How Catholic Church Architecture Is Losing Its Identity

When my father, AIA architect Thomas C. Nickels, designed our new parish church, Saints Philip and James in Exton, Pennsylvania, it was understood that he would adhere to the three natural laws of church architecture—verticality, permanence and iconography. These were the years before the Second Vatican Council when Catholic churches had not yet discovered churches-in-the-round, hot tub baptismals, or suspended-from-the-ceiling UFO crucifixes, the only major ‘sacred object’ accent in an otherwise blank, Walter Gropius-inspired “starting from zero” church interior that could easily double as a high school gymnasium or work out room.

So, my father designed this very conventional looking church with side altars, a communion rail. It was a church with sacred objects, a space that anyone could easily identify as a Catholic church.

As far back as the 1920s and 30s, the American Catholic church had its own design style. Early liturgical movements in the country at that time made the crucifix a prominent feature in Catholic churches. In the decades before Vatican II, the American Catholic altar was relatively unencumbered with other images. The combination of altar, tabernacle and crucifix, minus saints and angels, stood in stark contrast to the interior of most European cathedrals. This oversimplification was really a precursor to modernism.

That modernism came to a head after the Second Vatican Council was convened to renew and invigorate the Church. While words like renew and invigorate have a positive feeling, that’s not quite what happened.

The Council unleashed a storm that not only affected how Catholics worship, but the buildings in which they worship. That windstorm produced a fair amount of architectural self destruction.

As a young twenty something agnostic-- I was visiting friends in Boulder, Colorado and hadn’t stepped foot in a Catholic church for several years—I came across a newly built post Vatican II church. It was a church in the round; reminding me of a book report I’d given in high school, Inside the Space Ships by George Adamski. I entered the church and barely recognized it as Catholic. A circular altar table with a plus sign surrounded by burlap banners with what looked like drawings by elementary school children—a yellow sun with long rays, a smiley face, some fish, and a garden of buttercups. It seemed I’d walked into a day care center. I looked in vain for an icon, an old rusted statue of the Virgin, a portion of a fresco, but found nothing. That’s when I realized that church architecture like this makes sense only if the building is filled with people. Empty, these churches were just auditoriums.

According to Michael Rose, author of Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces—and How We Can Change Them Back Again, the catalyst for the change was a duplicitous 1978 draft statement by the U.S. Bishop’s Committee on Liturgy, entitled ‘Environment and Art in Catholic Worship.’

Rose asserts that this document was “cunningly published in the name of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, implying approval from Rome. But the Vatican II document, Sacrosanctum Concilum, which was cited in the draft statement as the reason for the ‘wreck-o-ovation,’ did not call for the wholesale slaughter of traditional Catholic Church architecture.

What Vatican II actually said was: “The practice of placing sacred images in churches so that they can be venerated by the faithful is to be maintained.”

Many rebel U.S. Catholic bishops apparently wanted to reshape Catholic churches into more people-oriented worship spaces.

This idea had actually been around prior to the misreading of the texts of Vatican II.

In 1952, there was a booklet published by the Liturgy Program at the University Of Notre Dame called ‘Speaking of Liturgical Architecture.’ Its author, a Father H.A. Reinhold, was a respected liturgist of his day. The booklet was a compilation of Reinhold’s lectures in 1947 delivered at the University Of Notre Dame.’

Reinhold, an advocate of the form follows function, campaigned for a fan-shaped congregation or a church in the round. Reinhold didn’t get very far at the time, but his ideas lay dormant until the so called “spirit of Vatican II,” became a catch word in the Catholic world. This seemingly benign phrase was used to justify everything in the modern Church from a more charitable attitude towards non-Catholics to the use of Raisin Oatmeal cookies at Communion time. The phrase also encouraged bishops and liturgists to start at Gropius’s ground zero, forgoing organic change for the rough and tumble world of “let’s just bomb Dresden and start from scratch.”

This meant plain wooden altar tables rather than marble high altars with images of saints and angels; carpeted rooms; plain glass stained windows, potted plants in place of traditional Catholic artwork; small and nondescript Stations of the Cross that disappear into the walls; churches in the round resembling MTV soundstages; the elimination of altar rails and sanctuary lamps. Crucifixes were replaced by wooden crosses or geometric plus signs; the traditional baptismal transformed into a hot tub. Older churches, including many cathedrals, were stripped bare as high altars were removed and dismantled, and historic frescoes and icons whitewashed.

Suddenly, choir lofts were a thing of the past, as choirs were placed in front of the church alongside the main altar. The area would soon become crowded with the so called presider’s chair, lecterns, and microphones, recalling—if you are of a certain generation—the Tom Snyder Show or the Dick Cavitt stage set.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of churches worldwide were destroyed by the iconoclasts.

Fishtown’s Holy Name parish, founded in 1905, had an architectural wrek-o-vation in the free wheeling ‘70s. The project was the brainchild of a Dominican pastor.

He cut off the high altar and installed a Home Depot style butcher block in the center of the church. Then, as if trying to relive His WWII Air Force days, he hung a 747-sized crucifix from the ceiling. He and his Dominican cohorts then ripped out the marble altar rail, and covered the sanctuary in Holiday Inn-style carpet that tends to buckle over a period of time. When the new pastor arrived in 1998, he looked at the church and commented, “This is a mess,” as if surveying the damage caused by an exploding carbuncle.

The Dominicans, unlike the iconoclasts in the 6th and 7th Centuries, did show some restraint. Somehow they managed to leave the side altars intact, perhaps as a symbol of Remembrance of Things Past. They also spared the statues and even allowed a bejeweled Infant of Prague image — a nod to tradition if there ever was one — to remain in its quiet side altar niche.

Fishtown’s new pastor got rid of the butcher block, and replaced it with a real high altar from a church that had closed in the city in 1999. He also painted the church and added ceramic tile to the sanctuary. What he could not replace was the altar rail.

Vatican II did not issue any edicts calling for the removal of church altar rails. What happened is that in many American churches this was done more or less by design consensus when communion-in-hand became a popular form of receiving the sacrament. The altar rail, traditionally, is the western version of the Eastern iconostasis (a screen of icons that frames the altar). In many modern Catholic churches today there’s no delineation of the sanctuary; an altar rail used to signify that one was entering a place of special reverence.

Across town, in the Northeast, the once beautiful church of Saint Leo’s underwent something like botched cosmetic surgery.

The pastor of Saint Leo’s told me that the reformers got to the church in the 1960s, barely a nanosecond after the close of Vatican II. They took out the big marble altar along with the domed pulpit. Unlike the rabid Dominicans, who only half-wrecked Holy Name, the St. Leo reformers dumped all the church statues in the church school, where they soon fell into disrepair. As for the church’s large sanctuary lamp that looked as though it might have once hung in a European cathedral, it was replaced with a small, non-descript Martha Stewart/Target-inspired patio lamp. The exquisite altar rail was also ripped out as if it had been nothing but a tapeworm eating at the body of Christ.

When the new pastor, one Father Sweeney, came to St. Leo’s in 2009, he couldn’t get over the incongruity: old Gothic church on the outside, a gutted butcher’s specimen on the inside. He knew he had to do something, but what?

First, he threw out the ironing board and replaced it with a marble high altar blessed by St. John Neumann. The makeover continued with a vengeance.

“The church went from being a meeting hall to a cathedral in a couple of months,” Fr. Sweeney told me.

No matter where I travel, whether it’s Louisville, Kentucky, Vienna, a remote island in the Caribbean, Paris, Montreal or Quebec City—I see revamped Catholic sacred spaces, cathedrals stripped bare, such as Louisville’s downtown cathedral or even Thomas Merton’s old church at the Abbey of Gethsemane.

When I traveled to Eisenstadt, Austria, and visited the so called Haydn Church of the chapel of Mercy Mountain church, a church decorated and embellished by Prince Nicholas III, I was shown a new addition, not far from the Haydn crypt. My tour guide, visibly embarrassed, pointed out the Reconciliation Room, a substitution for the centuries old confessionals. The white plastic and smoky glass construction framed with a few potted plants could easily have doubled as a men’s room. Only the absence of flushing sounds set it apart as a space for contemplation. It reminded me of the hot tub baptismals I’d seen in some new churches where the constant gushing water makes the ordinary pilgrim (as Rose suggested) think of his or her bladder.

As Michael Rose explains, there’s no focal point in the modern worship space. The altar is too low to be visible in most cases, and the priest’s chair, at the level of the congregation, is inconspicuous to all but those sitting or standing in the first two rows. In many modern churches there’s no sanctuary distinct from the nave.

The chief architect of modern church design, Father Richard Vosko, a member of the Diocese of Albany Architecture and Building Commission, has designed/redesigned or gutted over 120 Catholic churches. Father Vosko’s brainchild is Cardinal Mahoney’s Los Angeles cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels, aka the Yellow Armadillo or the “Taj Mahoney.”

“This cathedral,” Vosko stated to the press, “is of its own time, of its own liturgy, of its own people.” Vosko added that he was not interested in establishing a sacred place like the European cathedrals of past centuries.

But this multi-million dollar conference hall is usually used as an example when parish committees and pastors inquire about Fr. Vosko’s services. Vosko’s “cookie-cutter” churches all have the same look: they are functionalist or industrialist with harsh lines; they are dominated by colder materials such as metal, concrete and glass. They are noted for their off-centered or less-than-prominent altars and, of course, there’s a lack of a clearly defined sanctuary or nave. There’s also a distinct lack of color and sacred imagery.

Vosko likes to refer to the 1978 document, Environment and Art in Catholic Worship — the bogus directive never approved by Rome — as the reason for “starting from zero.”

He likes tabernacles placed in obscure side chapels, away from the main altar. He opts for hot tub baptismal Jacuzzi, the removal of pews in favor of mobile chairs. His message is that everything should be “throw-a-way,” a church should be able to be cleared of all objects and double as a basketball court if need be.

In California, parishioners at the church of Saint Charles Borromeo in the San Fernando Valley, the so-called church of the stars (Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney worshipped here), are battling a possible church make-over by Vosko. Founded in 1920, St. Charles is one of the oldest churches in the San Fernando Valley. In 2002, a new pastor, Fr. Robert Gallagher, proposed the destruction of the church’s interior architecture. He wanted a church in the round, moveable chairs, an altar table, and a 747 crucifix, but parishioners revolted. They formed the St. Charles Borromeo Preservation Guild, collected petitions and planned a massive demonstration. An intimidated Fr. Gallagher beat a hasty retreat, with Vosko in the shadows, but after licking their wounds, the team soon reappeared, ready to tare out that tapeworm of an altar rail and turn the high altar over to Julia Child.

Today the parish is bracing itself for another go-round with Vosko and company. Unfortunately, they’ll get no help from Cardinal Mahoney, who likes his churches rare and bare.

Johann Winckelmann once noted that noble simplicity must not be confused with mere functionalism, abstract minimalism or crude banality. Unfortunately, that’s what the Diocese of Milwaukee got when they employed Vosko to redo the Milwaukee’s cathedral of Saint John. Archbishop Rembert Weakland was in command at the time, a name you may recognize from today’s news. Weakland’s plans to denude the old cathedral, especially the 40-foot high marble canopy over the high altar—something he decried as having “no artistic or historic value,” met with Vatican censure. But Weakland went ahead and did it anyway and now, the cathedral, denuded and stark, stands as a testament to fashionable bad taste.

Vosko, who says he gets his design ideas from Edward A. Sovik, author of the Lutheran tome, Architecture for Worship—a book in which Sovik says that it is his intention to “finish where the reformation Protestants left off 400 years ago”—continues to have some success in building Catholic churches that look like upscale libraries or nursing homes.

In 1831, Victor Hugo lamented the destruction of Notre Dame in Paris in his book The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo was not talking about the decapitated statues or injuries to the old queen of French cathedrals caused by the French Revolution, but to the grave damage that Notre Dame suffered at the hands of school-trained architects.

Hugo criticized the removal of colored glass stained windows, the interior which had been whitewashed, as well as the removal of the tower over the central part of the cathedral. Fashion, Hugo claimed, had done more mischief than revolutions: “It has cut to the quick—it has attacked the very bone and framework of the art,” he said.

Hugo called these school-trained architects slaves to bad taste and said they were guilty of willful destruction.

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”

Acts 17: 24-30

There are certainly bigger problems for Christians to worry about in this world than how pretty our buildings are. No building we can create is near glorious enough, and, honestly, I figure He’d rather we put the money toward better causes than ornate architecture.

Keep your eye on the ball.

SnakeDoc

In my 50s I’m still an enthusiastic Catholic, but... I remember entering my teens and thinking it was wrong to make us bring money to school to donate to the poor, while up the street at the church they were spending a fortune on remodeling. It shook my foundation and faith and it really took until I was in 30s and had kids to really get back “into” the church. A lot of my colleagues never recovered.

FTA:

Unfortunately, that’s what the Diocese of Milwaukee got when they employed Vosko to redo the Milwaukee’s cathedral of Saint John. Archbishop Rembert Weakland was in command at the time, a name you may recognize from today’s news. Weakland’s plans to denude the old cathedral, especially the 40-foot high marble canopy over the high altar—something he decried as having “no artistic or historic value,” met with Vatican censure. But Weakland went ahead and did it anyway and now, the cathedral, denuded and stark, stands as a testament to fashionable bad taste.

People wanted to buy the architectural features that were ripped out of the Cathedral -- columns, pediments, brackets, etc. Weakland claimed that they crumbled when being removed and could not be saved. I think that the crucifix over the altar is just bizarre. The throns are larger than the Christ figure. See below:

This photo is taken from the choir loft, but the ordinary worshiper does not view that crucifix from the same angle:

I just learned today that it is made of FIBERGLASS!

I do like the colors they chose for the renovation. THey are lovely.

Agreed. Churches have to put their money where their mouth is on this stuff. God does not want us to build Him palaces while poor people suffer or His Word stagnates.

This is also not to say that I do not understand the value of good facilities for worship, study and outreach.

I am Baptist, not Catholic. I go to a HUGE Baptist Church in Houston. We have over fifty-thousand members, several large campuses throughout Houston, and an international television broadcast of weekly sermons. Our campuses are large and expensive — but they are functional, not ornate, and they serve a purpose of spreading the message and doing the work.

There is an automotive maintenance garage where mechanics in the church do free repairs to the cars of the poor. There are dozens of Bible Study classrooms. There is high-tech broadcast equipment for spreading the message worldwide. Parking and seating alone for a 50K-member church is daunting ... and that money needs to be spent to keep membership growing.

But, we must give in proportion to what we have ... and there needs to be a functional, Biblical, Christ-centered purpose for every expenditure.

I’m just not sure architectural beauty qualifies.

SnakeDoc

Is that a serious question?

Can you honestly not see the theological and moral value in charity over architecture?

We are called to give. We are not called to build palaces for Him. Our ultimate goal is to spread the Gospel — is that goal better served by serving those in need, or by building pretty churches?

Our works do not determine our Salvation ... but our works can contribute to the Salvation of another. Our buildings are just buildings ... functionality is necessary, ostentatiousness is excessive and embarrasing.

SnakeDoc

Spot and I spend a lot of time in God's handiwork. It surpasses anything man can conquer, or despoil. The idea that God lives in any man made structure, or appreciates anything more than the whispers from our closets, is not confusing.

Man is always trying to think of himself as smarter than God... and art becomes confused with creation. Catholics churches are as gilt as whorehouses...

I have to say that I actually do sit in a gym during Mass. The wall separating the gym from the Church proper is folded back on Sunday. This probably won’t last much longer. Attendance is down due to changing demographics and an aging congregation so that soon, if they don’t close the church, the entire congregation will be able to fit in the chapel, except on Palm Sunday.

While you are correct I do not think you are looking at the entire issue.

One reason for the church building is to serve as a place where the church can come together to worship, to experience the presence of God in a corporate setting.

You can walk into an older, more classically designed church and "feel" the holiness. It is obviously a sacred place and instantly removes distractions and gets you focused on God. Even atheists tend to speak more reverently in those sorts of churchs

Now walk into one of the modern destroyed churches and you feel no "presence" at all. They are simply big meeting rooms.

I am Penetcostal, but I was raised Catholic. The Catholic churches inspire a reverence that I have not found in any protestant church (sadly).

The Catholic architectural reformers, in my opinion, are seeking to sever man's connection to God in any way they can. They are neither Catholic nor Christian.

Now this is not saying that the church should be spending all their funds on big buildings. But when we are building we need to remember that the building will be seen as God's house and should be fitting for that purpose.

Feeding the poor does them no good whatsoever if we leave their souls starving. We need to make it as simple as possible for them to connect with God on a personal level. Classical churches are one tool that makes that easier to do.

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