same applies to his clients. Hardman took an interest in Pugin’s welfare, knowing how he drove himself, and it was he and Lord Shrewsbury who urged him to go to Italy for a month to recuperate after the intense exertion of working on Cheadle and the House of Lords.

This took place in the spring of 1847 and, predictably, Rome was vilified. This was ill-received and a vivid account was written by James Gillis describing the lamentable impression Pugin made. ‘Marshall the convert with whom he went about a good deal declares he was in perfect misery all-day long – Then he went out in the morning & was tortured by the Paganism of the churches here, at his hotel he was Encompassed by Protestants talking treason & scoffing at religion – That in the stir out after Sunset for fear of Stilletos – On one occasion he suffered his pocket to be picked without resistance in church fearing the revenge of the thief – but their crowning joke is their having found him at his devotions in the Confessional of St Peter’s & upon congratulating him upon being able to pray in so Pagan a temple, he assured them that he was returning thanks that there were 5 cracks in the cupola of the Church.’

‘Ever since I left Rome I have been delighted with Italy,’ he wrote to Lord Shrewsbury from Florence, ‘… I have seen 3 of the finest gothic altars in Christendom & one of silver about 12 feet high – as for the stained glass there is nothing so good on our side of the alps – & the sacristies are full of Gothic shrines reliquaries chalices &c. I am in a perfect mine of medieval art …’. If anything, his enthusiasm intensified in Perugia, Bologna, Venice and Milan.

Pugin met Newman in 1846 at a reception at Alton Towers after the consecration of Cheadle, in company with the massed ranks of clerical and lay Catholic leaders celebrating the revival of Catholicism in England. But, on practical grounds, nobody indighted Pugin’s reputation as a liturgical designer more than Newman. In 1848, after preaching at the newly-consecrated St Thomas’s, Fulham, he delivered the coup de grace on the efficiency of Pugin’s altars and the functional competence of his churches.

‘Mrs Bowden’s new Church at Fulham is very pretty,’ he wrote to Miss Giberne, ‘but it has the faults of Pugin. In details Pugin is perfect but his altars are so small that you can’t have a Pontifical High Mass at them, his tabernacles so low that you can scarce have exposition, his East windows so large that every thing is hidden in the glare, and his skreens (sic) so heavy that you might as well have the function in the sacristy, for the seeing of it by the Congregation.’ Pugin did not attend the consecration and came to fear Newman’s antipathy.

In Jane Knill Pugin found a ‘first-rate Gothic woman at last, who perfectly understands and delights in spires, chancels, screens, stained glass windows, brasses, vestments, etc’. She befriended his children, bore him two more, and, Myers confided to Hardman, made ‘the governor’, ‘Very Cosy … and as fat as a seal’.

Every few years an immaculate volume of Pugin’s letters is published by the Oxford University Press, sparsely illustrated in monochrome on art paper, which is a model of how letters should be edited and presented to the public. Three have appeared so far, volume 4 is promised next year, and more are expected to bring the record to the year of Pugin’s death in 1852. They are not only a monument of scholarship but, through the extensive footnotes, set Pugin’s life in the context in which he lived, devoid of bias. Not least, the Second Spring of English Catholicism is reflected as it actually was through Pugin’s engagement with the protagonists. Victorian studies as a whole owe Margaret Belcher a debt that will never be repaid.

From the City Journal:

Pascal Bruckner
Europe’s Guilty Conscience
Self-hatred is paralyzing the Continent.

Europe is not aging gracefully. More than half a century after it began taking the steps that eventually resulted in the European Union, it is at best a vast market without a consistent military or political personality—and one that matters less and less in world affairs. Henry Kissinger’s old witticism about Europe’s having no phone number is more
relevant than ever. What happened? One can cite a number of factors: the persistence of nationalist egoism; the excessive importance of the EU’s two major founders, France and Germany; Great Britain’s aloofness and readiness to follow Washington’s instructions; the imbalance created by the influx of former Soviet satellites. But more decisive than any of these reasons is that since the end of World War II, Europe has been tormented by a need to repent.

Brooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism), Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations that culminated in two global conflicts. The average European, male or female, is an extremely sensitive being, always ready to feel pity for the world’s sorrows and to take responsibility for them, always asking what the North can do for the South rather than asking what the South can do for itself. Those born after World War II are endowed with the certainty of belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable civilization that has dominated and pillaged most of the world for centuries in the name of the superiority of the white man. Since 9/11, for example, a majority of Europeans have felt, despite our sympathy for the victims, that the Americans got what they deserved. The same reasoning prevailed with respect to the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on London in 2005, when many good souls, on both the right and the left, portrayed the attackers as unfortunate people protesting Europe’s insolent wealth, its aggression in Iraq or Afghanistan, or its way of life.

Europe has surely engendered monsters. But it has, at the same time, engendered the ideas that made it possible to slay monsters. European history is a succession of paradoxes: arbitrary feudal power gave rise to democracy; ecclesiastical oppression, to freedom of conscience; national rivalries, to the dream of a supranational community; overseas conquests, to anticolonialism; and revolutionary ideologies, to the antitotalitarian movement. Europe sent armies, missionaries, and merchants to distant lands, but also invented anthropology, which is a way of seeing through others’ eyes, of standing at some distance from oneself in order to approach the stranger. The colonial adventure died of this fundamental contradiction: the subjection of continents to the laws of a mother country that at the same time taught its subjects the idea of a nation’s right to govern itself. In demanding independence, the colonies were applying to their masters the very rules that they had learned from them.

Since the time of the conquistadors, Europe has perfected the art of joining progress and cruelty. But a civilization responsible for the worst atrocities as well as the most sublime accomplishments cannot understand itself solely in terms of guilt. The suspicion that colors our most brilliant successes always risks degenerating into self-hatred and facile defeatism. We now live on self-denunciation, as if permanently indebted to the poor, the destitute, to immigrants—as if our only duty were expiation, endless expiation, restoring without limit what we had taken from humanity from the beginning. This wave of repentance spreads through our latitudes and our governments like an epidemic. An active conscience is a fine and healthy thing, of course. But contrition must not be limited to certain parties while innocence is accorded to anyone who claims to be persecuted.

The United States, despite its own faults, retains the capacity to combine self-criticism with self-affirmation, demonstrating a pride that we lack. But Europe’s worst enemy is Europe itself, with its penitential view of its past, its corrosive guilt, and a scrupulousness taken to the point of paralysis. How can we expect to be respected if we do not respect ourselves, if our media and our literature always depict us by our blackest traits? The truth is that Europeans do not like themselves, or at least do not like themselves enough to overcome their distaste and to show the kind of quasi-religious fervor for their culture that is so striking in Americans.

We too often forget that modern Europe was born not during a time of enthusiastic historical rebeginning, as was the United States, but from a weariness of slaughter. It took the total disaster of the twentieth century, embodied in Verdun and Auschwitz, for the Old World to happen upon virtue, like an aging trollop who moves directly from debauchery to fervent religious belief. Without the two global conflicts and their parade of horrors, we would never have known this aspiration for peace—which is often hard to distinguish from an aspiration for rest. We became wise, perhaps, but with the force-fed wisdom of a people brutalized by carnage and resigned to modest projects. The only ambition we have left is to escape the furies of our age and to confine ourselves to the administration of economic and social matters.

While America is a project, Europe is a sorrow. Before long, it will amount to little except the residue of abandoned dreams. We dreamed of a great diversity where we might live well, seek personal fulfillment, and, if possible, get rich—and all this in proximity to great works of culture. This was a worthwhile project, to be sure, and such a calm condition would be perfect in a time of great serenity, in a world that had finally achieved Kant’s “perpetual peace.” But there is a striking contrast between the stories that we Europeans tell ourselves about rights, tolerance, and multilateralism and the tragedies that we witness in the surrounding world—in autocratic Russia, aggressive Iran, arrogant China, a divided Middle East. We see them, too, in the heart of our great cities, in the double offensive of Islamist terrorism and fundamentalist groups aiming to colonize minds and hearts and Islamize Europe.

There is nothing more insidious than a collective guilt passed down from generation to generation, dyeing a people with a kind of permanent stain. Contrition cannot define a political order. As there is no hereditary transmission of victim status, so there is no transmission of oppressor status. The duty of remembering implies neither the automatic purity nor the automatic corruption of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. History is not divided between sinner nations and angelic ones but between democracies, which recognize their faults, and dictatorships, which drape themselves in the robes of martyrs. We have learned over the last half-century that every state is founded on crime and coercion, including those that have recently appeared on history’s stage. But there are states capable of recognizing this and of looking barbarism in the eye, and there are others that excuse their present misdeeds by citing yesterday’s oppression.

Remember this simple fact: Europe has vanquished its most horrible monsters. Slavery was abolished, colonialism abandoned, fascism defeated, and communism brought to its knees. What other continent can claim more? In the end, the good prevailed over the abominable. Europe is the Holocaust, but it is also the destruction of Nazism; it is the Gulag, but also the fall of the Wall; imperialism, but also decolonization; slavery, but also abolition. In each case, there is a form of violence that is not only left behind but delegitimized, a twofold progress in civilization and in law. At the end of the day, freedom prevailed over oppression, which is why life is better in Europe than on many other continents and why people from the rest of the world are knocking on Europe’s door while Europe wallows in guilt.

Europe no longer believes in evil but only in misunderstandings to be resolved by discussion and dialogue. She no longer has enemies but only partners. If she is nice to extremists, she thinks, they will be nice to her, and she will be able to disarm their aggressiveness and soften them up. Europe no longer likes History, for History is a nightmare, a minefield from which she escaped at great cost, first in 1945 and then again in 1989. And since History goes on without us, and everywhere emergent nations are recovering their dignity, their power, and their aggressiveness, Europe leaves it to the Americans to be in charge, while reserving the right to criticize them violently when they go astray. It is notable that Europe is the only region in the world where military budgets go down every year; we have no armies that would be able to defend our frontiers if we were so unlucky as to be attacked; after the Haitian crisis, Brussels could not dispatch even a few thousand men to help disaster victims. We are well equipped to calibrate the size of bananas or the composition of cheeses, but not to create a military force worthy of the name.

In its worst moments, Europe seeks peace at any price, even what Saint Thomas Aquinas called a bad peace—one that consecrates injustice, arbitrary power, and terror, a detestable peace heavy with vicious consequences. Europe postulates freedom for all but is content with just its own. It has a history, whereas America is still making history, animated by an eschatological tension toward the future. If the latter sometimes makes major mistakes, the former makes none because it attempts nothing. For Europe, prudence no longer consists in the art, defended by the ancients, of finding one’s way within an uncertain story. We hate America because she makes a difference. We prefer Europe because she is not a threat. Our repulsion represents a kind of homage, and our sympathy a kind of contempt.

What is the point of our bad conscience? To purge our faults and to avoid falling back into old errors? Perhaps. But it serves mainly to justify renouncing political action. If the Old World invariably prefers guilt to responsibility, it is because the first is less burdensome; so one puts up with a guilty conscience. Our lazy despair leads us not to fight injustice but to coexist with it. We delight in tranquil impotence, and we take up residence in a peaceful hell. We allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with words of blame, a role we willingly adopt so as to be accountable to no one and to avoid taking any part in world affairs. Remorse is a mixture of good will and bad faith: a sincere desire to close old wounds and a secret wish to be left alone. Eventually, indebtedness to the dead prevails over duty to the living. Repentance makes of us a people who apologize for old crimes in order to ignore present ones.

Europe has developed a veritable fanaticism for modesty, but if it cannot preside over the destinies of the whole world, it must at least play a part, retain its special voice in favor of justice and law, and assume the political and military means to make itself heard. Penitence is finally a political choice; it is to choose an abdication that in no way immunizes us against mistakes. Fear of repeating yesterday’s errors makes us too indulgent of contemporary outrages. By preferring injustice to disorder, the Old World risks being swept away by chaos, the victim of a renunciation mistaken for wisdom.

We long thought that Europe was the future of Switzerland. But what if the opposite were true? What if Switzerland is the future of Europe—what if we are threatened by Helvetization? In that case, our continent, aging and in decline, would be reduced to a high-class sanatorium—ready to be dismembered piece by piece by all predators and to renounce its freedom to gain just a little more quiet and comfort.

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher. He will be a visiting professor at Texas A&M University this autumn. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel.

While on the subject of liturgy, Praxiteles attention was drawn to the following article by Martin Mosebach, the German writer, which he delivered recently in Colombo, Ceylon:

THE OLD ROMAN MISSAL: LOSS AND REDISCOVERY
(by Martin Mosebach)

The history of the Holy Catholic Church is full of mysteries; and as well as good mysteries there are evil mysteries, The Apostle Paul speaks, significantly, of the mysterium iniquitatis, the “mystery of iniquity.” Down the centuries the so-called Theodicy—that is, the question “How can there be evil in a Creation that God made good?”—has constantly been bursting into flame. It is a question that comes from a profound unease, from a deep distress. St. Paul’s “mystery of iniquity” recognizes the distress caused by the existence of evil, but he absolutely refuses to give an answer to it. As for myself, I will not say whether the mystery of which I am about to speak is good or evil, or an inseparable mixture of both elements. Why am I reticent on this point? Each one of history’s great events has consequences that send ripples down the centuries, and these consequences are constantly changing their aspect. Something that is a curse in one century may turn out to be a blessing in a later century. But it is also the case that diseases can persist while their manifestations change.

These introductory remarks, I must admit, express a certain hesitation on my part. This is because I am deeply aware of the seriousness of my subject. I wish to speak to you about the tremendous upheaval in the Church’s history since the Second Vatican Council. For it was then that something entirely new happened: something that, until then, was unthinkable. Whenever a Catholic hears the word “new” in connection with the Church, he must always be on his guard. What is really “new” in the history of the world is the Incarnation, God’s becoming man; and this has already taken place. At the same time this Incarnation never ceases to present itself to us as something new: it is something so new that we cannot fully grasp it. It points ahead to a time after the end of times when the world will be re-created. It anticipates this new creation, but until then the Incarnation lodges in the world’s body like a annoying and irritating thorn.

Besides Jesus Christ nothing can be “new” unless it is totally saturated with him. On the contrary, anything that tries to modify, intensify, re-touch or re-vamp what has been revealed once-and-for-all will always remain doubtful and possibly even dangerous, however interesting and attractive it may sound. There is a cultural axiom that states, “Old things are best”: this is surely the experience of every culture, every civilization. Culture is necessarily connected with confidence in the tradition: culture consists in the expansion of a brief human life into the wide horizons of the past and the future. Culture gives people the opportunity to assimilate the experiences of earlier generations and to hand them on the future generations. Based on the experience of past generations, trees can be planted now so that, eventually, generations to come will be able to enjoy their fruit. What is old has proved that it can survive over many generations. It has not sunk into oblivion like things that are valueless and dead, but has demonstrated its fruitfulness over centuries or even millennia. As Goethe, the great German poet, observed: “Only the fruitful is true.” What is old and has remained a living reality can even be the visible form of truth in past and present.

Christians, however, have a further reason for holding fast to what is old and traditional. The Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ cannot be equated with belief in pagan myths, existing in the eternal present, not involved in history. Christians believe that the Creator of heaven and earth became man at a particular moment of history, in the early period of the Roman Empire and in the most despised province of that Empire. In the Creed, one of the most sacred Christian texts, Christians utter the name of the Son of God and of his holy Mother alongside the name of a mediocre and unsuccessful Roman provincial official. This was Pontius Pilate who, on account of his weakness, became associated with the work of Redemption. He owes his immortal fame to the will of the Fathers of the Council of Nicaea, who determined to make it a part of the Christian faith that Jesus was a historical figure. God became man, and being a man meant having a particular country, a particular language, particular traditions, and being born into a particular political and cultural situation. Jesus was a Jew and also a Roman subject. When his Church subsequently incorporated Jewish and Roman characteristics, it was quite literally continuing the Incarnation. And these perpetuation of incarnation is to be the Church’s mission until the end of time.

All Christians are therefore bound to look to the future, to the Lord’s return. But in order to know who it is who will return, they must look back into the past. And the “past” here does not mean the murky abyss of the earliest beginnings of the human race, but the decades of the reigns of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius. This was the time of those who witnessed the Lord’s glory and went to their deaths for the sake of their faith. And their faith was more a knowing than a believing. It is they who handed on the faith to us. No Christian priest and no Christian layman, giving a reason for his Christian faith, can give a greater or better explanation than that given by St. Paul when he says, “I have handed on to you what I have received.” In explaining their faith, Christians are part of a chain that links the present with the past. The bodily act of the laying-on-of-hands, which cannot be replaced by any kind of spiritualism, connects them with the Apostles of the earliest time. What we learn from them is that the presence of Christ is the life of his Church, and this does not come about by way of auto-suggestion, meditation or internal disposition: it occurs by means of the transformed figure of the Incarnate Christ as he passes by, blessing people by laying his hands on them, radiating miraculous powers from his clothes; as his feet are washed by the woman who was a sinner and as they are pierced by the nails; as he weeps for Lazarus and roasts a fish for his disciples. Jesus had taught his disciples that they were constantly to re-create his presence. And this presence was infinitely more precious than his teaching, because it contained not only the entirety of that teaching but far, far more: things that can only be approached through contemplation, not through intellectual comprehension. His Apostles were to become his instruments, making him present, present in the highest and most concentrated moment of his earthly life; that is to say, his sacrificial death on the Cross.

Early Christians knew as a matter of course that the cult bequeathed to them by the Lord was far more than a repetition of the Last Supper. They knew that the Last Supper was itself only a sign of the real work of redemption that was to take effect in his anguished death on the Cross. That is why they clothed this cult in the most sublime and beautiful forms of prayer and sacrifice that mankind had developed in the thousands of years before the coming of the Redeemer. These forms had no author; they were not devised by wise men: they arose from the sensibilities of all people who desired to worship the Divinity. Only one thing distinguished this new Christian sacrifice from its antecedents in all religions: in making present the sacrifice of Jesus, it was not so much the work of pious and religious men as the work of God himself. It was a work performed by God for the benefit of mankind. It was a work which men—even the most religious men—could not have done for themselves. They could come to it only by the grace of the Redeemer. This is a central axiom of Christian worship, without which it remains unintelligible: it is not a human work, and therefore must not be allowed to appear to be a human work. It must be seen to owe its origin not to the will of man, but to the will of God.For Catholics this should be beyond dispute. But we have to acknowledge that in many parts of the Catholic world, and particularly in the Catholic Church’s historical bedrock territory, this axiom is no longer taken for granted.

After this lengthy introduction I will now return to the developments that took place in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Something happened then that had never happened before. It was new. It was new in such a way that Catholics can only see it with fear and apprehension. I have tried to describe the Church’s relationship with her liturgy: for almost two thousand years the Church’s liturgy was accepted without question as the bodily presence of Jesus, the Head of the Church. It was the Church’s visible body. For a Catholic this visibility is not some subordinate quality: it is not subordinated to some higher, invisible world. God himself took a human body and even bore his wounds with him into glory. Ever since the God-man saw with our eyes and heard with our ears, our senses (which are by nature so easily deceived) are fundamentally empowered to recognize truth. As a result of Christ’s Incarnation the material world is no longer the realm of illusion: now, matter can again be seen for what it is: God’s thoughts, expressed in terms of the material world. This realization gave rise to the absolute seriousness with which the Church used to perform all the physical actions of the liturgy. Every gesture of the hand, every inclination of head or body, every genuflexion, every kiss given to sacred objects was performed seriously and deliberately. The candles, the vessels and the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine were handled with respect. The language in which the divine thoughts were expressed was regarded literally as an instance of revelation. Thus St.Basil the Great, one of the Eastern Fathers, expressly said that Holy Mass was just as much revelation as Holy Scripture. A small example will illustrate the Church’s attitude towards the world of things that she draws into her Sacraments (or did prior to the Second Vatican Council). In medieval times the Cistercians often used to engrave their gold chalices with the name of Mary: just as Mary’s body had carried the God-man, the chalice contained the divine Blood. In this way the whole story of salvation history came to a point in the objects used in the Eucharist. The Second Vatican Council expressly and emphatically repeated the traditional theology of the Mass; it solemnly recognized the sacred language and the sacred music (Gregorian chant, which hovers between West and East, not belonging exclusively to any one culture). The Council called only for a cautious revision of the liturgical books – the kind of revision that was usual every couple of hundred years or so, in order to prevent any misunderstandings creeping in. Let us remember what the Catholic liturgy had achieved up to this time. Beginning with Asia Minor it had conquered the Roman and Greek world. Ultimately it had triumphed in the pagan Empire, had witnessed the latter’s demise and had won over the pagan peoples of the North and East. It became the instrument of a missionary success that is unique in world history. How many historical disintegrations and revolutions did it survive! It expanded beyond the borders of Europe and came to

Asia, Africa and America, and everywhere it was initially something alien – to German and Irish people just as much as to Indians, Singhalese and Chinese. The Germans did not understand Latin, nor could they read, when the great missionary, Boniface, brought the Holy Mass to them. This remained the case for a long time, notably in the Church’s most brilliant periods, when the faithful felt that the most important thing in the celebration of Mass was not that every word should be understood, but that the presence of the Redeemer should be experienced. A man might understand every individual word of the Mass, but if he did not experience this presence, he understood nothing at all, strictly speaking. Revolutions caught fire all over the world, dictatorships mushroomed, only to collapse and shrink, but the Holy Mass remained always the same. To the whole world, Holy Mass tangibly represented the Church’s unchangeable nature down the ages. Even the Church’s enemies recognized that her strength lay in her untimeliness – that is, not that she was old-fashioned, but that she and her liturgy were not completely identified with any particular period or culture; she always had one foot outside time in every period of history. The liturgy was not celebrated in the present time butter omni saecula saeculorum, for all time since the world’s foundation, right up to the world’s end, and then in eternity. This eternity has already begun and is the gold-leaf background behind all historical times; it is against this backdrop that the liturgy – “The Marriage of the Lamb” as it is called in the Apocalypse – has always been celebrated and always will be.

I realize that I keep losing the thread of my discourse! The reason for this is that I am somewhat inhibited when I come to give an account of the unique event that has taken place in the Church. Of course I can give plenty of sociological, political and historical reasons for this event, which in its effects can only be compared, perhaps, with the hundred years of the Iconoclastic controversy in Constantinople, though Iconoclasm affected only a small region within the vast compass of the universal Catholic Church. But I find none of these reasons convincing. I believe in the Church’s supernatural essence: this means that I cannot be satisfied with any natural explanations for the Church’s triumphs and disasters. Consequently I refuse to guess or surmise the reasons that moved many reformers of his time to surrender the Church’s inherited treasure, her very heart, and draw up a new liturgy. This new liturgy was constructed out of elements of the old liturgy but, as Pope Benedict has said, it tends in a direction that is in many ways opposed to that of the old.

I have already said that this reform was totally unlike anything in the Church’s history. It was fundamentally new and novel and constituted a profound break with tradition. There was also something especially unfortunate about the reform as regards, not only the intention of the reformers, but the time at which it was introduced. For it took place in the fateful year 1968, a year that needs to be given more attention by historians. We give the name “axis years” to years when – without any obvious intellectual or political connections – similar ideas and religious movement spring up all over the world. For instance there are the years when Buddha was teaching in India, Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, Jeremiah in Israel and Pythagoras in Greece. It was as if all these events turned around a single world axis. And also 1968 was such an axis year. It saw the outbreak, throughout the whole world, of a revolt against tradition, authority and inherited values. In France the western world’s last patriarchal head of state, General de Gaulle, was toppled from power. In North America an apparently irresistible youth movement sprang up, making it impossible to continue the war in Vietnam. In Germany the traditional and highly efficient system of free universities was destroyed as a result of strikes. In Prague there was a revolt against the Soviet Union, and China saw the Cultural Revolution with its great devastation. In 1967 the new order of Mass was promulgated against the clear wishes of a synod of bishops specially summoned to consider the issue. It was the first Missal in the history of the Church to have been put together on the desks of academics and largely written from scratch. Now, however, the reform, which we could just as well call a re-invention, was dragged into the tornado of the 1968 Year of Revolution. At a time when the Zeitgeist [the spirit of the times] was utterly out of control, when every form of obedience, authority, respect and reverence was fundamentally rejected, this radical measure was to be implemented in the entire universal Church, from Rome to the most isolated Chinese catacomb community. And we must remember all the time that this measure was itself utterly contrary to the spirit of the Church. The result was that in many places, above all in Europe and the United States, but also in Latin America, it was as if all dams had burst. What was untouchable had shown that it could be touched. This meant that, from now on, there would never again be anything untouchable. From now on everything would be available, at will, to every generation. Everything was in principle available and amenable. [Everything was now “up for grabs”]

Pope Paul’s reform itself had weighty consequences, but the way it was carried out, particularly in most dioceses of Europe and the United States, trashed everything that, in the Pauline Rite, still had links with Catholic tradition. In this axis year, 1968, reform turned into revolution. It began with the liturgy. And here we can see liturgy’s central role in the Church: everything else, theology, the person of the priest, the hierarchical constitution of the Church, the everyday prayers of the faithful, the edifice of Catholic culture, missionary work, and ultimately even the core articles of faith, were intimately connected with the liturgy. With the liturgy they all stood or fell. The liturgy was not a historically conditioned form that could be replaced and adapted to everyday needs without doing damage to its substance. This should have been obvious even to people who mistakenly thought that love for the traditional liturgy was a morally dubious, a kind of religious aestheticism. Pastoral requirements had been cited as the strangest argument for the reform. A severely simplified rite, with vernacular prayers that were theologically general and unchallenging in tone, would surely help to keep modern people within the Church. Even this notion should have made people ask questions; in the mission lands of Asia, for instance, with their advanced civilization, people had been accustomed to extraordinarily rich rites in difficult sacred languages for millennia. To withhold Catholic tradition from them was equivalent to an act of colonialist paternalism. In the Christian heartlands, however, the reform’s simplifications had devastating consequences. When, in spite of much resistance, the reform was pushed through in a last exercise of power on the part of the Roman central authorities, the faithful began to pull out of the churches. As someone wrily observed, “The reform of the Mass was intended to open the Church’s doors to those outside; what happened was that the people inside escaped and ran away!” The solemn, hieratic cult was abolished, and the attempt was made, so to speak, to run after the faithful with the sacraments. But they declined this offer. In whole areas of Europe all understanding of the sacraments disappeared. The entire development was baffling: now that every word – allegedly – could be understood, the whole eucharistic event had become somehow alien to people. The Church’s great work of making God present no longer made sense. Simultaneously, knowledge of the Catholic faith withered away. Today, in Europe, there are many Catholics who can hardly say an Our Father, let alone a Creed. Many have only the vaguest notion of the Church’s teaching.

Terrible damage has been done to the Catholic priesthood in the wake of the reform. In the west the ancient awareness that the priest at the altar is acting in persona Christi has faded. The reformed [and refashioned] clergy has remodelled itself along fashionably democratic lines. It cannot bear the idea that the priest is homo excitatus a Deo (a man called out from among the crowd). A modern priest feels the distinction between laity and priesthood – a distinction found in the Acts of the Apostles – to be something deeply upsetting; he cannot deny this distinction, so he tries to forget it. Lay people invade the sanctuary, women act as altar servers (and in doing so they obscure the fact that acolytes actually belong to the lower ranks of the clergy). In Europe, generally speaking, priests have abandoned clerical dress. They no longer want to be recognizable; they find their role in a secularized society a source of embarrassment. In German there is an old saying, “The habit does not make the monk.” This is correct, but the opposite is equally true, and we have come to understand this in our time: “It’s the habit that makes the monk.” In other words, it is the harmony of outer form and inner attitude that makes the Catholic priest. He is meant to exercise his role in persona Christi in a bodily way: he should be visible and tangible to everyone.

Liturgy, leiturgia in Greek, means “public service” or “service to the public”. Liturgical prayer is contrasted with the prayer of the individual. The individual speaks to God in whatever language he knows and with whatever words he can, whereas the Church prays in the name of Angels, of Saints, of the souls in Purgatory and of the living on earth. This prayer of all and for all must therefore be shaped by a form that is open to everyone’s scrutiny. The western Church was afraid that there would be a widening gap between a religionless, libertarian consumer society and the world of faith; accordingly it tried to suppress everything that was specific to itself and might therefore give offence [be a stumbling block] in the secular sphere. It tried to support the modern world’s principles. As a result, as someone said, “it baptized ideas that had not been converted.” Forty years went by in this way and the western Church lost more and more clarity of profile, trying more and more obsequiously to adapt itself to the ideas of a religionless society. There is something mysterious and magical about these numbers. The People of Israel spent forty years wandering in the desert. The Communist occupation of East Germany with its puppet regime also lasted for forty years. [Forty years were spent “reforming” the Church;] and when these forty years were up, the fruit had ripened. It burst and spread its evil-smelling contents all around. I am speaking here of the immorality scandals that have shaken many of the Church’s western provinces. Of course we can say that in the present environment, which is hostile to the Church, the scandals have been maliciously exaggerated, distorted and generalized. But what the scandals reveal above all is a Church that is speechless and helpless, having secularized itself. Having shamelessly courted the public, it can no longer communicate its own being; it can no longer communicate its core reality. Forty years of aggiornamento, forty years of popularizing and secularizing the sacrament of the altar, have produced a catastrophe of the gravest proportions. This is no exaggeration. And as for those people who, right from the start, watched the secularization experiment with anxiety and apprehension, they are not saying smugly, “I told you so!” There is no satisfaction in being in the right when all of us are faced with this terrible collapse and the Church’s moral ostracism [banishment from society]. We realize that whole generations have been abandoned and lost, and that any reconstruction will be infinitely hard and laborious. The blood that has haemorrhaged from the western Church will take a very long time to replace.

There was a time before, in the Church’s history, when the faith began to shift its dwelling-place. It left areas in which had settled and won new territory elsewhere. Few Christians now live in Christianity’s original homelands, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor particularly – places where the young Church blossomed and the first important Council took place. Why should Christian Europe be any different? Christianity has traveled all around the world from its base in Europe. In Asia it may be as yet a minority, but a minority that is spiritually and intellectually strong, resolute and ready for sacrifice. It is a minority that is regarded with respect by the majority.

It is clear to me that the destruction of Catholic tradition did less damage in regions where it was not linked with the spirit of 1968. Though these reforms were plainly contrary to the Church’s tradition, it was possible, of course, to implement them in a spirit of devotion and with a heart that had been fashioned by this tradition. Furthermore, many of the most offensive infringements committed against the law of Catholic tradition were in no way rooted in Pope Paul’s reform. They arose from the disobedience that proliferated everywhere in the West as a result of the structural collapse during the pontificate of this unfortunate pope. Once Paul VI had begun to realize the extent of the destruction, he observed with great emotion that “the smoke of Satan had entered the Church.” The Missal of. Paul VI, for instance, did not order the altars to be turned round – one of the most grievous acts against the tradition of prayer in the entire world. Pope Paul did not necessarily want to put an end to the tradition whereby the priest, together with the faithful, faces the Crucified Christ, the Christ who is to come again from the East; nor did he want to suppress the tradition according to which the priest addresses his prayers, together with the congregation, to Christ, present on the altar in the form of the transformed [transubstantiated] gifts. This reversal of the orientation of prayer did more harm in Europe and the United States than all the relativizing, demythologizing and humanizing theologians. It struck the simple believer immediately that the prayers were no longer addressed to God but to the congregation. Now, the purpose of prayer was to put the congregation in the right mood, the right frame of mind so that it could celebrate itself as the “People of God”. Something similar happened when Holy Communion was given in the hand instead of on the tongue, as formerly. This change, also, was not foreseen in the Missal of Paul VI: it was enforced by some German bishops.

Prior to the changes a whole garland of reverent gestures had accumulated around the sacrament of the altar, and these gestures gave a most eloquent sermon, constantly reminding priest and people of the Lord’s mysterious presence in the [consecrated] Bread and Wine. We can be sure of this: no theological indoctrination on the part of so-called “enlightened” theologians did as much damage to the belief of western Catholics as did communion in the hand. It immediately abolished all the former precautions [care] with regard to particles from the Host. Is it impossible, then, to receive communion in the hand reverently? Of course it is possible. But once the etiquette of reverence exists and has had its beneficial, elevating influence on the consciousness of the faithful, it stands to reason that withdrawing the etiquette gave a clear signal (and by no means only to simple believers). What was this signal? That the earlier degree of reverence was not required. This in turn, logically, produced the conviction — a conviction not initially made explicit — that there was nothing present that might command respect.

As I have said, these things were the result of the baneful combination of the liturgical reform with the West’s political Zeitgeist. Absurdly, this “spirit of the age” demanded the democratization of Catholic worship, as if the Church were a political organization like a state or a political party. In Asia, by contrast, the Church’s growth, its Spirit-filled and charismatic power seems not to have been undermined by the reform; every Catholic must be heartily thankful for this. Where the fire burns, it can be given to others. It would not be the first time in the Church’s history that missionary territories had re-transmitted the faith to Christian homelands that had lost it. After the fall of the Roman Empire, France was re-Christianized by Irish monks, who in turn owed their Christianity to Egyptian missionaries. In this way the Christian law of mutuality was fulfilled, brothers strengthening each other in faith. But we must also remember the poet John Donne’s line, “No man is an island,” – in this sense: in the universal Church there are no Isles of the Blessed, no places that are spared the fortunes and misfortunes of the wider body in the long run. The crisis in the wider body of the Church will one day reach all its parts; we must be prepared and equipped for this. So regions that have not yet produced the symptoms of decay and debility [weakening] must ask what the causes of such decay were, and what can be done to forestall them. The attack on the inherited liturgy by the reform of the Mass remains a problem in the strictly philosophical sense of the word, because it has. created a situation that has no obvious solution. People say, “problems have no solution, only a history.” And this history of the problem of liturgical reform has only just begun. Even before his election, our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI was one of the very few bishops who knew that the radical break with tradition represented a great danger for the Church. Now, in his famous Motu proprio he has asserted that the Church’s Traditional Rite was never forbidden because, by its very nature, it could not be forbidden. The Pope is-not the master of the liturgy but its protector. The Church never forsakes its inherited rites, which it regards as a spiritual heritage. On the contrary, it urges the faithful to study them and make their hidden treasures available here and now.

The Pope had no intention of ignoring the past – a futile enterprise in any case – and pretending that the last forty years did not happen. He took a decision that was aimed, above all, at reconciling the reform party with the defenders of Catholic tradition. According to the papal statement there is now one single Roman Rite in two forms, the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary”. The two forms stand side by side in a relationship of equality. Either of these two forms can be celebrated by any priest at any time without episcopal permission. They are related to each other in such a way that the celebrant of the New Rite (the “ordinary” form) is meant to learn from the Traditional Form (the “extraordinary” form) how the Church’s tradition understands Holy Mass. The Pope has urged the Church to re-examine the old books of rites and learn, from the fathers and saints of past centuries, how to perform the solemn work of making God present. We are all summoned, then, to give thanks for the rescuing of the traditional Missal, which was almost lost, to open it – perhaps even at the eleventh hour – and read how the Church, and all those faithful people to whom we all owe our faith, used to pray. Perhaps we too can try to pray again as they did. We should not forget that this was the Missal of the Roman Popes; it was prescribed for the whole Church at the Council of Trent. Why? Because, with absolute certainty, it contained not a single error, nor even the possibility of any misunderstanding. In the great crisis of the Reformation it was regarded as a kind of spiritual Noah’s Ark for the Church, saving it from the Flood of universal apostasy.

Let us then rediscover the Psalm Judica, with which the traditional Mass begins at the foot of the altar, this unique preparation for the rite. We are summoned to leave behind our individual, everyday concerns, to turn away from the godforsaken world and put away our anxieties, cares and deep-seated doubts. We are to go up to the sanctuary of the Lord on the Temple Mountain. This Psalm invites us to Holy Mass as to a pilgrimage, in which we set out and leave behind everything that obstructs our prayer. Next the priest makes his confession of sin and the congregation listens to him in silence before praying for his sins to be forgiven. Then the congregation makes its own confession of sin to the priest. In fact, the confession of sin only makes sense in this dialogue form, because a confession needs someone to listen – and someone who, while listening, is not speaking at the same time. Let us rediscover the great Creed of Constantinople, which was formulated to clarify the Creed of Nicaea and ward off the errors of Arianism. Just like the Church when it was threatened by Arianism, we need again the profession of faith that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” In Germany, at least, this Creed has disappeared almost entirely from worship, as has the genuflexion at the central article of our faith, “et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine et homo factus est.” With wonder and astonishment let us read the Orations, especially those of the Sundays after Pentecost, many of which were composed by St. Jerome himself. They are masterpieces of rhetoric [oratory], formulating theological truths that nourish meditation even outside the Mass, and uniquely giving voice to the Christian relationship between God and man. One of the greatest losses in the reform of the Mass is the loss of the Offertory prayers, during which the veiled sacrificial gifts are brought to the altar and the sacred event of the Lord’s sacrificial death begins. These prayers come from earliest times; they speak, for the first time in human history, of the dignity of man, a dignity God gave to his creatures from the very beginning, a dignity that was wondrously renewed by Jesus’ sacrificial death. The Epiclesis, too, is of the greatest importance: in it the Holy Ghost is called down upon the gifts. The Eastern Church regards this prayer as having an essential effect on the act of transforming the gifts; but the Western Church, too, knows that it is the Holy Ghost who will bring about the miracle of transubstantiation. Then comes the Roman canon, which is still contained in the new missal, though it is prayed in only a few places nowadays. The Roman canon, listing as it does all the saints of the city of Rome, connects every offering of Mass with Rome, with the Pope and therefore with the universal Church. In this way those who share in the Mass come forth from their home countries and become citizens of Rome, members of the one Church that embraces the whole world. In one highly significant prayer the Roman canon links the present altar sacrifice with the sacrifices of all men at all times: with the sacrifice of Abel (representing revelation in its first form), the sacrifice of King Melchizedek (who was not a Jew and so represents the sacrifices of non-Jewish peoples) and the sacrifice of Abraham, which – in terrifying explicitness – anticipates the sacrifice of the Cross, this drama that is acted out between Father and Son.

I can give only the barest indication of the wealth of forms to be found in a ritual language that has undergone thousands of years of refinement. The old Missal is full of references and allusions, which only yield their meaning after decades of use. Its aim is to change the lives of the faithful. It demands life-long meditation. It is not an instrument for instant propaganda; rather, one must allow it time to penetrate the soul.

And what of the language of the Missal? The English-speaking faithful, at least, will soon be able to use correct translations that will replace the many very damaging simplifications and falsifications to be found [in the current English language missals.] Other nations, where modernist arrogance is more established, will have to wait longer for this. It is therefore all the more important for priests, as well as the faithful, to get to know the Church’s mother tongue, in which the Church’s teachings have been preserved in such clarity and conciseness. A sacred language has the advantage of being the language of no individual nation. We enter this language like entering a sacred building; it breathes a prayer that is more powerful than the prayer of the individual. It speaks a prayer that is pre-existent, that is there before us; we only have to associate ourselves with it, join ourselves to it. The Church we belong to is above time and above nations; and she is present in this sacred language.

It may be that the present crisis is presenting us with an opportunity: we should not allow ourselves to drown in pious routine but seek to rediscover the Church’s visible form, learn to love and defend it like a precious treasure that we thought had been lost: to our great surprise and joy we find it again, and realize – perhaps for the first time – that nothing can replace it.

On the Move

Landmark Church Survives the Wrecker’s Ball By Being Transported to Georgia

by JOSEPH PRONECHEN

NORCROSS, Ga. — All kinds of things happen to churches that close: If they’re not torn down they might be sold to different congregations or be turned into other types of facilities.

In Buffalo, N.Y., a historic church is being preserved in an unusual way — it’s being moved to an area of the country and an archdiocese where the Catholic population is expanding rapidly and booming with well over 900,000 Catholics.

If the plan works, St. Gerard’s will be the largest building in the United States ever taken down, moved and reconstructed.

The move to the Atlanta suburb of Norcross, Ga. — 900 miles away — is more than an engineering feat. It’s a testimony to preserving a magnificent church and using it for its original purpose: the worship of God.

Mary Our Queen Catholic Church in Norcross was founded in 1994 with 70 families. It now has 750 families but still uses its small, temporary church building.

Parishioners raised capital toward constructing a much larger permanent edifice. Desiring a traditional style that would incorporate elements saved from other churches, they had a prominent architect design it.

“Then we saw pictures of St. Gerard’s in the Buffalo Diocese,” said Father David Dye, pastor of Mary Our Queen. “It looked like the building the architect drew.”

Bill Harrison of Harrison Design Associates agreed.

St. Gerard’s, which was closed in 2008, is a one-third scale of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, one of Rome’s four major basilicas. The church is 144 feet long, 83 feet wide and 75 feet high. The interior’s 12 solid granite columns are 30 feet high and 3 feet in diameter.

Father Dye and Harrison traveled to Buffalo for a firsthand look at the church, which is named after 11th-century St. Gerard Sagredo, the first bishop of Hungary.

When Father Dye stepped inside, his eyes went immediately to the dome in the sanctuary, “and there’s the crowning of Mary,” filling the dome.

Father Dye, because of his parish’s name, took it as a sign.

He proposed buying the church and moving it to Georgia.

“I was totally amazed, thinking this was a bizarre idea,” recalled St. Gerard’s last pastor, Father Francis Mazur. “But when Father Dye walked into the sanctuary and saw Mary, Our Queen in the dome, he knew this was the building. I’m happy the faith of the founders and the testimony of the people who built that great church will live on 900 miles south. It’s a testimony of the strength of our Catholic faith, and our people here have supported this move enthusiastically.”

Saved by Relocation

Father Mazur describes the Italian Renaissance edifice, built of Indiana limestone in 1911, as “absolutely gorgeous.” It has an interior of travertine marble, ornate plasterwork, gleaming coffered ceilings, and 46 exceptional stained-glass windows. Along the walls the medallion portraits of the popes through Paul VI are depicted just as they are in St. Paul’s in Rome.

“This church is beautifully chaste and pure in its designs,” said Father Dye. “It’s very ornate, very Catholic, yet very simple.”

“We are preserving a building instead of knocking it down,” said Father Mazur. “People will still be able to reverence the sacred art and architecture in another place.”

Calculations showed that it would cost an estimated $40 million or more to build the new church according to the architect’s similar design, but to move and reconstruct this church would be around $15 million, considerably less cost.

When former St. Gerard parishioner and trustee Richard Ciezki heard St. Gerard’s would be saved, he first wondered if he was hearing right, then had “immediately a heart filled with joy that the church would be able to be used for the purpose it was originally built for,” he said, noting the faith and work of the German immigrants who built it.

Mary Our Queen parishioners like Mike Hickey, who with his wife, Susan, was a founding parishioner, were equally enthusiastic.

“It’s a masterpiece that needs to be saved,” Hickey said after visiting the church in Buffalo. “There was great detail attended to in building that church, and there’s no way to re-create it now. Even the acoustics are a choirmaster’s dream.”

Source: National Catholic Register

St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth

The College Chapel

The College Chapel in Maynooth is currently undergoing what appears to be a competent restoration. Much work has been done on the interuior and on the exterior of the radial chapels. One welcome feature of the restoration has been the removal of the awful strom glazing from the windows of the chapel – leaving them much more translucent when seen from within. Here are some photographs:

Longford Cathedral

From the Westmeath Independent
13 October 2010

Athlone’s St Mary’s is now a cathedral

St Mary’s Church in Athlone has been upgraded to a Cathedral, on a temporary basis.

At a Mass in the Church on Sunday last it was announced that it would now act as the “interim Cathedral” for the Ardagh and Clonmacnois Diocese while work is carried out to restore St Mel’s Cathedral.

The Longford building was destroyed by fire last December and Bishop Colm O’Reilly said this week that it would be approximately four years before the Cathedral would reopen. Speaking to the Westmeath Independent, Bishop O’Reilly stated that St Mary’s was the Church best suited to serve as a Cathedral in the absence of St Mel’s.

“Losing St Mel’s was a double loss in the sense that it served as a parish church and as a Diocesan institution. We were able to make alternative arrangements for the parish church, when a replacement was found last February, but we had to find an alternative place for occasions of Diocesan importance.

“I felt that St Mary’s in Athlone was best suited to serving that purpose,” he said.

The Bishop explained that occasions such as the blessing of oils during Holy Week in Easter would now take place at St Mary’s, “along with other events of Diocesan interest and importance.”

He added that a long-serving Bishop’s chair, which had been used at St Mel’s Cathedral from 1890 to 1975, and which avoided damage in the fire because it had been moved to his residence, would be relocated to St Mary’s Church in November.

“The chair is a link with the past. I expect that it will be relocated to St Mary’s for the first Sunday of Advent this year, and we will have a ceremony for that,” he said.

Discussing the renovation work at St Mel’s, Bishop O’Reilly stated that the walls of the Cathedral had been secured and a temporary roof had been erected. Much of the work over the coming year would involve a design team drawing up plans for the new interior of the building, he said.

Bishop O’Reilly confirmed in May that his resignation on age grounds had been accepted by Pope Benedict.

He said this week that his position as the acting Bishop for the Diocese would remain unchanged until his successor was appointed, and he didn’t know when that would be.