A Visit Home
The controversy surrounding the renovation of Sacred Heart Cathedral is something I've followed off and on since the bishop announced his intentions in 2000. Clark’s plan was to "update" the small 1928 cathedral with an $11 million renovation. Yet so incensed were some Rochester Catholics that a Sacred Heart Preservation Committee was formed to declare the cathedral a city landmark in an ultimately failed attempt to thwart the bishop.
Sacred Heart is around the corner from my high school, Aquinas Institute, and several of my school friends belonged to the parish and attended its school. Accompanied by my father and my seven-year-old son, I decided to visit the Cathedral during a recent trip home to see what the fuss was about.
Now, I am not an architectural expert — far from it. To date my Catholic focus has been on catechesis. So my recognition of a bad renovation is, on a certain level, like Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum for identifying obscenity: "I know it when I see it." (More on standards later.)
A House Swept Clean and Empty
You first notice the sea of chairs. That's right, chairs. There are no pews in Clark's self-described "Mother Church." Instead there are padded, movable, light brown chairs not much different from those you’d find at an outdoor wedding reception, only these come with flimsy retractable kneelers. Don't bump one of them, because you're likely to shift noisily the entire row.
Then your eyes are drawn to the plain, box-like structure in the middle of the church. Elevated on a slate and marble riser, it looks like one of those kitchen islands that people place in their homes after a remodeling project. You wouldn't be surprised to find a cast iron range or an indoor grill underneath the linen. If you haven't guessed it, this is what the good bishop thinks an altar — the place where heaven and earth meet — should look like. Where the old altar stood are rows of even more chairs, presumably there for the choir to "entertain" the assembly.
Next, you notice the bishop's chair, the "cathedra" of the cathedral. It looks like a captain’s chair from the inside of a conversion van or a borrowed seat from one of the JetBlue airplanes that shuttle Rochesterians to and from New York City. Like the chairs for the congregation, it too is padded and, like everything else in the place, entirely lacking in sacramentality. As I explained to my son, the chair represents the seat of a bishop's authority in his diocese. Somehow Bishop Clark's chair is a particularly fitting image of his tenure.
The Woeful Record
Am I being too hard on Bishop Clark? I don’t think so. Clark’s twenty-six-year tenure as Rochester’s bishop has been an unmitigated disaster. This once proud diocese of hard-working Italian and Irish immigrants has been turned into a hothouse of pelvic dissent and liturgical loopiness. You might call it Three’s Company Catholicism, since the forward-thinking Christianity practiced here has the feel and reverence of a late '70s sitcom.
Diocesan masses are known for prohibited liturgical dancers, the prohibited "option" of standing during the consecration, similarly prohibited lay homilies, and the sloppy (and prohibited) practice of self-intinction, whereby the communicant is permitted to "dunk" the consecrated host into a chalice containing the Blood of Christ.
In anticipation of a 1997 "Mass for Gay and Lesbian Catholics" held by Clark at the cathedral, he said it would be "oppressive and manipulative" even to mention what the Church teaches about human sexuality. It's no wonder that Clark is barely able to ordain one new priest per year to serve a diocese of 350,000 Catholics.
Wreckovation vs. the Teaching of the Church
The cathedral project was overseen by Fr. (or, variously, "Dr.") Richard Vosko, a collarless, suit-and-tie-wearing priest from the nearby diocese of Albany who claims "we need a new understanding of what religion is and what God is." He has raised the ire of many Catholics by bringing that "new understanding" to cathedrals in Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville and Seattle.
Vosko and Clark claim the renovation brings Sacred Heart into conformity with "the current norms of the Roman Catholic Church." I presume they're talking about the "norms" set out in Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, a nonbinding pamphlet with no authority published by the Bishops' Committee on Liturgy in 1978 and never voted on by the bishops themselves.
The real norms are contained in the documents of Vatican II, specifically Sacrosanctum Concilium which states that "there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them, and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing."
My father, a "live and let live" Rochester native who has developed a survivor's mentality after a quarter-century of Bishop Clark, took one look inside Sacred Heart and said, "You've got to be kidding me!" before requesting that we leave.
He got no argument from me.
("beam me up...you know who")