New churches: A trend to the traditional

National Catholic Register:

When the monks of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel wanted to design a new church for their Wyoming home, they turned to a building style just as ancient as the 800-year-old Carmelite order itself — Gothic architecture. Designed by Jim McCrery of McCrery Architects in Washington, D.C., its plans call for towering spires, flying buttresses, twin bell towers, wooden trusses, rose windows and more of what typically might be found in Europe’s greatest spaces of worship.

The monks are not alone. Parishes and religious orders across the United States also are turning to traditional design for new churches and renovations.

Anglican Catholic Our Lady of Walsingham Church near Houston built in 2003

“That is an enormous change from 10 years ago,” said architect Ethan Anthony of HDB/Cram & Ferguson Architects of Concord, Mass. “I’ve seen it go from nobody even thinking about this to it becoming kind of a cause. It’s a big deal things are happening.”

The trend pushes against the modernist architecture that frequently typified church construction in the second half of the 1900s — and returns to design seen in the first half of that century. In the United States, traditional architecture gave rise to churches such as St. Florian in Hamtramck, Mich. Built with a penny campaign and dedicated in 1928, it is a “most spectacularly huge,” Gothic church, according to Anthony.

It is as much statement as it is stature. St. Florian was designed by renowned Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram (a founder of Anthony‘s firm). The St. Florian website notes that “Cram rebelled against the hard-nosed social Darwinism of the Industrial Age and sought to reclaim the beauty and spiritual values of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages.”

Not long thereafter, though, such churches became a thing of the past.

 St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Farragut, Tennessee built 2008

First the Depression strapped parishes and put church construction projects on hold, Anthony said. World War II caused another interruption, and Anthony said men returned from the war “really in love with science.” That, he added, coincided with “a huge secularization, even in the Catholic Church.”

Architecture, meanwhile, began to emphasize “basic, simple, modern, straightforward” design. More changes were sparked by Vatican II, especially the document addressing art in churches, Sacrosanctum Concilium. That document, though primarily about the reform of the liturgy, also spoke about church architecture. Some church designers, though, went farther than the document itself.

“People within the various dioceses in the United States seized up on that because they wanted to promote modern architecture in the Catholic Church and said, ‘Well, Vatican II said we have to tear out all this old furniture because it’s old,’” Anthony said. “What a terrible destruction happened.”

Duncan Stroik, an architect in South Bend, Ind., said, “The misinterpretation of Vatican II was like Pandora’s box in which architects and clients thought that it meant anything goes. Anything as long as it was not traditional styles.”

That spawned what Stroik called the “consistently dull” suburban churches of the late 1960s and 1970s.

“Cheaply built, ugly, dysfunctional and iconoclastic,” Stroik said. “If they had been built as commercial or residential buildings they would have been torn down by now. There are some churches designed by famous architects which, though sophisticated, are rather poor places of worship.”

He mentions Seattle University’s Chapel of St. Ignatius, the Chapel of St. Basil at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. He also cites the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco, which some locals refer to as “Our Lady of Maytag” because its dome looks like the agitator of a washing machine.

“Interestingly, they all received awards from the architecture community,” Stroik said.

But beginning about 20 to 25 years after Vatican II, Stroik said, laypeople and younger clergy started to question modernism and began asking for “churches that look like churches.”

The trend, he said, is “almost only in the Catholic world” and is driven “by a sacramental sense that Catholics have and an inherent understanding that churches should be beautiful because they reflect the Creator.”

That means rejecting radically sloped floors, auditorium seating in the round, a “big-box-church type of mentality” and other fare of modern architecture that Anthony mentions. Instead, Stroik said, clients are seeking “beauty, verticality and traditional iconography.”

“There are those who want simple elegance and others who believe in rich colors and decoration,” Stroik said. “Both are part of our artistic patrimony.”

The South Rises

Anthony said he sees this trend to tradition “everywhere,” including in his home Archdiocese of Boston, where he said modern architecture especially took root.

“The local people here, the grassroots people here, are working to try to break that down from the bottom up,” Anthony said. “The fact that the people here wanted to do what they consider more church-like architecture is a huge thing, a huge change.”

But where traditional church architecture is most prevalent today, Anthony and Stroik said, is in the South and Southwest.

Traditional work there would include HDB/Cram & Ferguson’s Benedictine Syon Abbey in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Designs for the Gothic church and monastic buildings were inspired by a study of ruined English monasteries. Completed in 2007, its features include a facade of Spanish limestone, arched windows, marble tile flooring and a massive, 80-foot-tall bell tower.

Other projects Anthony’s firm have completed include Houston’s Our Lady of Walsingham (completed in 2003), which replicates the carpentry and stonework of churches near the site of a shrine destroyed by Henry VIII. Gargoyles stand guard on the four corners of the Gothic church’s tower. In Farragut, Tenn., Anthony designed St. John Neumann Catholic Church (completed in 2008), inspired by Romanesque churches of France’s Burgundy region.

McCrery’s firm has been involved with more than a dozen liturgical projects across the United States, including significant works in the South. His Chapel of St. Cecilia in Nashville, built for Dominican nuns, was inspired by Roman basilicas. In Charlotte, N.C., McCrery’s St. Ann Catholic Church expanded on a church that for more than 50 years had celebrated Mass in the basement of a never-completed building. The new design was so popular that donors responded with enough funds to add mosaics, statues and inscriptions. A new bell tower is in design. In Linville, N.C., McCrery’s St. Bernadette Church added to a metal building with a major interior renovation featuring wood trusses and grooved wood ceilings in the nave.

Stroik’s firm has completed churches in Covington, Ky., (All Saints) and Bullhead City, Ariz., (St. Margaret Mary) and designed others, including St. Paul the Apostle in Spartanburg, S.C. Design of the latter, modeled on U.S. Catholic church and Lombard Romanesque architecture, “will incorporate forms and symbols that make it unmistakably a Catholic church.” His firm’s 16 church projects also include a “creative restoration” of St. Joseph Cathedral in Sioux Falls, S.D.

“We are committed to a restoration of the sacred and a new renaissance of church architecture,” said Stroik, who in March received a Palladio Award from Traditional Building and Period Homes magazines in recognition of outstanding work in traditional design.

Beautiful Gates

What’s behind such a trend to the traditional? There seems to be plenty of praise to go around.

Anthony, for one, credits Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who, in his 1986 book The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy, “tried to take the bitter edge off of a lot of the rhetoric” regarding church architecture post-Vatican II. Anthony recently wrote the final chapter exploring new Gothic and Romanesque architecture in North America in a forthcoming book of essays, Benedict XVI and Beauty in Sacred Art and Architecture: Proceedings of the Second Fota International Conference, 2009. Fota is a small island in Cork Harbour, Ireland.

McCrery also praised Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II, saying both have “encouraged a re-inspiration, a rededication to the Church’s tradition in theology, in philosophy, in liturgy, in the arts and in architecture.”

Anthony also said the return to traditional church architecture was a grassroots movement, one influenced by laypeople who travel to Europe, see the great churches there, and then develop “a yearning for great architecture.”

No matter who’s to credit, Anthony said it’s important that beautiful churches be made.

“The primary starting point has to be that when you see the building or when you enter the space that you absolutely know exactly where you’re at every moment,” Anthony said. “That you are seized with emotion and with an emotion of wanting to enter and wanting to go pray and wanting to be closer to God, understanding that you’re in God’s space; you’re in God’s house. This is the gate of heaven.”

The writing's on the wall

All Things New by Deacon Greg Kendra


I have seen the writing on the wall. And I'm not impressed.

A couple of Sundays ago, I found myself at a sparkling, sprawling parish in central Florida, in a church nave surrounded by stained glass and leafy palms and cheerful greetings between families. About three dozen children were receiving their First Communion. The place was buzzing with energy and activity. It was packed with, I'd guess, close to a thousand people (including a couple dozen in the adjoining crying rooms).

But what struck me most of all was something I'd never seen in a Catholic church before. Once mass began, a big blank wall was transformed into a flat, giant hymnal, where someone projected the verses to the hymns. No need to go searching through the missal for the page numbers, or the song numbers. Just look up, and to one side, and follow along with the words on the wall.

I posted something about this on my Facebook page the day it happened, and was surprised to learn that this practice is increasingly common in Catholic parishes. A lot of places are doing it. And people seem generally to like it. The defenders say that it gets people to lift their heads out of the hymnals and sing. It focuses attention. It raises eyes, and voices. It pulls the congregation together.

Okay. But I have to say this: the experience, no matter what its intent, left me cold.

Call me old-fashioned. I like opening a book to read the words. I like the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. I like the cracked, worn sensation of a missal that's been held in hundreds of hands, shared by people I may or may not know—people praying for intentions I cannot imagine, smudging the pages with their thumbs or turning over a corner to mark a place they feel an urge to revisit. I imagine a husband and wife sharing a book, or a parent and child, or even strangers. In my experience, more than a few times, I've offered to share a book with the stranger next to me, and that tiny act has bridged a divide. The simple gesture of sharing a hymnal can be a form of communion, and community.

There's the posture of prayer, too. I like holding the missal my hand, and offering a sung prayer with my eyes lowered and head bowed. I like focusing on something that's physically close to my heart, where I can zero in on the verses, follow the words closely and see how they all come together. There is an intimacy there. A connectedness. It's just naturally comfortable.

This is the way people have sung and prayed together for centuries. It's how I learned to do it. And I just feel more at ease with it. I can sing if I want to, or refrain if I don't want to, and can just close my eyes and listen if I'm not exactly in the mood.

But the projections change all that. They take away the familiarity of an open book and my lone pair of eyes reading it and ask—no, insist—that I look up and out and focus everything on a wall a hundred feet away. It's liturgy as PowerPoint. Not just that, there's something gimmicky about it: it's Mitch Miller, without Mitch, and without the bouncing ball. The sacred space becomes an auditorium for a sing-along.

Ultimately, I think, there's something inherently, well, Protestant, about it. The holy sacrifice of the mass has been transformed into just another communal gathering. The large words and changing images on the wall don't encourage contemplation or meditation; the projections, instead, demand participation. And even that, frankly, doesn't really work. At the mass I attended, the singing was not all that unified, and participation somewhat spotty. (That may have been because there were a greater-than-usual number of non-Catholics there, because of the First Communion.) And I'm not sure the gimmick works for people with poor eyesight or folks who have to crane their necks to follow along.

I don't know if this trend toward visual projection in church will limp onward, or if the ongoing reform of the liturgy will trip it up. Maybe it will gain in popularity, as more people seem to need visual stimuli to stay engaged.

But a favorite question I like to ask, when I have any liturgical misgivings, is "WWRD?" What would Rome do?

I can't imagine them doing multi-media presentations in St. Peter's.

But you never know.

Maybe that's wishful thinking.

And maybe I'm the one suffering from projection.

You can't judge a Church by it's cover

from Huffington Post by Mark Redmond

The email flashed across my screen at work.

"Who is available next Sunday, 10am, to go to a church to pick up some items their fifth grade youth group wants to donate to us?"

The message was from a staff member at Spectrum, where I serve as executive director in Burlington, Vt. Spectrum is a nonprofit organization, and we provide care to teenagers who are homeless, runaways, disconnected from families, in trouble with the law, addicted to drugs and alcohol or some combination of all of these.

I hit the reply button and asked, "Which church?"

It turned out it was a church only about two miles from my house, so I volunteered to go. But I did so with some misgivings. The truth is, I didn't really like that church. It is an evangelical church, and it is physically large, modern, reminding me of a WalMart or a Costco building. 

To use the currently popular term, it is a megachurch. I also recalled reading a news article about this church expanding Sunday services to the local cineplex, with a photo of congregants seated in the new stadium seating there. This of course only reinforced my misgivings. I'm a Catholic, my wife is a Catholic, and we have always attended Catholic churches. In my mind, these megachurches promote a pie-in-the-sky, feel-good spirituality bereft of any emphasis on social justice and reaching out to the poorest of the poor. Whatever problems the Catholic Church may have, it does not give short shrift to Jesus's teachings about feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless and challenging the underpinnings of a society and economy which create such suffering. It is the Church of Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero,the martyred El Salvador missionaries and others whom I so admire.

But if the fifth graders of this particular megachurch were willing to donate some items to the homeless teenagers staying at Spectrum, I was certainly willing to swallow my prejudices for one hour. So I showed up on the appointed Sunday morning and found my way to the room where the fifth graders were waiting for me. There were about 20 children sitting cross-legged on the floor. Four other adults were with them. I was introduced to the children and did my standard five-minute presentation on what Spectrum is, who the young people are that we help, and why they are on the streets and without families. Then one of the adults there, a male, carried up a laundry basket full of things like deodorant, toothpaste and shaving cream, and placed it before me, announcing that these were things the kids had collected for our teenagers. I thanked them, saying that I'd be certain to deliver them to young people who needed such items.

I started for the door, when this same man motioned for me to stay.

"Amy, can you please show Mr. Redmond what you brought?"

I stopped and watched this 11-year-old girl dragging a black duffel bag up to the front of the room. She unzipped it, and I peered inside, then started pulling out a set of sheets, towels and washcloths. I started joking with the kids, "Hey look, here is some dental floss, everyone needs that, right?" They laughed along, and then I heard this man say, "Amy, show Mr. Redmond what else is in there." She reached into the duffel bag, pulled a Bible out of it, and handed it to him. I could see a card sticking out, which he handed over to me. "To a Young Man at Spectrum" was handwritten on the front of the card.

"Why don't you tell Mr. Redmond why you and your family are donating these things to Spectrum?"

"I had a teenage brother," she said, "but he died last year. So my family wants to give these things to a boy like him who can use them."

I opened the card. On the front was written, "Always remember..." and on the inside, "God is watching over you." A picture of this girl's brother was taped to the other inside flap -- a smiling young man, happy, standing in front of a building. Under his picture was written, "Given in memory of Brad," with the dates of his birth and death. He was only 19. Also inscribed was "God bless you, from the family of Brad."

I leaned over to the adult and whispered, "How did he die?"

"Heroin overdose," he answered.

My heart just broke when I heard that. That's one of the main things we do at Spectrum -- work with kids who are addicted to drugs or alcohol, trying to help them break free, and some are heroin addicts. I looked at the face of this young man Brad. Somehow we missed him. Maybe he never heard of us. Maybe he was too ashamed to come in for help. Maybe he overdosed his first time using. I'll never know, but it just cut right through me to be looking at him there, smiling. I could just feel the agony of that family in the writing on that card.

I reached over and hugged Amy. I held her tight, thanking her for the gift she had given. I promised to give the duffel bag to a young man who was homeless and could really use it. I looked over at the adults in the room, and I could see they were near tears. So was I.

I learned a lot that day in the megachurch. I was reminded that the heartbreak of addiction and early death can happen not only with kids who have no families and therefore live on the streets, but with kids who do have supportive families, some degree of financial means and even attend church. I was reminded that addiction reaches beyond all socioeconomic and racial boundaries; it clutches where it will.

And I learned, once again, for the umpteenth time in my life, not to judge. I judged that church. I put all kinds of nasty labels on it. But I was wrong. Like any other church, including the Catholic Church, there are good people who go there, people who care about others, people who want more than pie-in-the-sky religion. And some of those people are incredibly wounded, scarred by what life has dealt them. They go to Church to worship, but they also go in order to find healing, comfort and compassion.

That's why I keep a photocopy of that card, including Amy's brother's picture, and periodically look at it, with the hope that it'll keep me from judging any person or any house of worship again.

Can beautiful churches produce vocations?

from gkupsidedown.blogspot.com by Father Dwight Longenecker

I know a young priest who was brought up as a Baptist. He went into a beautiful old Catholic Church during the liturgy. This was a classic neo-Gothic church with stained glass windows and a beautiful liturgy. He fell to his knees and said that he knew then and there that he not only needed to be a Catholic, but that he was called to be a Catholic priest. He's not the only one. I know two other guys who eventually made the same decision for the same reason, and numerous other converts who were drawn by the beauty and reverence of worship including the reverence evoked by the beautiful church.

The unknown architect of Glastonbury Abbey in England wrote, "I want to create a church so beautiful that it will move even the hardest heart to prayer." Can a beautiful church produce vocations to the priesthood? Perhaps we should reverse the question and say, "Does an ugly church discourage priestly vocations?" To answer the question we must think through, and come up with a theory of aesthetics and think through the reasons for both ugly churches and beautiful churches. Once we understand the mentality behind both we will be able to answer the question of whether a beautiful church can help produce new vocations to the priesthood.

The modern churches we deem 'ugly' are usually designed from a utilitarian point of view. Modern architecture has taken as it's creed Frank Lloyd Wright's dictum, "Form follows function." Therefore most modern architechts, when considering the building of a church will ask, "Where will everyone sit. What kind of an artificial sound system should we install? Where will the heating, air conditioning and toilets go? Where will the Sunday School rooms go? What about disabled access? Do we need elevators?" All these practical and utilitarian questions must, of course, be answered, but if they are the only considerations you will end up with a practical, inexpensive and ugly building. You'll end up with a building that is simply an auditorium.

Then, of course, Catholics will want their church to be 'pretty' so they'll spend lots of money adding a layer of gloss. They'll throw in some marble. They'll buy some second hand stained glass windows from an old church in Ohio or somewhere. They'll add a nice tabernacle or some statues. That's all well and good, but the building itself is still probably an ugly, utilitarian, cheaply built structure.

Suscipe Prayer Window, Saint Francis Xavier Church,
Mount Washington, Kentucky

We then have to ask what these churches say about the faith, for the church building is a sacramental. It states what we believe. A building, whether we like it or not, is a statement of our values, our faith and our world view. A cheap building with no inner integrity of beauty--a cheap building that is 'dressed up' to look Catholic or 'pretty' with decorations is superficial and shallow and only skin deep....just like our faith too often I'm afraid! In our superficial, face lift world we build churches that are superficial where the 'beauty' is really on 'pretty' and skin deep.

What about the liturgy that goes on in such buildings? Too often it also is superficial, sweet and comfortable and skin deep. Does such liturgy and do such buildings inspire vocations? Do they say to our young people, "Look what sacrifices we have made to worship God?" Do they say, "We have given all to build something beautiful for God"? or do they actually say, "It's okay to give God second best. It's okay to give him what's left over."? Do they come out of the building yawning and wondering what next for Sunday or do they come out full of awe and thankfulness for the beautiful worship of God?

A beautiful church, that required great sacrifice to build, on the other hand--combined with beautiful liturgy and an awesome and reverent worship of God is more likely to inspire the reverence and awe and sacrifice required of our young people who are thinking about a vocation.

This is my theory: sacrifice much to build a beautiful church and you will find that your children will sacrifice much to become the priests, brothers and sisters to fill that church for a next generation.

1572 parish church found

from  SaintAugustine.com. (Our family's favorite vacation spot)...

When St Augustine officials decided to remove parking on what is probably one of the nation's oldest streets, it opened up an opportunity for the city's archaeology department to find out more about the history of the Oldest City.

What they found was solid evidence of a church dating from 1572 -- evidence of the location of the first parish church of St. Augustine.

It's the first physical evidence of Nuestra Senora de Los Remedios (Our Lady of the Remedies), according to City Archaeologist Carl Halbirt.

His voice still carries a bit of the excitement and wonder when talking about how he and his team uncovered the builder's trench and the wall that marked the rear of the church near the east corner of King and Aviles streets.

Link to article about Aviles Street being the oldest street in the USA...

"It was on the west, the back wall. The front of the church faced toward the bay," Halbirt said. He thinks it's the first church in the state with documented archaeology.

More discoveries were made including post holes that date back the 16th century, pottery and human bones.

Those bones offer up another mystery. Only feet and leg bones were discovered, and they came from two people.

"Apparently the bodies were dug up and moved. We're not sure how long they were there, because the feet bones were still (together)," Halbirt said.

Whoever moved the bones probably wanted to get the job over with and moved the bodies as quickly as possible, missing portions of bodies.

Halbirt doesn't know who the bones belonged to, although he thinks they were removed about 400 years ago and reburied. They could be the bodies of priests.

He's more certain about why the bodies were moved. One of the post holes found midway in the wall is sunk about three feet, and he believes it was the base of a large cross.

"That's probably where they put the cross (for the church). They had to move the bodies in order to put in the cross," he said.

Finding the church wall is a bit of a coup. While people knew about the church and had an idea of its location, no evidence of the structure had been found.

Early maps, including the Baptiste Boazio map of 1586 and the Hernado de Mestas map of 1593, show the church. The churchyard was located in the 1960s when graves were discovered nearby.

The Hernando de Mestas map included a drawing of the church. The building was of vertical board with a sort of thatched roof. It was a large building, about 37 feet wide and 60 to 70 feet long. To one side, there's a campanario, or belfry. Four bells hung from the structure.

Built about 1572, the church was rebuilt twice after suffering damage. Once it was destroyed during a raid by Sir Francis Drake, an English privateer. Later it was damaged by fire and a hurricane.

In 1702 the British burned St. Augustine and Los Remedios. That ended the parish of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios. The Spanish congregation moved to Nuestra Senora de la Soledad, which began as a hospital and small chapel in the late 1500s. Soledad was located on a St. George Street property owned by the religious order of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Even though the exact location of Los Remedios was lost over time, people apparently remembered the ground had been sacred. Digging in the area, little debris was found dating before the 1800s, and that's an indication people retained an awareness the church had been there, said Halbirt.

While the excavations done in August had to be recovered so that Aviles Street could reopen, plans are under way to put up signs telling passersby what is below the surface.

"That way they have an idea of what was here and they'll know more about the area," Halbirt said.

Nuestra Senora de Los Remedios

1572 - First church built.

1586 - Church destroyed during raid by Sir Francis Drake.

1587 - Second church rebuilt

1599 - Destroyed by fire and a hurricane.

Church rebuilt, stayed in use until the British burned St. Augustine in 1702

Sources: Cross & Crozier, a history of the Diocese of St. Augustine, by Charles Gallagher, Ph.D., and St. Augustine Catholic, October 2010 edition.