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.

>> 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.

The presence of God is not in architecture ... and mistaking architectural power for God’s presence is also problematic in itself. People feel architectural awe at all kinds of places that are ENTIRELY unconnected with the Almighty ... the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the White House. There are some fairly impressive Mosques out there. Reverence-inspiring or not, this stuff is just irrelevant.

>> The Catholic churches inspire a reverence that I have not found in any protestant church.

God Himself was born in a humble stable in Bethlehem. His presence is not connected to the beauty of the building. If people’s reverence is dependent on the look of the building, is it really God they are experiencing ... or just run-of-the-mill architectural awe?

To boil the presence of God down to the look of the building is to take away from what His presence really is. His presence is just as likely to occur in a mud hut in Africa, in my bedroom in suburban Houston, or in a run-down Methodist church in central Texas as It is in an ornate church in Europe.

SnakeDoc

It does. Trust me. And having a glass sided swimming pool halfway up the wall of your auditorium to serve as a dunk tank, right between the giant flat screen television monitors, strikes me as excessively ornate, as well as in poor taste.

Church is not beautiful in order to be pleasing to God, though that would be a worthwhile purpose. They are to be beautiful in order to inspire worship and sacredness.

And one more thing — many of those ornate parishes were not built with money from Rome. They were built through gifts of the congregation and the sweat of their brow. These iconoclasts had no RIGHT to throw out what previous generations had sweated and died to create, all in the name of communism and modernism.

John 2: 13 When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15 So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!"

17 His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me."

18 Then the Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?"

19 Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days."

20 The Jews replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" 21 But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

23 Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name.[ 24 But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. 25 He did not need man's testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man....

...

John 4: 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

...

Acts 2: 2They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.

44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

The finest idolatry in the world... Catholic churches want to keep crucifying God and try to put Mary on His level with adoration of a creation! JMHO based on my knowledge of Scripture... and an education in Greek, latin, Hebrew, and/or English versions thereof since 1954. Protestant, of course. Father and Grandfather are/were Episcopal Priests. I long ago left that sewer.

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Finest Catholic Statues, Gifts, Church Goods, Church Statuary, Church Supplies, Crucifixes, Rosaries, Nativities, Plaques, Bibles, Missals and more ...

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The presence of God is not in architecture ... and mistaking architectural power for God’s presence is also problematic in itself.

True.

People feel architectural awe at all kinds of places that are ENTIRELY unconnected with the Almighty ... the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the White House. There are some fairly impressive Mosques out there. Reverence-inspiring or not, this stuff is just irrelevant.

Untrue. I feel no reverencial awe of God in any of those sort of places. (White house or any of our historical buildings etc) I only feel that sense of awe in a building dedicated to the worship of God (Jesus). A church has a different feel to it.

>> The Catholic churches inspire a reverence that I have not found in any protestant church. God Himself was born in a humble stable in Bethlehem. His presence is not connected to the beauty of the building.

True (but redundant with your first paragraph)

If people’s reverence is dependent on the look of the building, is it really God they are experiencing ... or just run-of-the-mill architectural awe?

See my second paragraph.

You missed the point. Yes God can manifest His presence anywhere at anytime (A burning bush perhaps?). BUt a building that is dedicated for worshipping Him aids us in experiencing His presence (That is, in getting rid of all the day to day distractions and actively being in His presence).

During most protestant services we sing praise and worship before the sermon. Why? To give God the glory He is due, but also to prepare ourselves to receive from Him by clearing our minds of distractions. The building can be a part of this process. Unless of course you don't think people can worship God with the creations of their hands and skills.

>> [...] But a building that is dedicated for worshipping Him aids us in experiencing His presence (That is, in getting rid of all the day to day distractions and actively being in His presence).

It seems to me that architectural grandeur IS a day-to-day distraction. If the grandiosity of the building is drawing attention ... it is drawing attention away from the Almighty toward the building.

>> Unless of course you don’t think people can worship God with the creations of their hands and skills.

Designing and building the church may very well have been an act of worship toward God. Basking in the glory of the building seems to be an act of worship for the building.

SnakeDoc

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.

Have you read the OT specifications for the temple, given by God Himself? He was quite specific. Just as God was present in a different way in the temple then, He Himself is made present in the Eucharist now; which means that the church is a temple for Him, and God is worthy of the best that man can offer.

Also recall Matt. 26:11, when the woman poured the precious ointment on the head of Jesus, and Jesus said the poor you will always have with you? Well, the Catholic Church has managed to have both beautiful churches (until the last 50 years, that is) and be the largest charitable organization in the world.

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.

Give me beautiful architecture which reminds me of God over plush seats and diamond vision screens; give me the natural acoustical qualities of a vaulted, soaring nave which lifts the heart and mind to God over the latest in audio-visual electronics!

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.

This is a false dilemma where one must choose between beauty and utility. The beauty is for God. The utility is for man.

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.

Every denomination has it's own identity, what a marketer would call a brand. The brand identity for Catholicism has been rooted in the concept that the Catholic church is an age old institution, never changing and rooted in the authority granted to St. Peter by Jesus himself. With this ancientness came a set of fixed and never changing rituals and prayers.

In this way, Catholics could feel a connection to the ancient past, to the history of the Church and it's roots with the apostles. There was a sense of awe and majesty for the institution of the church and it's role as gateway to Christ. Certainly people can disagree that this is good or desirable, the reformation saw a direct repudiation of all that with the formation of denominations such as the Calvinists. But if you didn't like the "brand" of the catholic church you could go be a Baptist or a Lutheran or whatever church you felt best fit your idea of what a church should be.

In the 1950s onwards, the Catholic Church systematically destroyed it's own brand. They got rid of majestic churches, they demolished the separation of priest and congregation, they eliminated compulsory mastery of catechism, in essence they took everything that supported their claim to be the one, true, immutable church, and they made it all flexible and soft and changing. And when they lost their brand, they lost much of their flock. Hardly anyone actually goes to Sunday mass now.

The closest real-world consumer analogy I can think of is the Cadillac Cimmaron. Prior to that, Cadillac was a luxury brand, the place where you got special and unique styling, the latest innovations, and the best materials and workmanship. Then some genius at GM decided that if you took a generic Buick and you put in leather seats and fake wood trim, you could call it a Cadillac. It wasn't and people weren't stupid enough to think that a junky Buick with fancy trim was a real cadillac. Sales plummeted. Substitute "Cadillac" for "Catholic Church" and you get the summary of this article.

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).”

AMEN. Very well said.

Designing and building the church may very well have been an act of worship toward God. Basking in the glory of the building seems to be an act of worship for the building.

Having attended Marquette, a good Jesuit University, I once had the privilege to attend mass in the Joan of Arc chapel. For those who don't know the story when they wanted to build a larger church on the location where Joan of Arc supposedly was inspired by God to throw the British out of France they moved the original building stone for stone from France to Milwaukee. Now the building is small, fairly dark inside, unembellished and made from crudely dressed stone. And yet i felt more of a connection in that tiny building than I ever did in the cathedral just across the lawn from it. I just kept playing in my mind, if I got that call, how would I answer.

Christs presence is not in the church but in the hearts of Christians. No building no matter how ornate or simple can capture that spirit. No dictator can suppress it. And the derision of a Comedy Central show can not destroy it.

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