Our Modern Churches: Lies Set in Stone
Like pouring gasoline on a raging fire, France's National Heritage and Architecture Commission has given the green light to the Archdiocese of Paris’s proposition to modernize Notre Dame Cathedral. With astonishing blindness to the March of Death of the Faith that the French hierarchy has launched in the past half century, they are redoubling their efforts to deepen the ruins. It seems they will not rest until only embers remain of the once glorious Faith of the Eldest Daughter of the Church. Their proposal for Notre Dame? Removing religious statues and confessionals and replacing them with “emotional spaces” and a “discovery tour” with a strong “environmental emphasis." The justification by the Archdiocese is that these changes would make the cathedral’s religious meaning more accessible. Even the Commission denied some of the Archdiocese’s requests in an open letter titled “Notre Dame de Paris: What the fire spread, the diocese wants to destroy.” It has come to this. Agnostic aesthetes must teach obvious lessons of religion to Catholicism’s religious leaders. Such absurdities would escape even the absurdist pen of Kafka.
This screeching anomaly was reprised in Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in Los Angeles, a zany liturgical dreamer’s paradise. That monstrous insult to holy religion was the brainchild of now retired Cardinal Roger Mahoney. In 1997 he proclaimed that he was attempting to “de-Europeanize” the sacred liturgy. That is liturgical mumbo-jumbo for further loosening the liturgy from the bonds of Roman tradition. “Europeanisations” include things such as kneeling, genuflections, and, of course, Latin. More generally, they mean gestures, words, and hymns that conventionally suggest reverence for the Divine. Quite a plan. These secularist henchmen recognize that Catholics receive most of the formation in the Faith from the Sacred Liturgy. Refashion that and one successfully refashions the Faith, and Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself! Hence, lex orandi, lex credendi. What is at stake in the spanking new Los Angeles Cathedral is that it doesn’t tell the truth. Not about God. Not about man. Not about the Catholic Church. It is a lie set in stone. Any Catholic not deeply disturbed by it should be deeply disturbed. Once more Chesterton had it exactly right when he wrote:
“The new theologians do not worship the sun or moon; they worship the clock... The put first things last."
From time immemorial, the traditional Roman form of the Mass has been under attack. For the Gnostics, it was too purely physical. For the Jansenists it was not pure enough. Our own century has produced a number of liturgical iconoclasts. Having suckled on the antinomianism of the 60’s, the now decide that rubrics and ritual laws hamper man’s unbounded elan. The externals of religion in general and liturgy in particular cramp their style. What’s inside is what’s important, they squeal. True enough, but that’s not the whole story. The interior state of one’s soul is indeed an interest that towers above all others. It is standard Catholic dogma that external practices can never substitute for interior grace. Interior grace, on the other hand, doesn't flourish without external actions. Our Lord, in fact, designed the sacraments to be external signs of the granting of invisible graces.
Those primordial sacramental signs have a mighty ripple effect. Every part of Catholic life imitates their divine pattern. Catholicism is never more itself than when it enlists physical things to manifest its invisible mystery. Thus, the ancient dogmatic principle apples: The invisible is seen in the visible through the physical. That’s why Baroque churches served her purposes so well. Their sumptuous complexity inebriates the senses and impresses upon the mind the supernal truth of Christ’s conquest over sin and His Kingly reign of grace. Angels do not require the heady lessons of the Baroque. Men do. Their body/ soul nature craves grace's fleshly epiphanies. Catholics should never be squeamish when the Faith announces itself to the world in lavish physical forms. After all, we daily bend our knees at the Angelus’ “et Verbum caro factum est” because the Son of God chose to save us through the visibility of human flesh. No Catholic ought to be sheepish with that divine logic. The incarnation demands that the church utilize splendid things for splendid truths.
To de-Europeanize the Mass is to replace magnificent forms with banal ones, even ones that de-Christianize Christianity. Though the Faith might remain intact, when its forms do not measure up to its glory, the Faith becomes a shadow. Cardinal Newman preached to this in his Plain and Parochial Sermons:
No one can really respect religion and insult its forms. Granted that forms are not immediately from God, still long usage has made them divine to us: for the spirit of religion has so penetrated and quickened them, that to destroy them is, in respect to the multitude of men, to unsettle and dislodge the religious principle itself. In most minds usage has so identified them with the notion of religion, that one cannot bear transplanting...Precious doctrines are strong like jewels upon slender thread.
Chesterton once remarked that the shimmering of Cardinal Manning’s scarlet robes struck his imagination as the Arabian Nights did, as signs of a glory beyond imagining. Yes, interior things only flourish in the soil of external things. That is why a nun in full habit is replete with interior invitations of grace without uttering a single word. A priest in a Roman cassock pierces the soul more deeply than ten brilliant sermons. So does the Pope in jeweled tiara or a cardinal in scarlet cappa magna. All signs of a glory beyond imagining.
What the deracinated liturgical nomenclatura fails to understand is that every Catholic Church is a book. In fact, so is every building made by man. They tell a story. Only art tells stories with the greatest and most arresting impact. After art is created, it creates. Winston Churchill pointedly commented, “After a man shapes a building, the building starts to shape us.” Buildings are not like lectures; they are more like songs, or should be. Their beauty leaps into our soul and teaches as no teacher can. They are like poems, not position papers. Each communicates meaning. Song does it ineffably and indelibly; a position paper does it efficiently but fleetingly. The old saying goes, “You can write a nation’s books, but let me write its songs.” Art stirs and moves and animates. It tosses man’s soul to and fro and makes sure that despite his enervating complacency, he sees things.
Churches make sure we see things. It makes us see the supernatural, and man is upended. In 987 Prince Vladimir of Rus decided he needed a religion for all the subjects of his empire. He dispatched emissaries to the Western city of Constantinople where they attended Holy Mass at the Hagia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom). Upon returning, the Prince asked what it was they discovered. The emissaries replied: “We entered Churches and it seemed as though we had stepped into Paradise.” With that, what is now present-day Russia embraced Christianity.
Every Church must be like stepping into heaven. Large or very small, rich or poor, Catholic Churches must possess grandeur, clarity, nobility, and, most importantly, the drama of the Faith. Since the Faith is changeless, there are certain architectural details and designs which bespeak that timelessness. Speaking idiomatically, one may call the congenial form “traditional,” and that would be unquestionably correct. Put more precisely, traditional architecture (Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo) possesses the architectural features necessary to bear the heavy depths of the Faith: height, breadth, light, shadow, shape, ornamentation, and solidity.
All of this permits the Catholic Church to teach both directly and indirectly, explicitly and implicitly. This double motion only occurs because Holy Church enlists the help of art. For instance, the Tabernacle is observed and understood to house the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. So far so good, but cerebral at best. However, when the Tabernacle is seen at the front and center of a splendid sanctuary, glistening in finely sculpted gold, flanked by candlesticks and standing behind seven hanging lamps, fire blazing, night and day, one not only understands the Mystery, he feels it. He not only nods his assent to the Doctrine, he trembles before its beauty.
Why? Because it is not only true, it is beautiful. Not only would an eminent philosopher instantly tremble, but also would any man who has not traded his humanity for the fashion de jour. For beauty is not elitist, it is democratic. If it needs to be explained, we are not in its presence. Beauty strikes with the swiftness of an arrow. Beauty is the swiftness; the arrow is the truth.
This same synergy accompanies all the architectural and artistic depictions of the faith: the Crucifixion, Our Lady, the Holy Angels, the Saints, the Confessional Boxes, and on and on. Each Church teaches the faith symphonic-ally. Just as a symphony combines diverse instruments and sundry notes to produce the effect of music, so every detail of architecture and Faith joins forces to produce the one single effect of closeness to God. With that proximity comes examination. God’s nearness evinces comparison. One cannot help but measure all of one’s life against the demanding will of God. Similarly, Churches generate contrition. They are unrelentingly existential not merely self-referential. Entering Chartres or Saint Peter’s in Rome leaves you in tears, not only because of its beauty, but because it houses our gracious God against Whom we are so often ungracious. Saint Augustine once preached, “If Christ were to come into this room and stand before you, what would you think? Not of Christ, but of yourself.” Churches compel that question too.
Sadly, very sadly, the new Notre Dame or Los Angeles Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels accomplishes none of these things for Catholics. In fact, it does not present the Faith; it distorts it. It doesn’t help Catholics to see; it makes it impossible to see. It excitedly embraces every modernist assumption about art, which is the mutilation of art.
But as they say, where there’s smoke, there's fire. There would not have been such a rush to this modernist architecture unless there was first a rush to modernism. How else to explain the new church’s absence of any traditional sign of Catholicism? Even the architectural details are designed to disorient: vastness as emptiness, light as blindness, sterile non-description as a deconstructionist nod to transgressive non-conformity. Even the scarce Catholic images which might manage a slight appearance are so attenuated as to create nonplussed confusion, not wondrous awe. It is axiomatic that devotion is an enemy of modernism; Notre Dame and Our Lady of the Angels will be a centuries-long confirmation of that. It is gutted Catholicism, nothing less than doctrinal meltdown.
Yet someday, perhaps in fifty years, a Sovereign Pontiff will send a new Bishop to the Sees of Paris and Los Angeles. He will be a Bishop after the heart of Borromeo and Bellarmine, Pius X and Leo the Great. After setting his eyes on Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral of 2002 he will quickly come to a decision. It must be torn down. And all the children of those benighted Catholics whose parents donated the $193 million dollars to construct this mistake will raise no fuss.
For a time of renewed common sense will have returned. God’s honor will be foremost, not man’s folly.
Originally Published in Latin Mass Magazine - Winter-Spring 2022
Father John A. Perricone is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Francis College (Brooklyn, NY). He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University (Bronx, New York). Numerous talks by Father Perricone can be found on our website www.KeepTheFaith.org. Father Perricone offers the Traditional Mass each Sunday at 9:00 am at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Jersey City.
[ Image credit: Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, Los Angeles, Public Domain, Wikimedia ]
