Modern church architecture needs Hispanic inspiration

Frankly, I don’t much like modern church architecture – and I never have (I once got in trouble in the seminary when I wrote a negative critique of a new church in the town of Thurles in Ireland where our seminary was located. Apparently, the archbishop read my article and was not amused).

From what I hear and read, very many Catholics are not overly enthused about their modern parish churches, either. Tom Wolfe, the popular cultural commentator, speaking about modern architecture generally, says that people are getting tired of "the whiteness and lightness and meanness and cleanness and bareness and spareness of it all."

The same may be said of modern church architecture. While our new churches work quite well at the functional level (hence the term "functionalist" architecture), there is not much about them that says beauty, glory, and majesty.

In an essay written some time ago for Faith and Form, the journal of the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture, Father Jaime Lara, a professor of art at Yale and the pre-eminent historian of Hispanic architecture, examined how troublesome modern church architecture is to the sensibilities of Hispanic Catholics.

Hispanic religious images, Fr. Lara says, are "dramatic and intense. … Hands and arms stretch out to the Eternal, mouths open in speech or praise, eyes filled with tears in ecstatic joy or contrite repentance. Passion and pathos are, for the Hispanic soul, the true signs of the Holy Spirit."

Hispanic spirituality, he writes, recoils from the passionless, colorless, imageless style of architecture that dominates in North America.

The Hispanic soul, he says, has a "disdain for the void." In barren liturgical spaces, it is hard for Hispanics "to feel any awareness of the divine energy they formerly felt in worship; harder still to live with passion when they feel no power." In Fr. Lara’s words, "the subtleties of white-on-white or variegated shades of beige are lost here. Such spaces to the Hispanic cry out to be filled and to be given life and warmth which appears absent."

While the modern church building is serviceable and functional and helps provide an adequate space and covering for worship ("four walls, a roof, a no-nonsense floor plan, a few statues, and lots of white, beige, and grey" as one friend put it), it is rather plain, colorless, uninspiring, and unbeautiful. It lacks what Catholics generally call "mystery." How many modern churches can be said to be replicas of the Heavenly Jerusalem, or give a foretaste of the glorious eternal wedding banquet, or bring Heaven to earth? (You can guess my answer!)

Granted, the typical pre-Vatican II church was less than great architecture, and its art and furnishings were hardly masterpieces; yet it was a colorful and interesting place, alive with shrines, statues, paintings, candles, colors, and ornamentation, uplifting to the spirit, and hospitable to devotion.

Part of the solution to the problem I am identifying here is to encourage the younger generation of classically-trained architects committed to a more "traditional" (and more Catholic) kind of art and architecture to cooperate together and promote education in a more adequate theology and practice through publications, conferences, and workshops for bishops, parish priests, and the members of diocesan art and architecture committees.

In the meantime, clergy, people, architects, and artists committed to the Hispanic heritage would do the whole church in the U.S. a big service if they pressed their concerns more pointedly and constituted at least 50 percent of diocesan art and architecture commissions.