style=width:200px;height:300px;float:right;" >IT IS ALWAYS a source of satisfaction for us when you, dear readers, send letters expressing appreciation for our articles. One recent contribution that aroused particular interest was God’s Architect by Renzo Allegri, which appeared in the November issue. The article refers to artist Antoni Gaudí and his church, the Sagrada Familia in Barcellona, Spain.
Many of you wrote to express gratitude for having brought this great artist to their attention, others praised us for the quality of the article and the photos, others still for the fact that those pages brought back to mind their past trip to Barcellona and their visit to the inspiring shrine.
Some of these letters, however, also expressed a certain disquiet concerning modern ecclesiastical architecture, with questions such as: Why are there so few churches like those? or Why do modern architects make such awful churches these days?
I have to admit that I find such views not entirely unjustified. To my mind there are, in fact, quite a number of modern ugly churches around. If one enters one of these ‘Houses of God’, instead of feeling called to prayer, one is immediately gripped with feelings of gloom and doom. Instead of elevating the heart and mind to God, one feels inner discomfort at the view of impersonal cement blocks, cold steel structures, bizarre-looking windows and incomprehensible paintings.
I believe that a church building should be the condensation of the architect’s faith-experience. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the architect who is finally selected to design a church is chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with his or her faith. Often these architects are chosen merely because of the fame and prestige attached to their names, or out of financial concerns, and not out of a desire to build an edifice specifically dedicated to religious worship. Many of these so called ‘artists’ are unable to go beyond their materialistic mindset, and set themselves the task of designing a church as if they were designing a shopping mall or a sports building. Yet a church is no ordinary construction; it is a holy place which has to embody the essential characteristics of Christianity, and which must create an environment conducive to meditation, prayer and devotion.
A look at the great cathedrals of the past will show the deep theological divide between the past and the present. Those churches are living testimonies of faith: they are inspirational books carved in stone, ‘bibles for the poor’ who could neither read nor write, but which spoke to them of the salvation mystery and, above all, led them to the most intimate of religious experiences: the reception of the Eucharist. The ethereal light emanating from double lancet and rose windows, the pied beauty and richness of paintings and mosaics, the imposing power of stone: everything was meant to convey the majesty of our faith and the mystery of a God who incarnates and dwells among us.
Those stones, however, are merely symbols pointing to other stones, the living stones; that is, the people who have been members of the Mystical Body of Christ through the ages.
The Church created by Jesus, in fact, is built not out of marble, wood, brick or glass, but out of men and women who become “living stones, built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” (1 Pt 2:5; Eph 2:19-22)
Gaudí’s beatification is pending, and his Sagrada Familia is there in the centre of Barcellona to remind the inhabitants of that city, and the tourists who flock to see it, that God has not forsaken us, that He is still dwelling among us, even though we may have forsaken Him.
Simone Weil, the Christian mystic, wrote in this regard, “In all that awakens within us the pure and authentic sentiment of beauty, there, truly, is the presence of God. There is a kind of incarnation of God in the world, of which beauty is the sign. Beauty is the experimental proof that incarnation is possible. For this reason all art of the first order is, by its nature, religious”.
We are in dire need of re-establishing a link with true art, that art capable of creating real beauty which induces tranquillity in the soul and opens the heart and mind to God. Beauty is the privileged path through which we can speak of God today, perhaps even more so than in the past.
Updated on October 06 2016