When it comes time to consider building a new church, the principle of beauty is of paramount importance, writes Elizabeth Bogoni.
New plans have been drawn up for the building of a new parish church for our community of faith, and many have made their opinions known. I thought it would be appropriate to offer my own thoughts as someone who has a profound interest in and love for sacred art and recently completed a degree in graphic design. I would like to offer these observations with sincere good will, intending to offend no one. In particular, I would like to give voice to the thoughts of like-minded young Catholics of the “World Youth Day generation” who have at heart the great cause of the New Evangelisation.
A house of worship
A church is a house for divine worship and it is house to none other than the most holy, God almighty.
Divine worship is, of course, principally the Mass, which makes present the sacrifice of Calvary. “This divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner” (Catechism of the Catholic Church-1367).
The duty of a church is to accommodate this sacrifice; “the Church which is the body of Christ participates in the offering of her head. With him, she herself is offered whole and entire” (CCC-1368). The background of the Mass should therefore reflect this solemn sacrifice.
It should be an offering most worthy, and most beautiful, uplifting the minds of the faithful to the profound nature of the Mass and to the presence of our Lord.
Outside of Mass it should maintain this solemn nature aiding our focus on our Lord present in the Eucharist, reserved within the tabernacle.
As this is the house of God, it should be fittingly shown that “the ornamentation should befit God and anything which is discordant with the sacred character of the place is excluded” (Canon 1220). Any add-ons that are just there for the sake of ‘good taste’ do not have the right to be there. “Everything should be truly worthy and beautiful and be signs and symbols of heavenly realities” (General Instruction on the Roman Missal 228).
Physical made real
As Catholics we believe that the human person consists of both body and soul (CCC- 362), likewise the church is comprised of both the spiritual and material. Spiritually the church should represent and uphold the Catholic inculturation of the values of goodness, truth and beauty, the natural values on which the Church is founded.
Of these the one most accommodating to the ‘physical format’ is that of beauty, which in its essence holds both goodness and truth together in vital and harmonious unity.
An aesthetic of beauty gives us the ability to grasp “treasures from the heavenly realm of the Holy Spirit… clothing them in words, colours, forms” (Benedict XVI).
Although in today’s architecture we seem to avert our eyes from the treasures of the heavenly realm for that which is ‘practical’, in being practical we run the risk of discarding the spiritual, expressed in the beautiful. We are warned against straying from beauty. As Hans Urs von Balthasar put it: “We can be sure that whoever sneers at her [Beauty’s] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeoisie past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love”.
Beauty draws man out of himself, raising his mind to higher things, and a church should reflect this. It should act as a physical reminder of the spiritual. Beauty in itself is not subjective, nor is it what the majority finds preferable or to their taste. Beauty stems from reason and “whatever is beautiful is also good and true, and expresses unity and harmony.” According to St Paul whatever is beautiful must fix our minds and our hearts on the things above.
And so it is only fitting that when building a church the practicality of the place be on par with the spiritual nature of the church, in order that we may strive to raise minds to the spiritual. How practical would a church devoted to divine worship be if it failed to aid men in that very purpose of divine worship?
A means of evangelisation
We are living in the age of the “culture of the image”. Everything these days seems to be visual. People, whether they admit it or not, are affected by the external appearance of things.
If people therefore judge on the basis of looks, they will see a “modern” building as a merely functional building (like Bunnings or McDonalds) and a grander building to house something of importance.
This is why concert halls, which house the arts, tend to be more beautiful in their representation; they house what is a representation of beauty. How then should a church look if it is to house the most beautiful thing on earth?
What impression do we create in people’s minds of how important the life of faith is to us by the style we choose to employ in the construction of buildings set aside for sacred worship?
Although many new buildings tend to be built in a functional style, as this is the ‘done’ thing, to offer someone the same thing they would expect everywhere else would run the risk of detracting from the special character of the sacred as something ‘set apart’ for the sake of the rest – not to stand aloof from the world but to be at the service of the world.
If the beating heart of the life of faith is the Celebration of the Sacred Mysteries, we strive to give this the best expression possible by the character of the building in which it takes place because the health of the heart impacts on the body.
If, however, the heart is not given the attention it should receive, then the rest of the body will suffer.
The utilitarian style runs against the message of faith, the reality of the spiritual, the irreplaceable value of the human person, and the beauty of God’s salvation offered in Christ.
With beauty on our side we are better able to offer people this alternative to the materialistic and barren spirit of our postmodern culture, in which people are tired and overburdened, longing for rest, for “light, refreshment and peace” (Eucharistic Prayer 1).
A mistake we commonly make in the Church is that we try to reach out to the post-modern world by watering down Catholic identity, trying to blend into the culture, to make it ‘easier,’ if you will.
This actually has the reverse effect, leading to a weakening of faith. How can we have conviction and stand up to an often hostile postmodern world if the Church at the parish level cannot stand firmly by the evangelising power of beauty? For “without beauty the world would sink into despair” (Benedict XVI).
In today’s often ugly culture and society which thirst for real values, beauty is one of the greatest conveyers of the spiritual, of the reality of God and of the love of the Heart of Christ.
Beauty is so powerful that it “awakens the soul to act”. Without it, how do we hope to awaken the souls of those in whom faith lies dormant?
Elizabeth Bogoni has just completed a degree in design, majoring in graphics. This reflection was contributed to her parish’s discussion on the design for a new parish church.