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YoungTradCath
Guest
And its intellectual background is completely illegitimate and, I’d say, anti-Catholic.
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JReducation
Guest
Consult is not the same as democracy. That was my point. Our rule says that the superior must consult the council and the chapter, but neither the council nor the chapter have any legal authority. The superior decides. Now, in our case, buildings are not considered major issues. Major issues for us is anything that has to do with the constitution. If it’s not in the constitution, no consultation is required.
No one is arguing this. There are forms, colors and shapes that are beautiful, both modern and classic. And there are some that are horrific.
Be careful there. This contradicts what popes have said about art and architecture through the centuries. Let’s not forget that the Church continues to be the strongest patron of the arts, both modern and classic. In fact, just two weeks ago, Pope Benedict met with a large group of artists and architects and encouraged them to be creative and to share their creativity with the Church. He explained that artistic creativity shares in God’s creative mind.
There can be an individual who is anti-Catholic or one who simply does not understand. I worked with an excellent artist to create our website. However, he did not understand Franciscan thinking. He wanted to go into a direction that would make our site look like IBM’s. Is IBM’s site ugly? No. But it’s not us. Was the artist anti-Catholic or anti-Franciscan? Not at all. He simply was unfamiliar with the tradition. It took a number of test sites until we got it close to what I wanted. It’s still not there, but close.
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choliks
Guest
There can be an individual who is anti-Catholic or one who simply does not understand. I worked with an excellent artist to create our website. However, he did not understand Franciscan thinking. He wanted to go into a direction that would make our site look like IBM’s. Is IBM’s site ugly? No. But it’s not us. Was the artist anti-Catholic or anti-Franciscan? Not at all. He simply was unfamiliar with the tradition. It took a number of test sites until we got it close to what I wanted. It’s still not there, but close.
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OraLabora
Guest
This makes no sense whatsoever.
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YoungTradCath
Guest
The intellectual principles and mode of thinking underlying modernity hate the past just for being the past and do not respect the idea of tradition. The whole point of the modern movement is to be diametrically opposed in every way to everything of the past, just because. It makes fine sense.
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choliks
Guest
As an artist, this offends me. I always look through artworks of past and present for inspiration. If you go through art school, you’ll have to learn about art history before you can even lift a paintbrush.The intellectual principles and mode of thinking underlying modernity hate the past just for being the past and do not respect the idea of tradition. The whole point of the modern movement is to be diametrically opposed in every way to everything of the past, just because. It makes fine sense.
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YoungTradCath
Guest
I’m not speaking about… that. ?? By “modern” I mean specifically the blockish, severely undecorated, right angle-hating, monochromatic style so common throughout the 20th Century that rejects, as a matter of principle, almost all that came before it (except simplicity). I do not simply mean contemporary. I mean a specific aesthetic with a specific mode of thinking and set of premises underlying it which I believe is a concrete realization of the same mode of thinking and set of premises that underlie moral relativism, militant secularism, and artistic degeneration.Be careful there. This contradicts what popes have said about art and architecture through the centuries. Let’s not forget that the Church continues to be the strongest patron of the arts, both modern and classic. In fact, just two weeks ago, Pope Benedict met with a large group of artists and architects and encouraged them to be creative and to share their creativity with the Church. He explained that artistic creativity shares in God’s creative mind.
There can be an individual who is anti-Catholic or one who simply does not understand. I worked with an excellent artist to create our website. However, he did not understand Franciscan thinking. He wanted to go into a direction that would make our site look like IBM’s. Is IBM’s site ugly? No. But it’s not us. Was the artist anti-Catholic or anti-Franciscan? Not at all. He simply was unfamiliar with the tradition. It took a number of test sites until we got it close to what I wanted. It’s still not there, but close.
I see these things as all connected, more or less. I cannot find a way to intellectually divorce these things because, while having a church built in a modern style does not mean that the people who go to it are moral relativist baby aborters and secularists–I am NOT saying that–why in the world would we Catholics, in effect, build a stone monument to these ideas and principles that are so anti-Catholic? If I’m wrong, where?
Of course, to accept my view one would have to accept that modern architecture–again, a specific aesthetic here, not just “new” architecture or contemporary architecture–is necessarily connected in intellectual basis to moral relativism, secularism and so on. I believe that these things are all necessarily connected.
At this point it isn’t even about the Haiti cathedral anymore so I might start a new thread.
How does it offend you? I did not categorize you, I didn’t even know you were an artist. I really don’t understand, this doesn’t have any implications for you or your work. Nowhere did I say that all current artists are terrible or anything.
I’m trying to go out on a limb here and understand the justification for the modern movement. At present all I can make of it is that it is: a reaction to the unprecedented death and destruction of the 20th Century, it hates the past just for being the past, it basically celebrates dissonance and disharmony. If I am wrong, please help me understand. I am testing my understanding.
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choliks
Guest
Then who are you referring to? Artists who do modern art or modernist artists?
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YoungTradCath
Guest
I think the modernist movement and the related, consequential movements after it are illegitimate artistic movements, blips and cancers on the development of Western civilization. I will not judge the intentions of a particular artist or artists unless I know their intentions.
When we look at what the 20th and 21st centuries have produced–artistically, culturally, morally, societally–there is just something very, very different from all that came before it starting with Jesus Christ and ending sometime close to the end of the 19th century or so. This has its root in earlier thinking, to be sure, but it didn’t really burst into bloom, a bloom of death and destruction in my opinion, until the last century.
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OraLabora
Guest
No. You are theorizing on the motives of unknown artists and architects and worse extending this theorization of what is essentially an aesthetic preference into theological speculation.The intellectual principles and mode of thinking underlying modernity hate the past just for being the past and do not respect the idea of tradition. The whole point of the modern movement is to be diametrically opposed in every way to everything of the past, just because. It makes fine sense.
It makes no sense whatsoever. That you dislike modern architecture is obvious and it’s your perfect right. But to impute “anti-Catholic” on those who may prefer it, isn’t. It is in fact a not so thinly veiled and arrogant insult to our faith and our intelligence.
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YoungTradCath
Guest
So the aesthetic of modern Western society, different than that which has come before it, has nothing to do whatsoever with the rampant secularization/anti-Christianity of modern Western society? Art and expression develops in an insulated world free from politics and larger culture? I think that position would be supremely hard to argue. I am not theorizing, I am observing.
It is not veiled, thinly or otherwise, it is what it is, I present it straightforwardly. It is not arrogant because I do not intend it to be arrogant. If it seems so, I am sorry for my presentation. I am trying to understand this phenomenon as connected to its cultural circumstances; after all, it must be connected to its cultural circumstances.
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JReducation
Guest
I think that you may be over analyzing. We have to be careful. We can find fault and weakness in anything that we set out minds to.
Once, there was a post on CAF, maybe a thread, I can’t recall. In any case, the poster who started the thread was making a case against the presence of “obscenity” in churches, especially the Basilica of St. Peter. The individual’s big issue was that the paintings and sculptures were erotic, because they showed genitalia.
That’s a perfect example of over analyzing something.
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QuestingKnight
Guest
What would be interesting is if there’s a tendency to embrace modernity for its own sake and rejecting older styles just because they’re old.
- To not make a Catholic Church look like a traditional Catholic church is a lost opportunity in teaching and marketing.
- A Church filled with stained glass, statues, altar rails and the like is a permanent lesson in itself: see what we believe, even ye that can’t read. You save time on lectures.
- Architects! Just because you can draw it on a computer doesn’t mean you should build it!
- Funny how samey ‘revolutionary’ designs are.
- Sometimes less is not more. Sometimes less is just … less.
- There are fashions in architecture. Fashion can date very quickly.
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simple_soul
Guest
It has always amazed me as to how loud silence is. It just dawned on me last night that some of these “modern” churches speak this silence more than the gothic style like ones. It is a silence that is fearful and yet reverent. It reminds me what Moses must have experienced with the burning bush. The reason I believe the “modern” churches might speak a louder silence is because there is less “noise” or “wild horses” to distract us from the silence. So my question to myself is always If we can not stand this silence how will we ever learn to stand the silence so that we can hear God? Just thought I would add some food for thought.
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OraLabora
Guest
And we have a winner. This is why monastic churches have, in general, usually been very austere, and why the overly decorated “new” church at Monte Cassino is so scandalous for some Benedictines.
The church in the abbey I’m affiliated with, which was accused of looking “drab” not only plays to light as I mentioned, but is an oasis of peace and silence when one enters it. It’s almost as if the silence, as you say, is loud enough to drown out the background noise of our society.
Clearly in this particular case the architect worked closely with the monks in order to capture their spiritual and liturgical requirements. One can therefore scarcely accuse him of “modernism” (which is hurled around here as a sort of epithet). It is modern, but it shows respect for the past Benedictine traditions and its current evolutionary state.
So the austerity reflects tradition, and the construction was designed around the concelebration of the Mass, which is the norm for Benedictines using the Ordinary Form (i.e. most of them). Which is why it wasn’t built with the tradition of multiple side-chapels, which is redundant because since now monks can concelebrate, there’s no need for a whole bunch of private Masses. In that sense architecture is not meant to be frozen in time. Not even Catholic architecture.
As for the Haitian cathedral… it doesn’t scandalize me in the least. God will not refuse to go there just because he doesn’t like the architecture
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OraLabora
Guest
You see this is one thing that really bugs me about “traditionalism”, that his the notion that there is some sort of “golden era” and that everything associated with that era is by extension good, and everything associated by our “depraved” era is by extension bad. IMHO that’s a result of ignoring history (maybe that’s another subject that needs to be better taught in schools).
Any study of history will show that the societies that built the great architecture of the past could be just as depraved as ours. “Culture of death”??? it wasn’t until after WWII that Europeans finally stopped killing each other in murderous wars. Sexual depravity? Read St. Paul. The Church permitted castration of young boys to maintain their singing voice.
I agree with Br. JR, you’re over-analyzing. No era is free of depravity and thus no human endeavour of that era is free of its taint.
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QuestingKnight
Guest
That’s an exaggeration of the traditionalist position. Traditionalists would like Catholic churches to look like Catholic churches; not school assembly halls or the bridge of the Starship Enterprise: The Next Generation.
Large numbers of Catholics have fallen for the advertiser’s lie: that New = Better, Modern = Good.
Suit the object to its purpose. Start from the basics:
- Do we need a new church? If yes:
- How should it look, given our budget?
- What is a church for?
Excusing bad architecture (and bad liturgy) by seeking out examples from different periods and contexts is disingenuous at best.
That they worshipped in the catacombs in Rome 120AD doesn’t excuse a sterile barn in Gary Indiana in 2012.
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Aramis
Guest
For many, these two goals are incompatible.
My preference is a 20’ wide quonset hut parish over a Gothic monstrosity any day. It’s far better to hear the priest without needing a microphone. It’s far better to have a huge number of small communities over a large “Scare the *” out of people edifice.
There is room for diversity in physical structure, as there is diversity in the psychology of the faithful.
Heck, one parish represented in my 4th degree assembly is too small to host the Corporal Mass… and yet, it’s a wonderfully reverent parish. Another is a huge open space in a third of a circle… with the blessed sacrament chapel of repose behind a wall of glass behind the altar; huge and modern, serving 1100 families with 3-4 masses per week (4 in the summer to allow for the hunting and fishing crowd… 8pm Sunday.). My home parish seats about 120; in a pinch, 200 (tho’ not since the new pastor put pews in… with the chairs, for Pascha we’d simply add an extra row or two in the same space).
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ringil
Guest
Yeah, it’s a bit odd, but like Brother says- the beautiful churches do cost a lot of money.
I like what is happening with some churches in the US. Folks are simply physically MOVING entire churches from areas with declining catholic populations to other places.
This way we can get the beautiful churches and still at an affordable price.
I like what is happening with some churches in the US. Folks are simply physically MOVING entire churches from areas with declining catholic populations to other places.
This way we can get the beautiful churches and still at an affordable price.
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ringil
Guest
But then that Pope unfortunately put those silly fig leanes on many of the statues.
That was a huge blunder in my book.
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