The Need for Sacred Space

A section of the
tapestry of the
Communion of
the Saints in the
Cathedral of Los
Angeles 

I mentioned in a recent posting that while I am committed to the Liturgical Reforms instituted by the Church during and after the Second Vatican Council, I still think we have a long way to go in developing the liturgical forms these rites take to bring out and maximize their spiritual depths.  There are several obvious flaws: while the language of the earlier translation was banal and without poetic tones, the current translation is not only equally prosaic, but aurally incomprehensible.  The translation principles of Liturgiam authenticam are fundamentally flawed and, as anyone who as a student had to unravel the complexities of Cicero knows, one cannot bring Latin syntax into intelligible English.  We need a translation which is not only substantially (as opposed to literally) faithful to the original, but which has some literary polish to it.  And then there is the music.  Directors of music and liturgy (though I suspect that most often the real problem are the priests) need to get over their fear of “bringing out old treasures as well as new” from their storeroom (cf. Matt 13:52).  It has taken us centuries to build up a repertoire of great music for the liturgy and it will take us centuries more to add pieces of equal value and worth.  In the meantime we should not be afraid to selectively use the treasures of the past even if they are in a language many (ok, most, almost all) people do not understand.  On the other hand, the Mass is not colonial Williamsburg and the new must be used alongside the old even if most of the new is not of the same excellence.  And much of the new, by the way, is of the same excellence.  Composers such as John Rutter, John Tavener, Bob Chilcott, Herbert Howells, or Malcolm Archer are contemporary musicians writing excellent Church music.  And of course there is a difference between worship and concerts.  While there is no problem in having the occasional soloist or choral piece, especially during a time appropriate to reflection, better to have music that invites the congregation to participate more fully in the liturgy and not just render them passive attendees.   

But where I would really like to begin is with architecture. I realize that we are entering an extremely subjective topic: much of it comes down to a matter of personal taste.  I am a huge fan of contemporary architecture.  As with contemporary classical and ecclesiastical music, not all contemporary architecture is good.  Some of it is ridiculous and some is even horrid—I think, for example, of the post-modern Canadian Embassy in Washington DC.  Some of it is magnificent, though located in an inappropriate context: for example, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art (ironically located directly across Constitution Avenue from the aforementioned Canadian Embassy) or les pyramides du Louvre in Paris.  (Both these buildings are the work of I.M. Pei, and while superb in themselves are somewhat alien to their immediate surroundings.)  The Sydney Opera House is an example of a fascinating structure in a perfectly located environment.  The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria Egypt is another outstanding example of contemporary architecture.  I could go on, but let me move to church architecture. 

As much as I like contemporary architecture, I have yet to see where it has been made to work well for liturgical space, at least in large spaces.  The monastery chapel of the Carmelite Nuns in Baltimore is an example of a contemporary small worship space that is conducive to prayer.  I found the chapel of the Benedictine nuns at Jamberoo Abbey in Australia to be similarly prayerful.  I also found the same in the Abbey Church of Our Lady of the Genesee upstate New York.  But when this translates to large space such as a parish church or a cathedral, I have yet to find good examples of contemporary church architecture.  The Abbey Church of Westminster in Mission, British Columbia is absolutely horrible.  I have very mixed feelings about the Cathedral in Los Angeles.  I was deeply moved when I visited there, but I think I was (and continue to be) overwhelmed by the tapestry of the Procession of the Saints from the baptistery to the altar.  Take away the tapestry and I am not so sure about the interior of the building while the exterior looks like a TD Bank on steroids.  It is actually, I think, an eyesore.  (Again, I realize this is very subjective.)  As long as we are using the steroids analogy, Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco is nothing more than an overgrown agitator from a washing machine.  The two British examples of contemporary church architecture: the Catholic Cathedral at Liverpool and the Anglican Cathedral at Coventry would have both been better unbuilt. 

I think the flaw in contemporary church architecture is the same flaw that has made many contemporary secular buildings so hideous.  There is innovation for innovation’s sake—shock for shock’s sake.  It doesn’t lead us to prayer.  There is no sense of the sacred, of the mysterious. 

Some think that the solution is a return to previous styles of architecture.  There is a school of Catholic architecture, more or less led by Duncan Stroik of Notre Dame University, that builds churches in retro style.  I will give Stroik and his better disciples credit where credit is due: for the purity of line and the excellence of craftsmanship.  But I have to pan them for their retreating into the past rather than moving forward and making right out of the mess of modern churches. 

I remember once being on a tour of the National Cathedral (Episcopal) in Washington DC.  The National Cathedral looks like it was just lifted out of a fourteenth century village in England and plopped down on Mount Saint Albans in North West D.C.  About half-way through the tour, one member of the group raised her hand and said to the docent: “When you build an American Protestant Cathedral in a pre-Reformation European style, are you saying that neither America nor Protestantism have anything worthwhile to contribute?”  Good question.  Our American heritage has a wonderful architectural heritage of Protestant Church construction.  Look at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg.  Look at the First Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connnecticut.  Look at Old North Church in Boston.  Why did the Episcopalians build a “Catholic” and English Cathedral?  It’s lovely, but it is a testimony against our American culture. 

In the same way, for architects today like Stroik, James McCrery, or David Meleca to go retro says something about how they—and their clients—see our contemporary culture and that, in turns, has vast implications for our mission of “Church in the Modern World.”  Now, don’t misunderstand me, from their work I have seen—either in person or in examining photographs—I cannot say enough good about the quality of design and execution.  My problem is with the philosophical and theological underpinnings of their work.  It fits the “Reform of the Reform” mentality that the Church needs in someway to take shelter from our modern world in its past glories but this isolationism encourages a false and even gnostic ecclesiology in which the Church retreats into itself and abandons its mission to confront the world with the Gospel.  It encourages the Christian to step out of his or her world to pray and creates a false dichotomy between the (arcane) sacred and the secular rather than empowering us, as a Church, to sacralize the secular.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXVI

William Byrd, Elizabeth’s 

Catholic Kappellmeister  

I know I said I would get back to the Katholic Krazies after a few blogs on the Church of England but let me ask your indulgence.  The Katholic Krazies entries are extremely popular and the number of hits goes up every time I put one up there, but I have needed this break and ask for about another week or so before I return and jab some fun at some of the kraziest-yet-to-comes.  So back to Elizabeth.

Well into Elizabeth’s reign, let’s say as late as the Armada in 1588, the majority of her subjects remained discretely, if not secretly, Catholics.  This was not true for the capital however—the mercantile cities and especially London, had been quick to embrace the Reformation and were strongly committed to Protestantism.  Max Weber, the 20^th century German sociologist, well noted the link between Protestant—and especially Reformed (or Calvinist)—thought and capitalism.  The merchants wanted their money to invest in business, not to squander on supporting monasteries or purchasing vestments or commissioning religious art.  This is not to say that the Protestant merchants were stingy when it comes to God.  Far from it.  But with God, as with business, they wanted to put their money where it would reap a reward.  They endowed schools and scholarships to the universities.  They opened schools for poor children and orphans.  They built hospitals for the indigent sick.  They provided dowries for respectable young ladies from families that had fallen on hard times.  They just didn’t want to sink their money into buildings and the accessories of ritual. 

This led to a significant cultural change.  Art and architecture had, to this point, been primarily at the service of religion, but with the Protestant preference for the stark in matters religious, the arts shift to the secular.  We get far more portraits of solid prosperous English men and women and much fewer saints.  We get still-lifes and some landscapes.  Secular building projects take off as well.  No more abbeys, but we start getting the great manor houses built from the ruins of those monasteries.  Theatres and public buildings go up in London and other large cities.   Society itself secularizes. 

Secularization was not among the goals of the Protestant leadership, of course.  They wanted a “godly realm of England.”  But this is the trouble when you have a break in religious tradition, even a good break.  Once the hold of religion over the culture, or indeed individuals, is broken and the ancient “givens” are called into question, the whole religious establishment collapses like a house of cards.  When you see everything you once held sacred being discarded, nothing remains sacred in your eyes.  But again, this is where Protestantism failed its own ideals—it devolved into religion with an emphasis on doctrine and discipline.  Had Protestantism been able to reach its Evangelical goals and emphasized the conversion of life to which the Gospel shows us the way, secularism would never have gained the foothold in the culture that it did.  But the forest of the Christian life was lost sight of as the Church got tangled in the innumerable trees of cold and abstract doctrine.  Without the ways that medieval Christianity had been able to reach into the daily lives of the ordinary person with the stories of the saints and the feast days and the processions,  there was nothing  but secularism to fill the gap in people’s lives. 

One area of art which remained at the service of the Church was music and the two great composers of the time, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, ironically were Roman Catholics.   Tallis was Catholic from the old days before the split with Rome and even though he was a musician in the Chapel Royal of King Henry and later King Edward, he never gave up the old faith.  Byrd was a convert to Catholicism during the reign of Elizabeth.  Being Catholic did not stop them from writing music for the Anglican liturgy, though both wrote for the Catholic liturgy as well.  Byrd was the music director Elizabeth’s chapel, an indication of how Elizabeth did not go looking for religious conflict as well as an indication of her preference of a more formal approach to liturgy. 

The fact that the Church of England developed a fine musical tradition should not confuse us into thinking that the average English subject attending Sunday worship in his or her parish church was being exposed to good music.  What happened in the chapel royal or in the occasional cathedral was one thing, but in the average parish the service was pretty drab, mostly read and not sung, and what little singing there might be was only the psalms, the Puritans considering hymns and anthems “too Catholic.”  Indeed church wasn’t a lot of fun due to the strong puritan influence that was suspect of anything ritualistic.  More about that in the next posting.

Back to where I started.  London was Protestant.  So was Norwich and the other larger towns of the south east, but there were Catholics aplenty in the countryside, and especially in the North where many of the great landowning families were still Catholic and with sufficient political clout, at least on the local level, to get away with it.  But priests are funny people and the seminary priests returning from their education and ordination abroad were supposed to pass through London and head into the Catholic regions to support the remaining Catholic population.  They didn’t.  They stayed in London, or at least the majority of them did.   They loved the big city and didn’t want to spend their years toiling away in the rural north.  Historians think that had the clergy dispersed into the Catholic areas, not only would far fewer of them had to pay for their faith with their lives, but that the Catholic faith would have continued to hold on in the North and West of England.  But you know, priests have always been known for liking a good restaurant and let’s face it, even in the sixteenth century you can’t beat London for the night life.   How can you keep them down on the farm…?

Things Change, Kundun

The altar at World Youth Day 2013

I mentioned in the previous post about the author of the Les Femmes website and her complaints of the Pope’s Mass for World Youth Day.  Drawing on the video of John Vennari of Catholic Family News, she noted the following things to have been “objectionable” about Pope Francis’ Mass. 

 Profane music more appropriate to a rock concert and in violation of the rubrics on music,

Dancing more appropriate to an aerobics class than the liturgy,

Drums and other rock instruments specifically prohibited by sacred documents on music,

Solo singing reminiscent of a cabaret act,

Plastic cups for distributing the Body of Christ???

Some of these objections are obviously highly subjective: whether a particular solo is more appropriate for a “cabaret” than for worship or whether particular dancing is more appropriate to an aerobics class than for worship.  Others are just disinformation: there is no ban on the use of drums in the Sacred Liturgy. 

I don’t think there is malice on part of the good lady, only ignorance.  And this is the problem.  I gather from reading her posts and her news letter over the years that she and I grew up at the same time, I north of the Mason Dixon and she south.  I gather that we both went to Catholic Schools where we had the good nuns who taught us the music of the Latin Liturgy (especially Mass 8), and told us about Pope Saint Pius X and his insistence on the organ being the only instrument for the liturgy.  Pius was reacting to the orchestra masses of the 18^th and 19^th century—the Mozart Coronation Mass for example—in which the congregation was reduced to the state of an audience while professional singers were required for performance.  Pius’ determination to restore chant was precisely to restore active participation in the Liturgy.  Pius’ Liturgical reforms were a tremendous step forward, but they were not the final step in liturgical development. Now I am not saying that Pope Saint Pius X would have loved the Copacabana Mass.  I am sure he would not have.  But like all us mortals, Pius lived in a fixed period of time which shaped his worldview.  The Church is a living organism, as is its liturgy.  It has continued to develop since the days of the Pope who made such a difference in Catholic devotion with permission for daily Holy Communion.  Pius’ norms remained in effect for decades but change did come and it came before Vatican II.  First came the encyclical letter of Pius XII, Mediator Dei approximately fourteen years before the Council opened.  Then came Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium which mandated serious revision of the Sacred Liturgy (though not perhaps as serious a revision as we were given in the Missal of Paul VI) and encouraged “inculturation” to permit the liturgy to be adapted to the various cultures in which the Church finds itself.  Sacrosanctum Concilium was followed by innumerable other documents carrying out the mandate of the Council that the Liturgy should involve a full, active, and conscious participation on the part of the laity in the Mass.  All sorts of permissions were given and some permissions were denied.  Some permissions—dance for example—were allowed in certain cultures and banned in others.  The Papal Masses, both in Rome and when the popes were “on the road” became models for what could be done with the Liturgy and different cultures used Papal Visits to showcase their unique gifts and now being worthy of an offering to God.
Personally I am delighted that Pope Francis has signaled an end to the attempts at partial restoration of the pre-conciliar rites.  His choice to wash the feet of women in the Holy Thursday liturgy was the first clear sign that there is a new sheriff in town.  His choice of the simplest of vestments, his insistence on celebrating facing the congregatgion (versus populum as opposed to versus apsidem), his use of the “for all” (as opposed to the “for many”) in vernacular celebrations, and other gestures have been clear signs that we don’t have to worry about the peculiarities of the neo-trads being imposed on us at prayer.  I know it upsets the good lady from Woodstock and others of her ilk who thought that they were about to restore the traditions they knew so well but which had begun to fade from pious memory, but it is allowing the rest of us to get on with a serious and focused approach to our faith.