One Sunday morning I did not feel well enough to leave the house for Mass. By the afternoon I had recovered sufficiently, but Masses at the parish I attend across town were already over for the day. I had no choice but to catch the late-afternoon Mass at the parish down the street. For years I have avoided that parish, except when in extremis, because of persistent liturgical abuses and an ambience that makes a train station seem more conducive to prayerful reflection. You may have a church like it not far from you.
Built in the 1970s, it is a truncated cube. The walls and ceiling have exposed steel beams. The stained-glass windows are so abstract that you cannot tell whether a human form represents a male or female. There is almost no statuary art. The tabernacle is hard to find and, when found, is uninspiring. The vestibule, which is not separated by a wall from the body of the church, is called the “gathering place,” a signal that talking is encouraged there, and so the church is noisy.
I suppose I should have written the previous paragraph in the past tense because things are different now. The church has been renovated. On the whole, there is a net improvement—but at what a cost! The renovation bill was $5.6 million. There is an outstanding debt of $2.4 million. This is not a poor parish, so the bill will be paid off soon enough, but one wonders whether anyone has gotten his money’s worth.
Today a gurgling baptismal immersion pool sits at the head of the main aisle. The drop ceiling hides the former industrial look, but the new ceiling consists of large, free-floating triangles that are supposed to represent sails, or so said the architect. The altar, “presider’s chair,” ambo, cantor stand, and deacon’s chair are solid cherry in a style that seemed dated when introduced in the 1970s.
The one real improvement is the crucifix. Previously there was a giant, metallic representation of the figure on the Shroud of Turin. Now there is a bronze corpus fashioned in a traditional style. It really looks like Christ, but the corpus is not attached to a cross. It hovers over a cruciform negative space cut into the large freestanding wall that is behind the altar. Not a bad effect, actually.
During Mass I took in the architectural changes and thought about what might have been accomplished with $5.6 million. Was this expenditure really an example of good stewardship? The irony is that the pastor and parish leaders are decidedly liberal. Inside and outside of Mass they talk about social justice, not about the importance of doctrinal and liturgical fidelity. I wonder what happened to the preferential option for the poor.
I do not mind big bucks being spent on churches. After all, that was done for centuries in Europe, the result being that continent’s chief architectural treasures. But it is easy to spend lots of money for meager results, and my neighborhood church is a good example of that. I wonder whether it might not be good to call a moratorium on renovations for a decade or two, until pastors who were ordained in the 1970s have had a chance to retire. The younger guys, on the whole, seem to have a much better sense of “sacred space.”