Thursday, April 24, 2008

Christ the King, Sweden

As part of our ongoing NLM efforts to report upon parishes here and there that have instituted the use of six altar candlesticks and central cross (in the hopes of helping encouraging other parish priests to do likewise) I wished to share with you news sent in by a Swedish reader of the altar arrangement in the parish of Christ the King in Gothenburg, Sweden:



As an aside, the surrounding art and how it seems to relate to the architectural elements is somewhat curious to me because while it is evidently modern in style, it is a different kind of expression from what we would typically see in modern ecclesiastical art and architecture -- which is usually characterized by either being functionalist, minimalist and/or abstracted, or at very least it is highly stylized, thereby lacking the warmth, fluidity and naturalism of the traditional arts.

You can more clearly see this detail of Virgin in the left-most panel:



This puts me to mind of the open discussion we had here which surrounded the question of the principles of development in Catholic art and architecture and how that may or may not be properly manifest. Part of that question considered whether the principles of artistic modernism were fundamentally incompatible with Catholic principles or not.

It is an intriguing debate.

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