Chapel of The Immaculate Conception, University Of Dayton (Catholic University)
Before:
This is what happens when liturgists, usually terrorists’ types, know it alls, get in charge of redecorating churches and renovating them.
By 1980, I bought into this crap lock, stock and barrel. And, yes, we had to get rid of pews and their rigid seating. Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility was the ideology of the day and not just for church building but for Catholicism itself.
A former seminary classmate of mine was able to design a new church. The plan was for ultra flexibility, so that the chairs, altar, and ambo could be moved depending on the liturgy and the particular need of that assembly at that moment. And there could be different arrangements for different season of the year.
Of course, as one ages, moving furniture constantly and have a nave and sanctuary constantly in flux wears on you and drives Catholic crazy.
I think we are back to some sanity when it comes to our churches, although pockets of the flexible 1970’s continue to rear their renovating, chaotic heads, but they too will pass, God willing!
6 comments:
The libs have taken so much from us and given us so little in return. Dayton U. is State owned and run.
William,
U. of Dayton is run by Marianists. Think Jesuits turned up to 11, but with less intellectual rigor.
Nick
I went to Mass there once in the After, After stage, when the orientation of the building was turned sideways. As I recall, it was actually a pretty OK liturgy (but you had a bunch of extremely enthusiastic conference goers for the congregation, which always makes things pretty robust).
I see the trend line, but the fact remains that it was such a beautiful church to begin with that, even after all the negative changes, it is still more beautiful than many Catholic churches I have attended. I'll even go so far as to say that is symbolic of something more important than the building itself: the residual grace from previous generations that can linger in a society that is moving away from God. Having lived in both Europe and Japan, I can assure you that there is a real but intangible difference between a Christian culture that has fallen into heresy (or worse) and a culture that has never been baptized.
Yesterday was the Feast of St. John Eudes who had this to say:
Bad priests are a sign of God’s anger
The most evident mark of God’s anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clerics who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. Instead of nourishing those committed to their care, they rend and devour them brutally. Instead of leading their people to God, they drag Christian souls into hell in their train. Instead of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are its innocuous poison and its murky darkness. St. Gregory the Great says that priests and pastors will stand condemned before God as the murderers of any souls lost through neglect or silence….
I just don't want to help pay for the wreckovations. My parish church was ugly, having been built in the early 1960's when things were changing. It was changed from being merely ugly to hideous and unfit for Christian worship because our Bishop liked things that way. He didn't see fit to tell us that he was behind the uglification and not our parish priest, who was his mere functionary.
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