Editorial: churches with ham and pineapple

A bon mot in the latest edition of the remarkable journal  First Things is well worth quoting in full for it touches on a matter of great importance in the life of the Church, one quite recently editorialised upon by The Record: “Waste not, want not,” we’re told.
“Want not, waste not” can be equally good advice – and following it may lead to some extraordinary results. Take, for example, the case of a hundred year old Catholic church that’s being moved, stone by stone, 900 miles from Buffalo, New York, to a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia.
The diocese of Buffalo was looking for a good use for the beautiful limestone St Gerard’s, built in 1911 and modelled after the Basilica of St Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome. “Why should a church become a restaurant, or a nightclub?” asks St Gerard’s former pastor. “Let’s re-use it for its intention. It’s a holy place. A sacred place.” At the same time, the pastor of Mary Our Queen, a parish in the small Georgia city of Norcross, was looking to build a new church that would look like an old one. “I don’t mean to offend the people who build those [modern] churches,” says Fr David Dye, “but some of them look like Pizza Huts.”
“A note to those building new churches: No one will ever move a Pizza Hut from Buffalo to Atlanta.”
Indeed, the former pastor of St Gerard’s asked a very good question which might be expanded as asking why a building meant to express a striking and transcendent beauty in the service of a unique function – the Church’s liturgical life – should be abandoned to such an ignominious end as a cheap and trashy pickup joint covered in the stench of beer and vomit the morning after the night before.
Or course, there is really nothing that says a former church can’t be used for profane purposes after its life as a church has ended, but both the former pastor of St Gerard’s and Fr David Dye were commenting on a much deeper issue. One thing that is often lost in the debate on the significance of church architecture is not the effect it has on the lives and attitudes to worship of the faithful but the extent to which architecture should beckon to the lives of those who have no faith or are not sure whether any such thing as faith is real or significant. In other words, an important function of excellence in church architecture is the effect that it has on those who walk past the outside of parish grounds without necessarily being prepared (as yet) to step inside. Great, beautiful and excellent church architecture has a social dimension too.
St Mary’s Cathedral, always a difficult architectural task because of the necessity of combining three historical styles into one completed building, was important precisely because it was the major ecclesial building in the heart of Perth. Thousands of workers who would not normally contemplate entering a church will, for generations to come, be struck, even on an unconscious level, by the psychological and spiritual reality of a large public building devoted exclusively to the divine and the transcendent – to God. The Cathedral is remarkable not for the fact that it is completed but because it stands in stark contrast to the brutalism of the city skyline and the emptiness of the marketplace that it represents.
Australians in general are not really as stupid as so many church bureaucrats have appeared to believe in recent decades. People of faith or none at all instantly recognise cheap buildings that represent nothing much more than a contemporary currency of bling – flashy today, gone tomorrow. The same principles would not be tolerated for a moment in planning a marriage or commissioning a portrait for posterity and yet mediocrity embedded in formal processes seems to have become cemented into our architecture. There seems to be a tremendous absence of vision in relation to designing and building churches. We do not, as a Church, seem any longer to be able to think creatively or laterally and, at the same time to maintain an organic link with the informing traditions of our past which express our history (history is remembering and therefore acknowledgement). Many of our churches are no longer the sorts of structures that beckon or invite, homes to which one one turns as places of silent spiritual refuge or renewal.
This is why parishes planning new churches should make it clear they are prepared, if finally necessary, to resist suffocating diocesan committees where accountants seem to wield all the power and none of the taste. They should even feel free to consider mounting Canon Law cases. We should not settle for nightclubs. If, as Fr David Dye said, some modern churches look like Pizza Huts, then is it any wonder that many behave as though that is what they are?