Besides the fact that there are immense problems with the term “traditional Latin style church”–what does that mean really?–I would just like to point out that the modernist and postmodernist monstrosities built in the last sixty years, and even a little before, both as churches and as secular buildings, were by no means cheap or easy to build.
Just because a church looks like a weird modular spaceship or a jumble of Jenga blocks thrown around randomly and stuck together with Play-Doh with the most abstruse and unrecognizable art in it–if indeed there is any art–does not make such a building cheap. In fact, these structures are often horrifically expensive.
I grin at this, because implicit in the belief that such structures are cheaper to build than more conventional/normal churches is the idea that because something is less adorned and more puzzling–which aesthetic I would argue is vastly more elitist than any obscenely florid Baroque aesthetic–it must! have been cheaper to construct.
It is wonderfully ironic, isn’t it, that these buildings are typically the most expensive?
Now, I realize the blocky horrors may not be the alternative your parents have in mind to ornate architecture. There is a continuum between Rococo and brutalist. I fundamentally and absolutely disagree with your parents’ working assumption that it doesn’t really matter for churches to be aesthetically pleasing, generally speaking. I would put forward the ideal of Romanesque architecture with moderate decoration as a good middle ground between the Baroque basilica on the one hand and the car-park-under-concrete-overpass on the other hand.
You might like to check out Our Lady of the Rosary’s of Greenville, SC, planned church. Their parish is by no means wealthy.
I agree with you that modern art is probably just as expensive as art with a more ancient style. I won’t say “ancient art,” because I assume that if you are purchasing an original piece of ancient art, you will pay a lot!
However, I think what makes more modern churches cheaper, if they are well-designed, is their heating and cooling systems. It costs a fortune to heat and cool older church buildings. A good design can greatly reduce these costs.
Incidentally, if you have a pipe organ and other acoustic instruments, they have to have a good heating/cooling system to survive. A pipe organ or an acoustic piano can’t be left in a freezing nave, or in a hot, humid nave, for all the seven days that it’s not being used.
However, to get a “well-designed” church building means paying for a really good architect, and that costs a whole heapin’ lotta cash! I personally think it would be money wisely-spent though. Get the design correct from the very beginning, and you’ll save money down through the years.
One of the problems with a lot of the modern church buildings is the wretched acoustics. We’re in a clamshell, and from what I understand, tens of thousands of dollars have been spent over the decades trying to get the acoustics fixed so that the majority of people sitting out in the “shell” of the clamshell can actually HEAR what is happening up front! It hasn’t worked. It’s my personal opinion that the parish should just give up and tell everyone to listen to the Mass through earbuds or headphones.
My personal preference is for the stark church naves with very little art and only a few basic colors (black and white is pretty, as is white with blue or sand with green). I love expansive spaces with high ceilings, but these are an acoustic nightmare. The older “Cruciform” design is actually much better for hearing.
We have to keep in mind that in the OF, hearing is everything. The purpose for putting everything in the vernacular was to help the people understand. But if they can’t HEAR it, they will utterly fail to understand. At least in the EF, people didn’t need to hear to understand what was going on (by following their missals). But in the OF, unless the people are holding a copy of the OF liturgy (which is in many of the church devotionals, e.g., The Word Among Us), they won’t understand a thing.
Music especially suffers in the OF. What is the good of having hymns in the vernacular if the choir or cantor can’t be heard or understood?
Another acoustic nightmare is the use of marble (or marble-like substances) in building church naves. Yes, it’s beautiful, but it bounces sound around and creates spooky echoes. The churches filled with wood (e.g., the old Lutheran church, built in 1862, where I take my organ lessons) are the best for sound–very “warm” and easy to listen to .
Again, a good architect should be able to take care of all this in their design. But he or she will not come cheaply!
