Michael S. Rose - Ugly as Sin

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Michael S. Rose

Ugly as Sin

Why They Changed Our Churches
from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces
and How We Can Change Them Back Again

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2001 Michael S. Rose

Biblical quotations are based on the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright 1965, 1966, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission.

All rights reserved

Jacket design by Lorraine Bilodeau

On the jacket: Background photograph: St. Patricks Cathedral,
New York 2000 Michael Pasdzior/The Image Bank; inset
photograph: Jaroslav Hejzlar/Sovfoto/Eastfotot/PictureQuest

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rose, Michael S., 1969

Ugly as sin : why they changed our churches from sacred places to meeting spaces and how we can change them back again / Michael S. Rose.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN HDCVR 1-928832-36-9 PPBK 978-1-933184-44-9 (alk. paper)
1. Catholic church buildings. 2. Church architecture 20th century. I. Title.

NA4828 .R67 2001
246.958209045 dc21 2001049617

Contents

(or, the minimum you need to know

to evaluate the church down the street)

(or, the essential elements of every proper church)

3. Our pilgrim goes into the
worship space of the people

(or, why you find it so hard to

pray in that modern church)

(or, bad theology has done

more damage than bad taste)

(or, what the Vatican wants you to do

to help restore the Faith in our day)

Foreword

Why do the Catholic churches built over the past three or four decades look the way they do? Why are they so different from churches of past ages, which all seemed to be built in a similar arrangement, using familiar elements and forms most people immediately associate with a church building? Why are our modern churches so ugly, so banal, so uninspiring?

Is it just a matter of taste?

Or is something more fundamental at stake?

To many people, these questions seem as unanswerable as they are mysterious. Ugly as Sin answers these hard questions and shows how Catholics can and must return to building sacred places worthy of the title house of God.

Modern church architect Edward A. Svik underscores this point when he writes that architecture is a more influential factor in the life of society than most people suppose. Church architecture affects the way man worships; the way he worships affects what he believes; and what he believes affects not only his personal relationship with God but how he conducts himself in his daily life.

In other words, church architecture is not negligible but significant, not the concern only of architects but central to your life and mine. The elements of our churches express a theology, manifest a particular Faith. Contrast the Quaker meetinghouse with a Gothic cathedral, and you must conclude that these two buildings represent two distinct theologies, two distinct ecclesiologies, two very different ways of looking at the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

Successful, authentic church architecture reflects the doctrines of the faith it represents. A Gothic cathedral no more reflects the faith of the Quakers than the Quaker meetinghouse reflects the truths of the Catholic Faith. What, then, can we say about modern Catholic church architecture?

Thats the topic of this book, which is more about architectural theology than it is about church architecture per se. But dont be intimidated by the term architectural theology. It simply means that church architecture is more than a matter of taste and more than a matter of tradition: what we build as a house of God should reflect what we believe about God.

The basics arent hard to understand. Once you grasp them, youll understand why modern Catholic churches have deviated from the natural laws of Catholic church architecture to take the often bland and grotesque shape that they have.

And youll know why its so important that we return to those natural laws that guided church builders of old, leading them to create churches that lift the soul to God by authentically representing the Catholic Faith.

Michael S. Rose

Ugly as Sin

(or, the minimum you need to know
to evaluate the church down the street)

Notre Dame, the crowning jewel of Paris, is arguably the most famous of Christendom's great cathedral churches. Countless chronicles, poems, novels, and artistic treatments have been devoted to the subject of this architectural masterpiece. Yet considering it's neither the tallest, the biggest, nor even the most beautiful of cathedrals, Notre Dame's universal appeal isn't easily explicable on the natural order.

There's something more.

Paris, of course, as the capital of France, provides a prominent setting not enjoyed by most churches, yet it's the building's own transcendent qualities that have led countless pilgrims from all parts of the world to marvel at its presence and enter into its sublimity. Itinerant merchants and priests, pilgrims, diplomats, foreign students, traveling knights and crusaders, freed serfs seeking new homes the whole wandering human fabric of the Middle Ages passed through the capital of France and admired its Cathe-dral. So reports Allan Temkoinhis 1955 book on Notre Dame.

These pilgrims, he adds, called Notre Dame the ecclesia of Paris, the church par excellence in a city of many remarkable churches. And since that time long ago, pilgrims and tourists have never ceased to come to this heart of medieval Paris on the le de la Cit.