Ten Theses on a Church Door

by Msgr. M. Francis Mannion

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Msgr. M. Francis Mannion, president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, Few Catholics today would disagree that, in most cases, contemporary church design leaves much to be desired. Reforms in the wake of Vatican II prompted extreme responses on either end of the spectrum. Msgr. M. Francis Mannion, president of the Society for Catholic for Catholic Liturgy has set out on a course pursuing the golden mean in liturgical reform overall He delivered the keynote address at the Liturgical Architecture Consultation, held Dec 5­8 1996, at Notre Dame University (excerpted).

The title of my presentation this evening is "Toward a New Era in Liturgical Architecture." The fundamental conviction undergirding what I shall have to say is that, at both conceptual and practical levels, Catholic liturgical architecture is today beset by critical problems requiring substantive solutions. It is no secret that popular criticism of modern church styles abound, while the fascination of traditional forms of church architecture continues to be evident. Considerable theological disagreement attends discussion of the nature and function of art and architecture in Catholic worship....

It is becoming apparent, then, that church architecture-like architecture in general-is entering a new era. This new era in liturgical architecture will be neither an anti­modern return to "tradition" nor a logical development of modern trends. Clearly no consensus as yet exists on the direction in which Catholic liturgical architecture ought develop. New points of view have yet to crystallize into anything approaching a coherent perspective. Various sorts of extremes and reactionary solutions need to be guarded against, however. History offers us no simple model or ideal to which to return, even as history does provide ample inspiration for appropriation in postmodern idioms. We must beware at all turns of new architectural ideologies replacing those currently operative.

What follows are 10 theses which I regard as desirable in any conceptualization of the future of Catholic liturgical art and architecture....

Architecture plays neither a sacral nor a merely functional role, but rather a sacramental role, in Catholic worship: the place of worship is neither temple nor "meeting house," but sacramental building.

Let me spell this out. The building in which Catholic Christians worship is not simply a cover for the community at prayer, a shelter for liturgical action or a "tent" for the people of God. The building is not a mere "skin" for liturgical worship. While liturgical architecture has an indisputably functional element, this functionality operates within a framework that is constitutively sacramental To say that liturgical architecture is sacramental is to say that architecture participates in the sacramental order of the church. Architecture enters intrinsically into the action of the liturgy. Material place symbolically amplifies the liturgical action, and the liturgy, in turn, draws into itself the spatial and the material.

Liturgical buildings, however, should not be conceived of as sacral places; that is, places that limit, contain or bind divine presence and action. God does not dwell exclusively in church buildings-or anywhere else. Because liturgical places are not sacral, the so­called "temple mentality" is foreign to Catholic Christian worship. The temple, typically and ideally, has been understood in religious history as the exclusive earthly dwelling place of the divine. A Christian church cannot be so regarded.

But neither are church buildings merely functional meeting houses, that is, places of no constitutive significance or without mediating role vis­a­vis divine presence and action in the world To hold that a church building is a functional meeting house is to imply that

divine presence is operative no more in a church building than anywhere else. Catholic tradition may not embrace such a perspective. Neither historic nor modern rites for the dedication of churches allow for a functional theology of the Catholic place of worship....

The debates of the past 30 years between the "sacralists" and the "functionalists" need to be left behind as the church embraces a deeper appreciation of the sacramental character of its places of worship. A new and heightened appreciation of the sacramental character of liturgical buildings must, in my opinion, constitute one of the characteristic elements of the new era of liturgical architecture into which the church is entering.

The holiness of the Christian assembly and the holiness of the liturgical building are not oppositional, but harmonious and mutually constitutive: the church building is both domus Dei and domus ecclesiae.

This thesis builds on the first Conceptual oppositions between the holiness of the worshipping assembly and the holiness of places of worship are commonplace today. They are constancy repeated in discussions and publications, and for the most part without much critical examination. Which comes first-the church building or the people of God? Which takes precedence? Which may be called holy: the people or the building? Does the holiness of one proceed from the other? In my opinion, these questions espouse a way of thinking that is fundamentally inadequate, both from the point of view of an adequate liturgical theology and of postmodern architectural anthropology.

The usual way of answering these questions is highly problematic. The standard answer holds that it is the people who are holy-and that from the holiness of the people is derived the holiness of the building. Others, on supposedly traditional grounds, respond that since the church building is a sacred, consecrated place, the holiness of the people derives from the former.

I would argue that the more adequate position is that the holiness of the church building and the holiness of the people of God are mutually generative and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, a church building is holy because it participates in the objective sanctifying and redeeming action of God at work in the sacramental liturgy of the church. On the other hand, a church building is holy because of the holiness of the baptized community which inhabits it and worships within it. The temple of stone is made holy by the living temple of the Holy Spirit.

The liturgical building sanctifies the people; and the people sanctify the church building. People and building are irreducibly holy, each according to their particular mode of participation in the sacramental order of the church....

Adequate liturgical­architectural theory and practice enshrine the recognition that the primary elements of liturgical events are the ritual form, the worshipping congregation, and the ordained ministry.

It is an axiom today that the assembly is the primary symbol of Christian worship. This theme appears constantly in discussions about art and architecture. The origin of this principle, as far as I have been able to trace, is Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (28). The intent of this assertion is to highlight the dignity and centrality of the people of God at worship and, for this reason, it can be welcomed. But it is best regarded as a transitional and corrective measure; as an objective principle the axiom needs to be questioned because it is conceptually confusing and, more fundamentally, because it distorts an adequate Catholic understanding of the way in which the liturgy is operationally structured.

In my opinion, it is conceptually confusing to speak of the people at worship as symbols. To be useful, words need to have some stability. People are people and symbols are symbols; in this sense it must be said that the primary symbol of the liturgy is the symbol system itself, the sacramental rites. While the worshipping people, in engaging and enacting the liturgical rites become themselves in a certain way symbolic (for instance, of the eschatological community), this occurs in a manner that is dependent on the ritual symbols. But to say that the assembled congregation is the primary symbol is to collapse the necessary distinction and relationship between the people and the liturgical symbol system.

In saying this, I am not for a moment playing down the importance of the assembly. I am rather suggesting the need for a more adequate way of speaking about the relationship between the various elements of the liturgy. Let me spell out my thesis here in a positive fashion. The event of Catholic liturgical worship is composed irreducibly of three elements: the worshipping congregation, the ritual symbolic form, and the ordained ministry. None of these elements may be taken to be the unqualified principle, origin or source of the other. In a liturgical event, the ritual form, the ordained minister and the worshipping congregation exist in principle in an integrated and mutually intended relationship. There exists, to invoke an Eastern term, a "synergy" of the three elements.

There is, then, not one primary element in the liturgy; there are three primary elements. The ascendancy of any of the three generates one of the recurring deviations of Christian liturgical history: ritualism, clericalism or congregationalism. To hold. then, that the assembly is the primary symbol or element is to offend conceptually, and as a result practically, against the harmony and synergistic interrelationship that should exist among people, rite and ordained ministry.

What are the liturgical consequences of the assertion of the symbolic primacy of the assembly? Principally, that the sacramental ritual is downplayed in theological and practical importance. If the sacramental rites are not primary, then they must be secondary. The liturgical symbol system, consequently, is no longer regarded as the revered medium of God's presence and action, but as the subjective creation and self­expression of the worshipping community. The result is that liturgical forms lose their proper autonomy and objectivity and are radically disempowered.

Why is this issue significant for liturgical art and architecture? Because when the sacramental ritual is conceptually deprived of its distinctive status and is regarded as secondary and derivative, the consequences are that the art and architecture of the liturgy are accorded a role that is secondary, functional and derivative. Liturgical art and architecture lose all the cultural and ecclesial weight that has been traditionally ascribed to them. It is no accident that the Protestant congregational churches have historically set art and architecture in a rather secondary and subservient role in public worship. Catholicism will be led inevitably in the same direction if it fails to renew its theological conception of the complex structure of the liturgy.

Catholic worship requires a renewal of ids iconographic tradition: modern iconoclasm generates a narrowing and an impoverishment of Christian vision.

Catholic orthodoxy (that is, right belief formed through right worship) is profoundly connected today as in the past to matters of visual representation in worship. We need only reflect on the history of the Reformation to remind us of this truth (Miles). The whole range of Christian images and iconography has never been regarded as merely decorative in function. It has been recognized, at least implicitly, that visual representations serve to establish, situate and orient the worshipping community in relation to the Trinitarian life of God and the communion of saints, as well as to symbolize and make present the eschatological and cosmic dimensions of ecclesial existence. While the Christian East has had a more stable and conscious grasp of this truth than has the West, the Catholic liturgy of the West has from the beginning depended on the iconographic as at least a tacit programmatic feature.

Representations within the liturgical assembly of Christ, Mary, the saints and angels, as well as imaginative anticipations of the life of eternity, are critical to sustaining a strong and compelling vision of the Christian reality. These aspects of faith cannot be adequately expressed, engaged or advanced by the verbal alone. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is eminently true of the liturgy. Sacrament, as St. Augustine pointed out, is word made visible.

Without adequate Trinitarian, Christological, eschatological and cosmic frames of reference visually embodied in places of worship, Catholic worship easily and quickly degenerates into self­referentiality, narcissism and introversion. Christian vision shrinks and narrows and hope becomes vague and abstract. The iconographic in worship serves to manifest the truth that the worshipping community does not live in and from itself. If Christ, Mary, the saints and angels are not visibly represented in churches, it is easy for them to be subtracted from Christian consciousness. Today more than ever, Catholics need reminders that liturgy is never the act of isolated communities in self­expressive modality, but always the action of the whole Body of Christ whose horizon is the Kingdom of God. The ontological source of the liturgy is God the Trinity; its foundational agent is Christ the Lord, and its community is that of all redeemed humanity.

A· rich architectural and artistic expressivity is crucial if Catholic liturgy is to generate an adequate doxological ethos: worship today is in need of a renewal of the "glorious."

Catholic liturgy since Vatican II, it is often said, lacks glory, beauty, majesty and splendor. It has become pale, lifeless and uninspiring. This observation is not valid if what is lamented is the absence of the triumphalism that accompanied Catholic worship in certain post­Tridentine expressions; yet, I believe that the observation is fundamentally sound. This problem derives, I believe, in great part from an impoverished Trinitarian, cosmic and eschatological artistry in our places of worship, and an inadequate presentation of the vision of eternal life, of Christian hope in heavenly things, of the return of Christ in glory and the lordship of Christ over history. If the renewal of the iconographic will serve to widen and enrich Christian vision, this vision will also in turn serve to restore praise filled energy, delight awe and fascination regarding the divine mystery that is at the heart of the liturgy.

The engagement of liturgy with the eschatological, that is with Christ in glory and the glory of heaven, is the fundamental impulse which generates conceptions and expressions of glory, awe and majesty in the liturgy. Visually powerful liturgical art and architecture serve a crucial agency in sustaining and generating the doxological expressivity of the liturgy. Liturgy becomes praise­filled, weighty and solemn in the best sense. Rites take on a glorious, majestic and awe­inspiring character. Altars, ambos, tabernacles, baptismal fonts and liturgical furnishings in general assume a noble and beautiful quality. The ritual space is so configured as to invite, even require, noble and dignified rites and ceremonies. The music generated within and by such spaces is resonant, expansive and soaring.

The inadequate doxological character of present­day worship did not materialize from nowhere. Modern art and architecture alone are not to blame. Among its causes are modern cultural subjectivism, which has resulted in liturgical pietism. The tendency of modern liturgical conceptions and practice is to focus primarily on inferiority and interpersonality within a "small group" modality. The therapeutic spirituality which is generated is one of the principal reasons the liturgy has lost its ethos of glory and majesty. Therapeutic idioms, expressed in an ethos of warmth, intimacy, personal affirmation and security, are not conducive to an expressivity of glory or energetic praise of God. They lead generally to an ethos of sentimentality, emotivism and personal and group self­absorption....

Liturgical art and architecture properly have a public rather than a domestic character: Catholic liturgy is ritually public, architecturally spacious and ecclesially inclusive.

The church is, by its catholic and evangelical vocation, a "public church." Catholic worship in every era since the time of Constantine has always-at least in its urban expressions- properly taken place in the public plaza, on the top of the hill and at the center of the city. Authentic Catholic worship has never-except in times of crises­­been closed to the public; worship belongs at the center of the affairs of the city.

Christian worship assemblies are not, and never should be, regarded or enacted as private gatherings, spiritual­therapeutic communities, support groups or common interest societies. Church buildings are not, then, domestic spaces in the modern sense. Only with great care should a Catholic place of worship be spoken of as "the living room of God's people" (hospitality vs. transcendence). A place of worship that is tame, "homey," plush or comfortable in the manner of domestic spaces, clubs or social facilities is not able to sustain a strong public presence and comprehensiveness. Liturgical architecture in the authentic Catholic tradition has more in common with the city hall, the public auditorium-even the concert hall-than with the living room, the small group facility or the retreat space.

In this matter, liturgical style and liturgical architecture influence each other strongly. Church architecture that is not public in function and appearance generates liturgical practices and spiritualities that are not only non­public but that actively generate a withdrawal of the church from public life. Non­public church buildings take the liturgy out of the public sphere. In turn, introverted liturgical ritualization fails to generate the kind of architecture that positions the church to be public, socially concerned and culturally influential. Most problematic of all, when liturgical worship and its architectural expression fail to be public, they tend to become sectarian and exclusive. Patterns of social exclusion and cultural homogeneity easily become operative.

Much of the problem here derives from what I would call "the cultural canonization of the intimate relationship." We have lost in American society a sense of the dignity of being neighbors, fellow citizens, even respectful strangers. The intimate relationship is regarded today as the paradigmatic relationship. In this view, human relationships, to be authentic, have to be intimate or at least friendly.

This conception has been too easily absorbed into North American Christian worship. It is accompanied by a failure to recognize that there are many kinds and degrees of authentic human relationships, all of which may be civilized, baptized and eucharistized. The appropriate kind of intimacy to be sought in worship is not psychological intimacy in the accepted cultural sense: it is theological intimacy, that is, the bonding of persons of all degrees of relationship which occurs by their participation in the Trinitarian life of God through sacramental initiation and incorporation.

The "canonization of the intimate relationship" goes hand in hand with what I call "the greet American fear of space." In our experience, the public arena has become alien, fearsome and dangerous. This outlook has also been absorbed into the North American church to a notable degree. This means that spaciousness is regarded as a negative quality in church buildings. There exists in American Catholicism today a bias against serge, ample churches which has nothing to do with their ability to function well. Large buildings, if they do not function well, are, of course, problematic. Modern architectural technology, however, has largely overcome this problem and it is possible to have serge and ample buildings that function well....

Church buildings serve both liturgical and devotional functions: the restoration of the devotional will render church architecture more authentically popular.

While church buildings exist first and foremost for the celebration of the official liturgy of the church, they have also traditionally served as places for popular devotions (public and private), as well as for contemplation and meditation. The understanding that the function and character of a church building is not exhausted by the requirements of the official liturgy of the church is of long standing.

However, the mood in the church in the past 30 years has been against the devotional and, in particular, against the devotional as it impinges upon or operates alongside the liturgy. The functionalist principles of modern architecture and their inability to handle the ambiguity and polyvalence of Catholic devotionalism has rendered church architecture since Vatican II exceedingly anti­devotional. Many people have lamented the stripping of Catholic places of worship of devotional elements and artifacts. It is no secret that the alienation of the ordinary Catholic worshiper from modern church architecture derives in great part from the rejection by the newer architectural styles of traditional elements of Catholic devotionalism....

Historically, Catholicism has attended with considerable intuition to the "religious" dimensions of faith and to the various forms these have assumed in popular or lay spirituality. The authentic Catholic pastoral attitude does not reject, but assumes, redeems and transforms popular religiosity and devotionalism This approach by no means precludes a critical, balanced and appropriately cautious approach to popular religion and the devotional. The extremes of excessive religiosity and rationalistic faith need to be avoided.

Liturgical buildings, then, may not be reduced without remainder to "eucharistic halls." They serve both liturgical and extra­liturgical functions. In relation to the latter in particular, a new attention is necessary to the devotional features of church art and architecture. Overcoming the alienation of ordinary Catholics from modern church styles will be served in great part by a recovery of the devotional and the "religious" in the art and architecture of the liturgy.

The modern movement in architecture is not adequate to the service of Catholic liturgy; modernism in liturgy and its arts is undergirded by a mechanistic model of religion and culture.

Modern architecture is increasingly recognized as a "style" in the history of architecture. To name it as such is to say that it can and will be surpassed; the modern movement is no longer recognized everywhere as the end point of architectural evolution. The modern style is characteristically driven by self­consciously rational conceptions of function and performance. In its philosophical outlook, it is mechanistic, univocal, emotionally inhibited and positivistic. From its inception, the modern style has carried strong anti­historical and anti­traditional impulses. Architectural modernism embodies an explicit social agenda that is reconstructionist and revolutionary; thus it holds a general disdain for the past. The modernist outlook is obsessed by the grounding of form in function. Its operative model is the machine. Accordingly, it tends to reject forms that are not directly functional. Modernist aesthetics are generated largely in an abstract modality.

The philosophical origins of modern architecture are in Protestantism and its secularization in the Enlightenment. The religious roots in Calvinism and Puritanism are also particularly strong. Modern architecture seems to have picked up those theological convictions of Protestantism that were neutral towards creation, fearful of human works and cautious about religion as a human phenomenon. It is hampered in its self­understanding and expressivity by the philosophical convictions of the "age of suspicion" and its "masters," Marx, Nietszche and Freud.

The principles and practices of modern architecture were naturally assumed into the Catholic liturgical movement in the mid­20th century. The desire to establish the relevance of the church to contemporary culture was a principal reason. Another factor was a certain tendency toward behaviorism and mechanism in the later modern liturgical movement. By behaviorism and mechanism, I mean a view derived from certain anthropological schools, that liturgical rites operate by a limited and definite set of rational and predictable principles. Liturgical renewal in this model sought to control ambiguous expression and to curtail what seemed excessive or overwrought. It emphasized simplicity, clarity, directness of expression, freedom from duplication and assumed a didactic model of ritual operationality.

To criticize the modern movement in architecture is not necessarily to reject the genuine achievements of its functional and popular aims, or to seek a return to the past with a revivalist agenda. Nor is it, by any means, to reject the principles of liturgical renewal, including those that arose in the areas of art and architecture. In my opinion, however, the time has come to move past modernism into a new era of architectural creativity in the service of the liturgy that can assume the gains of modern functionalism without being hampered by its deficits.

The emerging era in church art and architecture will be a postmodern one; postmodernity in art and architecture allows a more adequate embrace and reappropriation of architectural tradition.

The postmodern alternative to modernism operates according to an organic model rather than a mechanistic one. This alternative recognizes that symbols, including art and architecture, communicate impressionistically, as a whole, to a considerable degree subconsciously, and in a manner that is not always rationally accessible. It understands that rite, art and architecture generate a wide variety of reactions, perceptions and emotions in participants. Architecture and art. in the postmodern view, speak polyphonically, in many voices, rather than monophonically, or in one voice.

The postmodern movement in architecture severely questions what many of its proponents regard as the "barren," sparse, inhuman" and "cold" characteristics of modern architecture. Postmodernism is attentive to symbolic richness, as well as more fully attuned to the spiritual and psychological dimensions of art. The postmodern perspective attends to popular idioms and is more exuberant and celebratory in its aesthetic. It recognizes the complexity of the architectural relation to nature, place, society and culture. Postmodernism does not simply reject the modern, so much as move beyond it by contact with longer architectural history and tradition. This attention to history and tradition is among the greatest strengths and most promising features of this movement.

Postmodern Catholic architecture will also be able to pick up and renew traditional idioms of church architecture, thus restoring greater continuity with the Catholic architectural past. It does not fear quotation from the received tradition of church architecture. It does not share the bias against the medieval, Renaissance and post­Tridentine eras that have been such a pervasive feature of Catholic thinking in recent decades....

Orientation or directional configuration within liturgical buildings is the fundamental programmatic factor regarding the placement and interrelationship of liturgical appointments....

Whatever the arrangement, the ordering of space and the orientation of elements within church buildings are highly significant. The question of the orientation of the altar and the priest at Mass is the most controversial aspect of this issue. While the "conservative" desire to return simply to preconciliar arrangements must be rejected, there is something to be said for priest and people praying in the same direction, as long as the altar and the place of the people are closely coordinated. There are certainly strong historic precedents for such a proposal. This arrangement might rationalize the visual dynamics of worship, which are presently quite confused, with priest and people looking now in different directions. It could reverse neoclericalist dominance of the assembly and reestablish a visual "register" of worship beyond that of the person of the priest. It would symbolize more adequately the transcendent orientation of worship by reintroducing, through common focus on an iconographic program, the cosmic and heavenly dimensions of the liturgy.

Again, the proper place of the tabernacle is fundamentally a question of orientation and spatial configuration. The position of the tabernacle in modern liturgical arrangements remains unresolved at both theoretical and practical levels. Popular sentiment in favor of its traditional prominence in churches has not been adequately analyzed and explained. Something in the sensus fidelium on this matter remains impervious to the current liturgical rationale. In my opinion, a more adequate theory of the tabernacle and of its significance and placement seems called for. Perhaps a new balance between altar and tabernacle along the lines of an incarnational­eschatological dialectic within the eucharistic liturgy would provide the key here....

In conclusion, the new era of church art and architecture that we are entering-or at least that I am proposing-does not signal in any way a "restorationism" that would seek to recover an imagined golden age; no such age ever existed. Nor do the new directions I am advocating simply reject the modern. Such an approach would be thoughtless and presumptuous. The genuine achievements of modern liturgical architecture should be gratefully embraced, even as we seek to move beyond them, recognizing their limitations. The signs that a new era of church art and architecture is upon us are disparate and inconclusive. But they do exist, and I believe we shall see them embodied in a new period of creativity to which, I hope, this conference will, in retrospect, have contributed.

Msgr. Mannion is rector of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, Salt Lake City, Utah.

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