Why Are Modern Church Buildings So Ugly

And Why Does it Matter?

The following first appeared as an interview in The Catholic Herald. Jan C. Bentz, who conducted the interview, teaches philosophy at Blackfriars College, Oxford.

Los Angeles Cathedral, completed 2002

Dr Bentz wrote:

For many Catholics, the experience is familiar and disquieting: newly built churches that feel more like conference centres than places of worship, stripped of ornament, symbolism, and the Holy. The question of ugliness in modern church architecture is often dismissed as a matter of taste or nostalgia. Yet for David Clayton, artist, educator and one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of traditional Catholic aesthetics, the issue runs far deeper. At stake is not merely style, but theology: how the Church understands worship, the human person and the relationship between beauty and truth.

In this conversation, Clayton argues that modern ecclesial ugliness reflects a loss of Catholic inculturation, a failure of formation, especially in seminaries, and a philosophical rupture that predates the Second Vatican Council by more than a century. Drawing on Benedict XVI, classical harmony and proportion and the liturgical traditions of East and West, he makes the case that beauty is not decoration but necessity: a formative power that shapes belief, prayer and even faith itself.

Jan C. Bentz (JCB): Many modern churches appear deliberately resistant to beauty, ornament and symbolic density. Do you think this widespread ugliness is primarily a failure of taste, or does it reflect a deeper theological, or even anthropological, confusion about what a church actually is?

David Clayton (DC): It is, I would say, a combination of all three. There is certainly a failure of taste, but that failure itself is rooted in something deeper: a loss of awareness of Catholic tradition and of how that tradition is inseparable from theology and anthropology, specifically, the Church’s understanding of what man is and what worship does to him.

We have become dislocated from our own inheritance. That rupture is largely the result of inadequate education and formation among Catholics today, and unfortunately this includes the formation of priests in seminaries, where these questions are often not given the attention they deserve. One of the most significant gaps is a lack of understanding of form, by which I mean not simply what is depicted, but how it is depicted. Style, proportion, harmony and architectural language all express a philosophical and theological world-view.

When this connection is lost, architecture and art are reduced to matters of personal taste. And taste, when it is not properly formed, becomes highly susceptible to contemporary trends and cultural fashion. People end up liking what they think they ought to like, rather than judging according to universal principles. At that point, beauty no longer refers to reality but to preference. That, I think, is at the heart of the problem.

JCB: You mentioned formation, especially in seminaries. Do you think there is an active lack of education in these areas? Should seminaries be more intentional about teaching beauty across architecture, art and music?

DC: Yes, very much so. Seminarians may encounter aesthetics in a philosophical sense, but what is really needed is a deeper Catholic inculturation. They need to be formed within a living tradition, not simply taught concepts in isolation. If you look at Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic priestly formation, the contrast is striking. Their clergy are required to understand what icons belong in a church, how iconographic schemas function and how art, architecture and liturgy work together as a unified whole. They are formed liturgically in a very concrete way. By comparison, Roman seminaries often teach what the liturgy is without sufficiently explaining how architecture, music and visual art are ordered towards it. There is, in short, a significant gap in formation. Without that integration, priests are left unequipped to make informed decisions about church buildings, and the results are all around us.

JCB: Do you see a connection between this loss of formation and a post-conciliar loss of confidence in symbolism, transcendence and tradition more broadly?

DC: Yes, but it is essential to be precise here. This is not the fault of the Second Vatican Council itself. Rather, the Council was used as a pretext by those who already wished to introduce changes, often in ways that directly contradicted what the Council actually taught.

Following Benedict XVI, especially in The Spirit of the Liturgy, I would trace the deeper roots of this problem back to the early nineteenth century. The real issue lies in a distorted understanding of worship itself and in the separation of liturgy from the artistic forms that properly belong to it.

Architecture is not merely a neutral container for worship. The church building actively forms those who worship within it. Its structure, orientation and beauty guide the faithful towards participation in the liturgy. When this formative role is forgotten, worship becomes increasingly internalised and cerebral, almost purely intellectual.

As long as liturgical structures were fixed and immovable, they exercised a kind of corrective force. But once change was permitted without sufficient theological grounding, the floodgates opened. What we saw after the Council was not a sudden rupture but the acceleration of a trajectory long in the making.

JCB: Turning to architecture more directly: are modern movements such as functionalism or Brutalism fundamentally incompatible with Catholic liturgical theology?

DC: Yes, because these movements are grounded in materialist philosophies. They fail to acknowledge the metaphysical and spiritual dimension of the human person. Ironically, they are not even functional in the fullest sense, because they do not fulfil the true function of a church, which includes nourishing the spiritual life of those who worship there.

Utility has been reduced to purely material concerns: keeping out the rain, ensuring audibility and accommodating bodies. Those things matter, of course, but they are not sufficient. Beauty is not optional. It is essential, because it raises hearts and minds to God.

And not just any beauty will do. A railway station can be beautiful, but beautiful as a railway station. A church must be beautiful as a church. Its form must be ordered towards worship, towards encounter with Christ in the Eucharist.

Brutalist architecture, in particular, quite literally brutalises man by reducing him to a creature with purely material needs. Designing a church according to such principles is therefore incoherent.

Traditional harmony and proportion presuppose that beauty is objective, that it is rooted in reality itself, even though it is perceived subjectively. This assumption was undermined by Enlightenment philosophy, especially by Kant’s separation of perception from reality. Once that happens, beauty becomes merely emotional response.

Those ideas eventually filtered into architecture schools. By the mid-twentieth century, traditional harmony and proportion were no longer taught. Interestingly, many architects understood they were rejecting Christianity long before Christians themselves recognised it.

JCB: Defenders of modernist simplicity often argue that it fosters humility and prayer. How would you respond?

DC: Accessibility is important. People should not need a university education to respond to beauty. Traditional forms achieve this remarkably well, but they are not simple. They are complex, in the same way that the cosmos is complex: immediately accessible, yet inexhaustible.

The claim that complexity distracts is ancient. It goes back at least to the iconoclastic controversies, and even figures such as St Bernard worried that beauty might draw attention to itself. But authentic beauty does not trap the gaze; it draws us beyond itself, towards its source, who is God.

Experience overwhelmingly confirms this. The forms that have endured in Christian worship are not simplistic designs but richly ordered ones, capable of forming the soul precisely because of their depth.

JCB: Finally, on a practical level: if a parish or diocese were to build or renovate a church today, what principles should guide the project?

DC: The first principle is to find the right architect, someone deeply immersed in tradition. Whether classical or Gothic matters less than whether the architect truly understands a living tradition. But it is equally important not to reproduce the past uncritically.

Here I follow the guidance of Pius XII and Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity. We do not change forms unless we must. Modern elements may be incorporated, but only if they genuinely serve the needs of the worshipping community.

The liturgy is the wellspring of Catholic culture. Architecture, art and music must flow from it. Only then can the Church engage modern culture discerningly, rejecting what is harmful and integrating what is good.

If we begin with worship, grace will do the rest. Beauty will attract. And from that beauty, a truly Catholic culture can once again emerge.

San Francisco Cathedral, completed in 1970

A Wooden Model for the Cathedral of Pavia

Last week, we had two posts of Nicola de’ Grandi’s pictures of the cathedral of Pavia, Italy, and the tomb of St Syrus, the city’s first bishop. As I mentioned in the second one, the current cathedral is the result of a major rebuilding project that began in the later 15th century, and still remains technically unfinished. As a brief follow-up, here are pictures of a very beautiful and very well-preserved wooden model for that project, made between 1497 and 1501. It represents the fusion of the ideas of the original architect, Giovanni Antonio Amodeo, who planned the central nave, the external buttresses, and the external chapels, with Donatello Bramante’s design for the cupola and the large external apses. The church as it currently stands bears some resemblance to this design, but many of the model’s features were removed as the project slowly progressed.

In 1490, Leonardo da Vinci was called to Pavia to offer his opinion and advice on the project; here we see some sketched which he made in that period, one of a series of Greek-cross church designs, which were something of an obsession for the architects of that era. (Bramante would go on to be hired by Pope Julius II to rebuild St Peter’s basilica, which he planned as on a Greek-cross design, later imitated by Michelangelo, and not definitively altered until the early 17th century.) 

Another of a basilica, both in plan and prospective, based on some of the prominent church buildings in Lombardy such as the very ancient basilica of St Lawrence in Milan.

Traditional Art Cannot be Revolutionary: Modern Churches and Traditional Parishes - Guest Article by Mr Joseph Bremer

We are happy to share this article by Mr Joseph Bremer, a PhD student at the London-based King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, studying western iconography, and specializing in the art and architecture of the Romanesque period. He also currently teaches theology and history at Holy Family Cathedral School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

There seems to be no artistic spirit of our age. Future generations of Church historians will have a profoundly unenviable task ahead; for we can examine a 6th century mosaic covered domed cross church and definitively call it ‘Byzantine,’ a 12th century thick walled stone basilica and recognize it as ‘Romanesque,’ or identify a 17th century sprawling marble-clad church as definitively ‘Baroque.’ One could even travel back 30 years and identify our large monochrome iconoclastic churches as definitively modern, but that simply doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Many Catholic churches currently in use were constructed in the now-outdated styles that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and it is no secret that most practicing Catholics now find this commitment to post-modern art and architecture deeply problematic. We still inhabit the bones of these modern spaces, but the Church’s architectural turn in the late 20th century is now considered by many priests and parishioners to be a mistake. Our future church historians will have to make sense of a well-meaning, albeit disparate traditional patchwork independent of any overarching style or meaning as we try to patch modern churches with what bits of tradition we can.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles

This is especially true in America, where the Church eagerly married itself to the spirit of the age, but the last few decades has seen her, at least aesthetically, widowed. Our artistic inheritance is the fruit of jaded and betrayed post-modern optimism, and now these modern churches have been all but rejected by the very youth they were designed to appease. A new generation of young, eminently conservative, and overwhelmingly well-meaning priests have been assigned to these modern churches, with a strong will to traditionalize them, but the walls and artwork of our churches preach a theology altogether rejected by many of her parishioners and most of her priests. The pulpit is at war with the building it inhabits, and we are all left wondering ‘what now?’

It is an all too familiar question in our day and age: What is a traditionally minded parish, or at the very least a parish that rejects the maxims of artistic postmodernism, able to do if they inherited the all too familiar 70’s square?

Many parishes understandably see the need to construct an entirely new space. One such example is St. Philip the Apostle Church in Lewisville, Texas; a congregation not known for being exceptionally traditional.

The Old St. Philip the Apostle Sanctuary, construction completed in 1977

The parish, over the course of many years, was able to raise the money for a brand new neo-Gothic church in Flower-Mound, the interior of which is currently incomplete and pictured below.

As beautiful and preferable as the building of a new church is for most parishes, this is rarely an option. The recent agglomeration of small local parishes into larger urban ones makes this very difficult. The late 20th century shortage of priests coupled with a declining percentage of mass attendance meant dioceses in the 1970s and 1980s shut down many small local parishes, and built very large, very central and very modern churches in their place. Building a new large church is a monumental expense most parishes simply can’t afford; and it doesn’t help that construction, labor, and land costs are at an all time high with no sign of decline in the near future.

So can a parish traditionalize a space designed to be antithetical to tradition? This question must be necessarily answered on a church by church basis, but let's first examine what is currently being done. An example I am intimately familiar with is the Church of the Incarnation, a parish located at the University of Dallas which serves as a stark archetype for the difficulties and pitfalls of traditionalizing modern spaces. The University of Dallas teaches us three important lessons in the traditionalization of modern churches: the importance of continuity, of artistic telos, and of recognizing the realities of your space.

The church was designed and built by architects Duane and Jane Landry in 1985 in the spirit of most modern churches, with an express emphasis on the community rather than the liturgy. Its circular form was derived from Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, but the processional aisle was deliberately placed so that it wasn’t the focal point of the very large narthex. (A cheeky former chaplain reserved the URL www.bigbrowncircle.com for the church’s website) The altar is pushed forward to the center to emphasize communal participation. It is also situated on a North-South axis, and there is no entrance to the church except for from the East. Its paneled walls prevent any other liturgical art but a crucifix. The sanctuary naturally feeds into the narthex, but the narthex rather awkwardly blocks entry into the sanctuary. The sanctuary simply doesn’t feel like the focal point of the church. It is awkward to enter and almost entirely barren.

The blueprint of the Church of the Incarnation 

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Geoff Yovanovic, Alumnus of the Way of Beauty Program, Named Partner at Prestigious Firm in Atlanta

In a significant move that signals both recognition of talent and a new chapter for a renowned architectural firm, Geoffrey Yovanovic, AIA, has been named the first partner at Norman Davenport Askins Architects. The name of the firm will shortly be amended to reflect the inclusion of its first partner. I am particularly pleased to see his progress as it bears witness to my assertion that beauty has a premium on the open market and is an investment of time and effort that pays rich dividends.  

Geoff graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor’s degree in architecture, and earned his Master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame. I met him nearly 15 years ago at a Way of Beauty summer program I offered at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts shortly after he graduated from Miami. We’ve stayed in touch ever since, and it’s been a pleasure to watch him flourish and establish himself in the field, while always wishing to follow the Via Pulchritudinis - the Way of Beauty - in his professional work. I was delighted when he told me that he had submitted a church design with a cloister for his successful application to Notre Dame's School of Architecture.

His expertise extends beyond his professional practice. When I was looking for a teacher who could create a course on the principles of Christian architecture for Pontifex University’s Master of Sacred Arts program, Geoff’s was the first name that occurred to me, and we are delighted to have him on our faculty. He created a course on the principle of beauty in architecture, sharing his knowledge and passion with the next generation of designers. He is also actively involved in the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, for whom he also teaches.

Geoff told me: “I had begun to follow (David’s) blog thewayofbeauty.org shortly after graduation.  A passing reference to beauty’s importance in architecture school spurred more interest in the Way of Beauty blog. Architectural fundamentals such as proportioning, order, historic precedence had been introduced to me in school, but these were all atomized at the university. The Way of Beauty course helped unite these scattered, seemingly disunited design principles, prioritize them, and direct them towards their proper end.  The two-week naturalistic drawing course was enriched through the practice and explanation of the Liturgy of the Hours, along with David’s engaging lectures. This early foundation in beauty has proven a blessing for me. Without it, the busyness and business of architecture could cloud the objective of art and architecture, which is always ordered to our ultimate end. Teaching for Pontifex has provided me the great opportunity to share these lessons and lay that all important foundation for my students.”

Since joining Norman Davenport Askins Architects in 2015, Geoff has contributed to the growing reputation of an already highly respected firm. The firm is known for its meticulous attention to historical detail and collaboration with skilled craftsmen. It has won numerous design awards, and his work has played a significant role in earning these accolades.

Principles of harmonious proportion inform Geoff’s designs. A recently completed home showcases this approach, with carefully staggered window sizes and frame proportions creating a naturally pleasing aesthetic. This attention to classical principles, combined with an understanding of modern living requirements, has become a hallmark of his work. This adaptation of traditional design principles to contemporary living is necessary for a living tradition that participates in the universal principles of beauty, but in a way that connects with people today. In order to be able to do this, the architect must have an understanding of the tradition, and of how these principles are manifested in all buildings from the most magnificent cathedrals and grand civic buildings to humble (and some not so humble) beautiful homes. The designs should not be identical in each case, but the embedded principle of cosmic beauty appropriately expressed in each case, will direct the souls of all to the Creator of the cosmos, who is God.

It is important, if we want a culture of beauty that today’s architects understand, as Geoff does in common with architects of the past, that all human activity can be ordered, through the beauty of the environment, to our heavenly end.

It is heartening to see a firm like Norman Davenport Askins Architects with Geoff Yovanovic as its newest partner, perpetuating timeless, beautifully crafted homes that honor the past while embracing the future.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

“Modern formlessness is repellant... We are beginning, perhaps, to recover from our blindness”

What modern liturgists thought we needed... (source)

The reaction of an Italian reader to the Italian translation of my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Nobile bellezza, sublime santità, Fede & Cultura, 2021), struck me as quite interesting and I wanted to share it, slightly adapted, in English.

It is not surprising that the Church has been infected by the temper of the times and its denigration of beauty — albeit as a laggard follower of contemporaneity, with the usual delay and very little awareness of changing fashions. Modernity was already giving up the ghost to postmodernity when a Council was called finally to meet and embrace it.

Since the death of Pius XII, there has been a vocal urgency in Catholicism, fatuous yet urgent, to recover the “Jewishness” of Christ, supposedly obliterated by two millennia of Latinity (there is much irony here, considering that the reformed liturgy removes so many Jewish elements that had had a place there); the “Kerygma” or “original message of the first community,” supposedly obscured by twenty centuries of commentary and interpretation; the “simplicity and poverty” of the liturgy, which is felt to be distorted by Latin and Gregorian chant and really anything elaborate or majestic.

Purveyors of novelty rewrite hymns and paintings to the measure of little kids, who, I suppose, are to them a symbol of a “new” humanity without history or education. They ask ultra-modern architecture to build churches as much like “tents” as possible (because God “pitched His tent among us”), or that at least look like casual, unadorned containers of refugee crowds (since we are a “people on the move”): denied the lofty vaults and uplifting domes, the roofs have to be flat jetties or skylights, the walls of bare concrete so that brutal matter gets the better of form (perhaps form would be a distraction from what is essential…). Everything reminds one of industrial architecture, the highest point of coincidence — according to a certain way of thinking — between the Archaic and the Functional.

The whole approach has an unequivocal meaning: the ecclesiastical innovators believe they are hurling the (original) Revelation against the (subsequent and deviating) Tradition. Neither do they realize, I fear, that the era of the contemporary as a return to the archaic, which has scattered external and internal carnage and ruin, is coming to an end — has run its course. The exhaustion of totalitarian ideologies is its most conspicuous symptom.
 

...was not the tradition in which Catholics were at home, and in which many still feel most at home, in spite of decades of suppression (photo from 1950s: source).

A subjective indication of that exhaustion is the combination of nausea and boredom we feel in the face of yet another “abstract” or “informal” painting, or yet another rational and functional piece of architecture, even as painters and architects continue to recycle their tired utilitarian forms, unable to find a beautiful form for the “postmodern” breakthrough to which they pay lip service. Yet it was (in some disciplines at least) precisely the penetration of the true archaic layers of humanity that began to put us on the road to recovery, the road to rediscovering the primal sources of religion in awe, wonder, mystery, infinity, and the necessity of sacrifice, purification, and rituality. But our reformers have managed to make the archaic not a source of new life, but a stylized archaeological remnant of past (and sometimes imaginary) phases of Christianity.

Every human coexistence — except our own “mass” one — is the present emergence of a traditionary past. We begin to guess that the archaic removed from the living process of handing-down is nothing more than museum residue, enigmatic and dead. That is why what Christians were arguably doing in the year 300 is much less important than what they were doing, well or poorly, throughout all the modern centuries right into the decades before the Council. That continuity with a truly active tradition, whatever its flaws (and flaws are never absent in human endeavors), was and remains the most faithful channel for us to tap into the origin of our culture: the living Archaic that it preserves and passes on. There is more of the Church of the year 300 in the Tridentine Mass than there could ever be in the reformed one, in spite of this or that oration plucked from an old manuscript.

My hope is that one day the Catholic world will realize this, too. Contemporary forms that disgust us by their vacuity, artificiality, or arbitrariness indicate that we are beginning to miss Tradition, that we feel a terrible want, and that our modern formlessness is repellant, at least among those who have a sense of beauty left within. We are beginning, perhaps, to recover from our blindness.
 

From a midnight Mass in 2023, in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe: modern men gratefully participating in an age-old ritual.

As a number of authors have emphasized in recent years, it is the stubbornly unmodern character of the traditional Roman Rite that wins for it a uniquely potent place in the "marketplace of ideas" or, for that matter, the "marketplace of religious practices." It does not present itself as a product of our own technical skill, or an expression of our (purportedly) superior judgment as we gaze out over a past littered with discarded prejudices; it is not an appendage to any program, party, or philosophy. It is more like a literary tradition that grows over many centuries and retains a unity-in-diversity that is stronger than the various tendencies of all of its parts, and greater than any one participant in it.

This rite offers itself to us as a whole and complete body of rite, symbol, text, chant, and gesture that belongs to no one and opens itself to every one. This overwhelming trait makes it both deeply challenging (for it is vast and subtle) and serenely unthreatening (for it remains aloof, inevitable, and impersonal) — at least, to those who are serious about prayer.

Right the way it is and has been and will be.

The Dominican Church of the Holy Trinity in Krakow

Today is the feast of Saint Hyacinth, (the Latinized form of the Polish name Jacek), the founder of the Order of Friars Preachers in Poland. Born into the noble Odrowaz family in the year 1185, he was made a prebendary canon at Sandomir after completing his studies in both canon law and theology. While accompanying his uncle, the bishop of Krakow, to Rome in 1218, he met St Dominic; on seeing the latter raise a man from the dead by his prayers, he and his brother, Bl Ceslaus, were both received into the Order, and sent back home to establish it in their native land. St Hyacinth’s missionary works are said to have taken him through Prussia and Lithuania, into Scandinavia, and parts even further east; his brother Ceslaus went to Bohemia, and many other regions of Eastern Europe, eventually succeeding Hyacinth as Polish provincial superior. St Hyacinth himself, after returning to Krakow, died in the house of his order in 1257, on the feast of the Assumption; he was canonized by Pope Clement VIII in 1594.

St. Hyacinth crossing the Vistula river on his cloak, from the cloister of the church of the Holy Trinity, Krakow. A similar miracle is attributed to another early Dominican Saint, Raymond of Penyafort.

The church of the Holy Trinity in Krakow is the home of one of the largest Dominican communities in the world, and maintains a studium generale where friars from other Polish houses come to study. Much of the Divine Office is still sung in Latin, using the Order’s proper chants, in the main choir of the church. Like most of the large churches in Krakow, it is always busy, but especially on Sunday; when I visited it many years ago, I came in towards the end of the late-sleepers’ Mass, which starts at 1:00, and it was absolutely packed.

The 14th century façade, in the local style known as “Vistula Gothic”, after the name of the largest river in Poland, which runs through Krakow.

The nave of the church, seen from near the main doors.

The high altar contains a portion of the relics of St Emygdius, the patron saint of Ascoli Piceno in the Marches region of Italy. His feast day, August 5th, was also the feast of Saint Dominic within the Dominican Order until the later part of the sixteenth century.

The reredos of the high altar. After a massive fire destroyed most of the church in 1850, the entire interior was redone in the neo-Gothic style. The wooden carvings throughout the building, (the reredos, the confessionals and the choir stalls) are all the work of a single lay brother.

On the left side of the church, a large staircase leads up to the chapel of St. Hyacinth. This is the view from the platform in front of the chapel, looking out into the front part of the choir.

A view of the part of the nave from above.

The altar of the chapel of St. Hyacinth, containing his relics.

.The altar of the chapel of St. Dominic.

Part of the cloister, which is full of funerary monuments and pictures. Since the fall of communism, the Dominican Friars have regained control of most of the conventual buildings attached to the church.

This 15th century tomb of a Polish noblewoman shows her praying the rosary; it is the oldest image of a Rosary in Poland.

The back of the church, seen from Dominikanska Street, which runs alongside it. Some of the Baroque chapels added onto the building survived the fire of 1850.

The towers of St Mary’s Basilica on the main square of Krakow, seen from the gardens of the Holy Trinity complex.

A Bill To Prescribe Traditional Architectural Styles for Federal Buildings

Beautiful architecture by the people, for the people, and of the people?

Last Wednesday, Rep. Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, introduced legislation to codify an executive order by former President Trump that made classical architecture the model for new government buildings, an order which was axed by President Biden. He was recently interviewed on the subject by on Fox News.

The “Beautifying Federal Civic Architecture Act” declares “traditional and classical” architectural styles to be preferred for new Federal government buildings. This offers hope, at least, that we might again see a national culture that is beautiful and is in harmony with Christian values.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident, famously said on coming to the US (quoting Dostoevsky) that, ‘Beauty will save the world.’ I would assert that in order to save the world, we must first save America, and that in order to do that, beauty must save America. I write as one, incidentally, who recently became an American citizen, because I want to help save the West through beauty.

Those who wish to see a strong American society rooted in traditional values focus, quite rightly, on the political battles, but can forget at times that this ought to be an urgent cultural battle as well. This is a shame, because a noble and accessible culture of beauty is the greatest ally that those politicians who strive for what is good in America can have. As the British conservative philosopher, the late Roger Scruton, put it, when the world around us is beautiful, ‘it tells us that we are at home in the world.’

When we are at home in the world, our desire is to conserve and develop further what is good, rather than to destroy the institutions of society. Furthermore, beauty inspires in us love for our fellow men, generates a culture of faith and virtue that supports the generation of wealth, and our desire to care for the poor. I have previously written about this principle here.

The neo-Marxist theorists who have steadily gained control of the institutions that influence culture in the West understand this well. They have nothing but disdain for the common taste, and for decades, they have deliberately sought to further their political goals by promoting a contemporary culture of ugliness, despair and death, in order to spark revolutionary and destructive anger directed against the America of the Founding Fathers. Beauty raises our hearts and minds to God, and in so doing, reinforces our desire to live by American values, which are rooted in Scripture and Judeo-Christian values. The Marxists know this, even if many Christians seem not to. Accordingly, the Marxists push ugliness, because they know it undermines traditional values. Their architecture of despair distracts our gaze from ‘heavenly things’, as St Paul puts it, and hence from an adherence to objective truth, leaving us vulnerable to manipulation by false propaganda.

The brutalist US Dept of Health and Human Services, the Hubert H Humphrey building. This speaks directly of the disdain that the elites who push this style have for those whom they serve. It says, ‘You may not like it, but we know better than you, as with everything else we do.’

I was delighted therefore to see in December 2020, right at the end of his term, that President Donald Trump (not a man popularly associated with high culture) issue a barely noticed Executive Order mandating that federal buildings should adopt the traditional American style of classical architecture. I wrote about it at the time as a move that would set a standard for American buildings that could be a visible symbol of the traditional American values of faith, freedom and justice. At last, I thought, at the highest level, we have a move that recognizes the importance of culture in preserving and promoting American values, which are rooted in Judeo-Christian values. “If the EO survives the next administration, it will, contrary to what it’s critics on the left claim, likely encourage creativity, authentic originality, and a new richness in architectural style that can be the driving force for a beautiful American culture that speaks authentically of its past and directs us hopefully to its future.”

It turns out that was an important ‘if’. Within a month of Joe Biden becoming President, the EO was scrapped.

Now, thanks to Rep Jim Banks, there is a proposed bill that seeks to do the same, and which adds more detail and direction to the original mandate. For example, as his press release tells us, it specifies that: 

“The term ‘traditional architecture’ includes classical architecture; and the historic humanistic architecture, including Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and other Mediterranean styles of architecture historically rooted in various regions of America, the bill states. 

The bill denounces modern, ‘brutalist’ styles of buildings made popular in the 20th century, defined as a ‘massive and block-like appearance with a rigid geometric style and large-scale use of exposed poured concrete.’ Buildings should instead be modeled after ‘Greek and Roman antiquity’ like the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. 

Banks said his bill aims to restore respect for the beauty of traditional American culture. 

A 2020 poll from the National Civic Art Society found that 72% of American respondents prefer classical and traditional design for federal buildings. Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, said he is fully behind Banks' bill. 

"It is crucial that the design of federal buildings reflects the preferences of ordinary Americans — namely, that such buildings be beautiful, uplifting, and designed in a classical or traditional style.”

I am hoping that this bill might make progress, and even if not made law, might set the standard for how legislation can have an impact on the culture. 

Setting an example that will drive a wider American culture of beauty. 

On the whole, I believe that the culture is not created from the top-down, but from the bottom up. It is a pattern of how ordinary people interact and behave. So it is appropriate that a federal bill limits its attentions to the aspect of American architecture that it should properly be concerned with, that is federal architecture. This way, its influence beyond that is by example only. If people like what they see, they will be inspired to follow suit in the building design that they have an influence over. 

The Supreme Court building

Architecture for the people, not the elites 

This bill reflects a proper government concern for serving the people. If the views of ordinary people were taken into account, then I am pretty sure there would be no modernist architecture ever. (I am using modern in a broad sense to mean those styles that arise from a conscious rejection of Western tradition). A poll referred to by the drafters of the bill indicated that classical was the preferred style of the public and of federal workers - those who will actually have to look at and work in the buildings. This does not surprise me. In my experience of decades of talking to people about art and culture, it is the many - ordinary people (who don’t consider themselves members of the cognoscenti) who prefer traditional designs. On the other hand, it is the few - elites who are inclined to tell us what we ought to like - who advocate modernist designs, and who dominate the teaching institutions that form the architects who go on to design such buildings. 

A move that will encourage originality and creativity 

One argument that I am sure will be used against the bill is that it will stifle creativity. In fact, in my opinion, the opposite will happen. It will encourage a richer and more authentically American diversity of beautiful architecture than that produce by modernist architects.

As a rule, in art, if you define limits to creativity in one direction, creativity finds room for maneuver in other directions. Rather than being a prescription for sameness and sterility, it is exactly the opposite: a mandate for beautiful creativity and variety. 

History confirms this. Some of the most admired architectural styles began as attempts to copy the past. Without deliberate intent from the architects, their work was a product of the time and place in which it was created as well. So, for example, the High Renaissance classical style began as an attempt to recreate the classical style of the ancient Romans and Greeks. It quickly became its own distinct form of classicism known as Palladian architecture and in turn morphed into English Georgian and the American colonial style.

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Architectural Reflections on the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima

Basilica of the Rosary, Fatima Shrine

Today, May 13, is the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. I recently had the privilege of visiting the shrine in Portugal, a large complex of several buildings formally known as the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima. The most touching aspect of the space is the piety of the pilgrims who flock there to honor the Mother of God and the three little shepherds who saw her. But the architecture is also difficult to ignore. In particular, I was struck by a dichotomy between the message of Fatima--especially the prediction that Russia would spread her errors around the world--and the shrine's own artistic statements.

Chapel of the Apparitions

The three shepherds (Sr. Lucia, St. Jacinta, and St. Francisco) had visions in several different locations, but the most important was at Cova da Iria (Peaceful Hollow), where a total of six Marian apparitions occurred, including the disclosure of the Three Secrets and the Miracle of the Sun. In that cove, Our Lady appeared on top of a young holm-oak tree no more than a meter high. Within a year of the last apparition (October 13, 2017), the local townsfolk built on the site a small, charming chapel in obedience to one of Our Lady's commands. Anti-clerical fanatics bombed the chapel in 1922 but it was quickly restored. The humble monument is now encased in a modernist glass and wooden structure that can be mistaken for a highway rest stop and surrounded by a sparse, postconciliar sanctuary where Mass is celebrated on a free-standing altar. The interior of the chapel is inaccessible to pilgrims.

Chapel of the Apparitions

First Basilica

A much grander fulfillment of Our Lady’s command to build a chapel in her honor is found not far away at the top of the hill, where the children were play-making a small stone wall when they saw the “lightning” that preceded the first Marian apparition on May 13, 1917. The neo-Baroque Basilica of the Rosary, which was begun in 1928 and completed in 1953, contains the tombs of Sr. Lucia, St. Jacinta, and St. Francisco as well as fifteen altars in honor of the mysteries of the rosary. The cruciform church has many virtuous elements, including: an imposing spire that is topped with the same crown that adorns the statue of Our Lady of Fatima; a façade with a statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary donated by American Catholics; and a robust representation of Portuguese saints and saints associated with the rosary both inside the church and atop the surrounding colonnade.

Yet the basilica, in my opinion, lacks the marvelous blend of transcendence and intimacy that some other Portuguese churches have. The grey interior has a cold vibe to it, the stained glass windows smack of a modernist antipathy to form, and some of the paintings of the events of Fatima are, well, strange. Above the high altar is a scene where the Blessed Virgin sends Saint Gabriel to distribute Holy Communion to the three children. The artist’s depiction of Our Lady reminds me of the ghostly, floating female figure in Raiders of the Lost Ark before she turns into a terrifying harpy and melts the faces off Nazis.

High altar of the Basilica of the Rosary

Outside Altar

A little further down the hill in front of the Basilica of the Rosary is a covered sanctuary where the most populous Masses are celebrated. Except for a cross-less image of Jesus either rising from the dead or jumping off the high dive, there are no architectural or ornamental indications that this is a place of importance, nor is there any sacramental symbolism. To a Catholic, it looks like a sanctuary on Holy Thursday after the stripping of the altars; to a non-Christian, it might be taken for an outdoor pavilion with limited seating and only one table.

Outside Altar in Front of the Basilica of the Rosary

Second Basilica

The outdoor altar looks over a vast, barren plaza that would be perfect for a remake of Triumph of the Will or a Soviet parade celebrating their victory in Stalingrad. At the other end of the plaza is the second basilica. The Church of the Holy Trinity was dedicated in 2007, the 90th anniversary of the apparitions. According to one of the many tourist booklets on the subject:

Under the authority of the Greek architect Alexandros Tombazis, the church represents a bold design with its main structure partially underground….It is constructed in a circular shape of 125 square metres in diameter, void of any supporting columns.[1]

Bold indeed. Chesterton argues that while the circle is an excellent symbol for madness and for centripetal religions like Buddhism, the cross is the symbol “at once of mystery and of health” and, of course, the centrifugal religion that is Christianity.[2] Unsurprisingly, the traditional design of a church, both in the West and in Mr. Tombazis’ native Greece, is cruciform. We may also add that like Leninist ideology, the circle is anti-hierarchical and radically egalitarian—except for the center which, like a geometrical Politburo, reigns over an infinite number of nameless radii.

The boast about the church being “void of any supporting columns” is also noteworthy. Columns are “abstracted people” (the Doric is based on the proportions of a man and the Ionic on the proportions of a woman), and so the columns of a church building betoken the “pillars of the Church,” those who uphold the Body of Christ and promote its spiritual mission.[3] A church “void of columns” therefore implies a Church without hierarchy or heroes.

The Plaza, a large crucifix and, in the background, the Basilica of the Holy Trinity

Other Features

The shrine has one distinctive monument that credits the fall of Soviet communism to Our Lady of Fatima. Bordering the plaza is a piece of the Berlin Wall. After it fell in 1989, Portuguese workers residing in Berlin commandeered a section of the wall and donated it to the shrine. Outside the shrine, Hungarians grateful for the end of communism in their country had stations of the cross built along the path that the children used to tend their sheep and where they received several apparitions. To the victor go the spoils.

Section of the Berlin Wall, Fatima Shrine

Conclusion

Despite these important reminders of the evils of communism, the shrine as a whole—thanks in large part to the plaza and the second basilica—feels like a product of communism. There are stylistic differences between modernist and Soviet architecture, but they share a contempt for celestial hierarchy, beauty, and form. If one did not know the history of the twentieth century, one would have thought that Russia began to spread her errors in the very spot where Our Lady warned us about Russia spreading her errors. It is a shame that the form of the Fatima shrine is so at odds with the content that inspired its creation.

Notes

[1] Fernando Leite, S.I., The Apparitions of Fatima (Secretariado Nacional Do Apostolado Da Oracao: 2017), 42-43.

[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

[3] Denis McNamara, How to Read Churches (Rizzoli: 2017), 30.

Architectural Aids: Two Reviews

Sketch by Peter F. Anson

A review of Carl Van Treeck and Aloysius Croft, Symbols in the Church (Romanitas Press, 2021) and Peter F. Anson, Churches: Their Plan and Furnishing (Romanitas Press, 2021)

It is a fact without doubt that the Roman Missal represents in its entirety the loftiest and most important work in ecclesiastical literature, being that it shows forth with the greatest fidelity the life-history of the Church, that sacred poem in the making of which ha posto mano e cielo e terra [“Heaven and earth have set their hand,” Dante, Paradiso XXV,2].[1]

The temple of Solomon… was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle… Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice.[2]

Here is a riddle: What are the three most important books in Catholic life that are not books? The answer is: the Bible (which, despite its modern binding, is not a book but a library of works co-authored by the Holy Spirit ); the traditional Roman Missal (which, though also appearing in book form, is a set of instructions for a sacred action); and the church (a building that, like the Holy Temple, is meant to be read cover to cover).

But if it is true that the church, like all great architecture, is a book (Victor Hugo calls architecture the great book of humanity), then it takes training to read it. One must learn its alphabet and grammar, so to speak, in order to understand its sentences and paragraphs. And yet not many people today are artistically or architecturally literate. One of modern Catholicism’s deficiencies is the widespread inability of its faithful to decipher the symbols of their Faith.

It is for this reason that we can be grateful to Romanitas Press for republishing two volumes on the subject: Carl Van Treeck and Aloysius Croft’s 1936 Symbols in the Church and Peter F. Anson’s 1947 Churches: Their Plan and Furnishing.

Peter Anson (1889-1975) was a restless and talented soul. Born near the sea in Portsmouth, England and trained as an architect, he entered an Anglican Benedictine monastery in 1910. Three years later, he and his community submitted to the Holy See and became Catholic. Anson eventually became an Oblate and the monastery’s librarian; he also founded the Apostleship of the Sea for Catholic seafarers. After a breakdown in health, however, Anson decided to return to the world, and at the age of 35 he earned a living as an artist while seeing the world. He became a Franciscan Tertiary for a while in Italy but returned to his nomadic life before eventually settling down in a village of sailors and fisherman in Macduff, Scotland, where he could savor the life of the sea once more.

Anson wrote Church Plans as a practical guide for building and remodeling churches. The author wisely cautions against altering churches simply because they do not conform to contemporary sensibilities, and he frowns upon antiquarian and unimaginative resuscitations of earlier styles. His language of functionalism and his disdain for “fancy symbolism” are slightly troublesome, for they could be interpreted as an excuse to produce barren barns and call them churches. But Anson himself does not go in this direction: his meticulous illustrations and moderate counsel open the reader up to the riches of sacred architecture. Anson faithfully operates within the strictures of the 1917 Code of Canon Law and other Church legislation. His summary of these regulations is quite useful, although not all of it is still valid, such as the prohibition of electric lights for illuminating the altar (112).

As you may have guessed from his biography, Anson was an eccentric fellow, and Church Plans is an eccentric work. The author does not shy from offering his own advice in addition to official Church rules. Pulpits, he opines, should be elevated, made of wood (“it looks warmer and gives more color to a church”), and have a door (“many an eloquent preacher would feel far more at his ease if knew there was no danger of falling backwards”) and a solid front (“it is distracting to see the preacher’s cassock and feet”)(156). He also holds the odd view that if the weather were perfectly clement every day, we would not need churches at all but would celebrate Mass in an open field (3). He seems to forget that churches do not simply provide shelter from the rain but, among other things, help keep our minds from wandering.

The chief weakness of Church Plans is that it tries to square the circle between traditional architecture and modernist. Anson quotes passages that advocate placing the altar in the center of the church and advises a “happy mean” between the new view and the old (39). But how can you have a happy mean between an altar in the center of the church and an altar at the end: placing it three-quarters of the way in? Fortunately, Anson’s go-to authority on practical matters is St. Charles Borromeo, so he almost never ends up recommending something silly. And although he includes illustrations of modernist abominations (there is a bleak, free-standing altar for Mass facing the people from 1935 Germany), his own rich sketches betray the stark differences. After being enchanted by page after page of beautiful churches, seeing a design by Hans Herkommer or Eric Gill is like a punch in the gut.

Sketch by P.F. Anson. Yes!

Sketch by P.F. Anson. No!

Although Church Plans is thin on symbolic explanations, it is nonetheless useful for gaining a better understanding of the meaning and parts of a church. Equipped with this understanding, readers can then continue their education in sacred architecture with the works of men like Duncan Stroik.

Carl Van Treeck and Aloysius Croft’s Symbols in the Church was also written as a practical guide for artists and “ecclesiastical craftsmen” rather than students of symbolism (vi). Annotations are scarce as well as scholarly explanations of styles, historical context, etc. Like Church Plans, the images are illustrated with black-and-white sketches rather than photographs. The disadvantage of this choice is that the image is more dependent on the viewpoint of the artist; the advantage, however, is a unity of presentation, a greater beauty, and, in this case, the superior viewpoint of the artist, Carl Van Treeck. The basic idea behind Symbols in the Church is to introduce artists to “the beautiful picture language” of the Mystical Body of Christ (vi) so that they can adapt these symbols to contemporary use. Happily, the authors did not follow their own rule strictly but included some early representations of Christ that are no longer recognizable as such, e.g., a griffin, a peacock, a phoenix, and a bird in a cage (representing gestation in His mother’s womb!). As a result, the reader catches something of the breadth and depth of Catholic symbolism, which has varied from century to century and place to place.

Symbols in the Church begins with an interesting chapter on symbols and symbolism in which the authors argue that all Christian art must necessarily be symbolic because Christian art portrays some element of the supernatural. (“Sheer naturalness” they state earlier, is “the death of all liturgical art” [vi]). The rest of the book is divided according to subject matter: the Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Gospels and Evangelists, the Apostles, the Church, the Sacraments, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Ecclesiastical Year, and the Four Last Things.

The entire book is a delight to peruse, but I was especially fascinated by the symbols of the Church, some of which surprised me (there are a lot more than just Noah’s Ark and Peter’s Barque). And I was struck by an image of the Last Judgment depicting scales, one of which is filled with the cross, the anchor, and the crown of thorns, the other of which is laden with jewels. The latter tilts upward: the virtues and sufferings of the faithful soul outweigh the riches and comforts of the world.

Plate XXXVIII of Symbols in the Church. Symbols of death (1 and 2), judgment (3 and 4), and damnation (5).

Church Plans and Symbols in the Church fit hand in glove: Anson more or less tells you how to build a church, and Van Treeck and Croft tell you how to decorate it. I recommend these books to anyone interested in Catholic art and architecture but especially as gifts to priests and planning committees in charge of building or remodeling churches. God willing, with aids like these, “writing” beautiful churches will once again become common.