Modern Worship, Vandalism, Bath Fitters, and Living Fire
Sensitive souls are being abused by a counterfeit
In 2014 I attended a concert of the Chicago choir Bella Voce, which took place in the beautiful St. Clement Church. Built in 1917-18 in a style evocative of the Hagia Sophia, the stunning Church proved a perfect setting for the diverse program, with everything from Renaissance Polyphony to the tight sonorities and luminous lines of Arvo Pärt floating on the air and often disappearing like thick incense, swirling upwards into the dome which tastefully accepted this musical sacrifice. The acoustic was perfect, and the Church in its appearance and acoustic a balm for the Catholic soul.
And yet in the back of the Church, behind the odd standing table altar, was placed a stylistically and architecturally dissonant baptismal font. Feeling uncomfortable by the seeming aesthetic imposition on such a beautifully-considered place, I went looking for answers. I didn’t have to look for very long, as at the front of the church, among the printed information cards, was a pamphlet which described what had occurred. Apparently a beautiful white marble altar had once stood where the baptismal font now stood, along with some floral arrangements to help fill the space. Its dismantling and replacement, along with the imposition of the altar table, was proudly proclaimed in the pamphlet as part of “renovation” to “update” the Church for “modern worship.”
Some pieces of what remained of the original altar were repurposed shamelessly in various parts of the church. The communion rails? Gone… a shameless violence perpetrated by an arrogant generation of men.
What made me so uncomfortable, it turns out, is the realization — at first intuited, later confirmed — that the people who originally built this space would not have been as careless, unrefined, stupid, and spiritually dead as to make such a mistake. Yes, the theological justification for the “reset” was given, and it is one many moderns are proud of, even if its execution is never as good as its theory. Such carelessness demonstrates an acute spiritual vertigo, and spiritual blindness or vertigo is the last the thing you want to encounter in a space once dedicated to the approach of the ineffable. It’s one step from there to just turning the thing into a hotel, restaurant, or skate park, which is what most moderns would prefer nowadays anyhow: the distant trappings of the sacred, but brought down into the mud for the rest of us.
In relation, it is worth sharing a now legendary story which circulates amongst Catholic Art Institute regulars. When Sir Roger Scruton was picked up by a CAI assistant from the airport to speak at our national conference, the enterprising staffer engaged Sir Roger in discussion. He later related how he had asked Scruton:
“Sir Roger, what do you think is the primary aesthetic impulse of the age?”
Without missing a beat, Scruton apparently answered:
“Vandalism.”
Vandalism does not need to be destruction or graffiti: it can be the simple replacement of luminous and transcendent things with pedestrian thins, and the discarding of the beautiful for the banal. It is certainly found in taking sledgehammers to beautiful works of art, let alone those in which Christ literally resides. In the case of St. Clement’s “renovation”, it joins an infamously long list of western Churches which had been subjected to modernist vandalism.
A more recent post-conciliar and post-liturgical reform act of vandalism took place in New York city, at the Church of Our Savior. The story begins with the famous (or infamous, depending on your particular bent) priest Fr. John Rutler working to beautify the space of this Church which he had been assigned to. It culminated in a massive artistic work — one of the great sacred art events in the modern American age — being created by Chinese American painter Ken Woo.
The pictures were stunning, and I made plans to go see it. The critically acclaimed aesthetic improvement began to draw the attention of art lovers, who began to visit the now stunning Church. It also drew the attention of the vandals, who summarily dismissed Fr. Rutler and sent a priest of questionable repute — one Robert J. Robbins — to “fix” Rutler’s success. The tragic dismantling which then took place can be read about here:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/our-saviour-church-icons-george-rutler-tradition/
Robbins own eventual explanation reads as badly — or even worse — than the afformentioned “architectural renewal” card from St Clement’s.
Never mind beauty. Never mind the accolades. Never mind how this will scare big donors away from future art projects. Never mind, most importantly, how this amazing work by Woo drew people closer to Christ and more deeply into the mystery of the liturgy: the vandals had no concern for any vision save their own.
Recently amongst the wonderfully strange people I spend time with on social media, the following post was shared with various reactions positive and negative:
While the gentleman who made the post and subsequent commentary seems to be a good man whose priorities and observations are otherwise in place, but I could not have disagreed with the sentiment more. My public disagreement even earned me a private rebuke from a rather well-known theologian, who said that my over-reaction was one of ingratitude, implying that I should be happy that a Church would put in at least this much effort at a theologically consistent worship space.
I will begin by saying that I do not know the rest of the Church’s architecture or aesthetic profile, nor would I consider myself to be an expert in Church architecture. Yet there is something of the modern spaces built specifically for the Liturgy of Paul VI – or “updated” to house it – which has always made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I will also admit that there is some good craftsmanship in the picture above, specifically in the gold relief work beneath the Hebraic and Greek inscriptions. (Indeed, my objection is not directed towards the artist(s) involved, so much as those whose intentions were imprinted upon the space!) And yet just about everything in this picture of the central part of a Church – the place where our focus should be drawn to the liturgy – falls into the category of “churches I would have to avoid.”
Let’s leave aside the off-white and green marble façade, which seems to be a hallmark of the era which, while not particularly ugly, simply triggers in me the memories of the type of misplaced and watered-down counterfeit Catholicism which made me initially leave (what I thought was) the faith for a number of years (one can almost hear “On Eagle’s Wings” rattling ghostily in the apse). Let’s also leave alone the distinct feeling that - lacking a coherent reference point in the aesthetic magisterium — this work just seems to be trying to hard to achieve modern noble simplicity not entirely cut off from its roots. To anyone who has been liturgically renewed in tradition, the wide-open aesthetic dominated by a table altar will always be jarring, as will the almost ubiquitous flower arrangements which so frequently and self-consciously fill the spaces where a traditional altar (or beautiful sacred art) should stand (or once stood, before a sledgehammer was gleefully taken to it). To one whose liturgical orientation is not anthropocentric, but rather directed towards the trembling approach towards Calvary and God’s unearned and undeserved presence among us, the arrangement is uncomfortable because it is almost flippant in its reduction of the liturgical mystery. Consequently a guitar sing-along or second-rate cantoring (with all the hand waving involved) is almost more appropriate to the space than chant or polyphony, which would seem too elevated an expression to match this flattened aesthetic.
While I can appreciate this attempt to be thoughtful in “noble simplicity”, the attempt here also leaves me wondering if the designers were simply ignorant, or in some way gas-lighting the faithful. To wit: the very same people who ignore the Second Vatican Council’s clear wishes for the mass to have a Latin Ordinary are being hypocritical when they place Hebrew and Greek on the walls flanking the tabernacle; how many do you think can actually read these inscriptions? Such inscriptions (and modern churches often take the “here’s some strident theological text on the walls!” approach), have to be translated and remembered, just as the Greek Kyrie and the Latin Agnus Dei do. There is also the not-insignificant matter that the Church’s traditional sacred visual art and iconography are here replaced with blank walls with inscriptions. While in the west we no longer have the largely illiterate Church we once did, what of the small children in attendance? What of those with learning or intellectual disabilities? And yes, what of the illiterate, who still exist? Furthermore, even if society were 100% literate, this would not be an excuse to minimize sacred art in the name of “noble simplicity”, as visual art (along with proper sacred music) is capable of ennobling the soul in a way that the written word (at least, that which is not prose) is simply not. Art and music cut more deeply than the written or spoken word alone; if this were not so, most religions would not have musical worship. So this modern iconoclasm is an assault on authentic beauty, and has far too much in common with puritanical liturgical notions to be effectively or traditionally Catholic.
Finally, we come to the monstrance. It’s rather beautiful, is it not? And yet, in its visual language – considered within this minimalist space entirely lacking in most of the Church’s aesthetic tradition and heritage – we have once again a not-so-subtle attempt to leapfrog back over the entire developed aesthetic and liturgical magisterium, back to an imagined primordial Christianity with an imagined primordial Eucharistic feast. This is exactly the type of mistaken originalism which has largely doomed the rather humble proposed liturgical reforms of the council. One is reminded of Tolkien’s famous comment to his son in a letter, when he wrote:
The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motive, is mistaken and in vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in all spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St. Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!). Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is a part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know it began with a seed, but it is vain to try to dig it up, for it is no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now resides in the Tree…
(J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 306).
Ultimately the reason I find such spaces – and the liturgies which generally take place within them – to be difficult to endure is because they are suffused with the ideological errors and (as we now know) misplaced reformist enthusiasm of the 1960’s and 70’s. They exchange the transcendent and radiant for the anthropocentric and materially immediate, often done in quite the pandering way. One is reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s famous words, written somewhat shortly before his death:
“Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his council—they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy. Churchgoing is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored.”
Save for me, it was the counterfeit to which Evelyn Waugh referred to which, in his other words, “knocked the stuffing out of me.” I perceived the pandering nature of it all as a young man, as also loathed the utter lack of seriousness in how God – who keeps the universe in existence in a single thought – was approached. I could no longer take seriously a faith whose supposed most dogged adherents (at least those whom I knew in my limited worldview) could not take seriously. At the time when I first left her fold, I did not know that the Church was not only historically much more beautiful, reverent, and serious, but also that such liturgical and spiritual options existed which matched the seriousness of her historical saints, writings, and sacred art works.
When I returned to the Church out of intellectual and spiritual conviction and necessity, I immediately was pained by the same pseudo-religiosity which had previously caused my departure, and I soon found myself “clinging bitterly” as Waugh had done. When a good friend introduced me to the Latin mass – and I later in turn discovered the Byzantine liturgy – I realized that tradition was alive and well. It was not in mothballs, nor presented as a museum piece (though admittedly this sometimes take place) – but rather being presented as a living fire from which new works arose. In hindsight, I think some of the communities where this “living fire” was most palpable were where the Novus Ordo was also done with great care, essentially setting a fertile soil for the sort of organic liturgical cross-pollination that Pope Benedict XVI imagined before this current crop of vandals took the ecclesial reigns.
These traditional liturgies have since offered me shelter and peace from the world, and place where I can set aside my (admittedly frequently over-active) critical capacity and simply approach God on His terms.
And so, as the TLM is restricted once again, the guitars are re-tuned for another go-around, and we are repeatedly gaslighted by elderly prelates by being told that our love of beauty, reverence, and epistemic humility is a sign of a spiritual or ideological disorder (or “rigidness”), or that we look backwards or are “old fashioned”, it is indeed experienced as a violence. I am not alone in this, as I have seen the faith of many sorely tested in these past few years, while some very good men (including some high profile defections) have fallen away from the faith, being tested beyond their ability to endure abuse. This lead me to regretfully write and publish the article ‘On the Theological Impossibility of Dealing with Abusive Fatherhood”, something I hoped would help more sensitive souls endure this time of trial.
As for me, there can be no going back: as a composer, I seek for beautiful paths which lead back to God, and these beautiful paths can find their sustenance only in the old rites. I need beautiful liturgy in beautiful spaces, done reverently and seriously, as much as I need food and water. Simply nothing else rings as true, while many other things register as a counterfeit draped – like a one-day install plastic bath-fitter covering over a marble tub which just needed a good renewal cleaning – over what is indescribably precious by comparison.