Notre Dame's neo-classicists yearn to build grand old churches

National Catholic Reporter, April 21, 2000 by MICHAEL E. DeSANCTIS

Neither does it faze them, apparently, that they may be significantly underestimating the depth of sentiment the public is capable of applying to even the sparest of architectural gestures. Witness the citizens of Columbus, Ind., who have worked hard to secure a place on the National Register of Historic Places for their dense collection of buildings by world-famous modernists.

The idea that modern-styled buildings might be perceived as anything but "cold and sterile" doesn't sit well with the Stroik and Smith's target audience. When Stroik shares his musings on the set of "Mother Angelica Live," however, a TV dreamland dripping with appropriately "ecclesiastical" decor, the conservative purveyors of Catholic information take pains to transmit every word to diocesan newspapers throughout the country. Likewise, when Smith makes an off-handed remark about modern churches looking like "Darth Vader helmets," the quip surfaces on a dozen Catholic Web sites, all proudly displaying the emblem of orthodoxy.

Yet, even Stroik and Smith must concede that from time to time in the life of the church the very style they hope to revive has been judged unfit for sacred service -- most notably, perhaps, by the 19th-century apologist of Gothic culture, Augustus Welby Pugin. So vile and pagan were classicism's historical associations to Pugin that he pronounced its application even to the facade of St. Peter's Basilica "a humbug, a failure, an abortion ... and a sham."

Pugin's hyperbole strikes us as humorous today, and, in time, one assumes, so will that of Stroik and Smith. At the moment, however, there is little amusement to be found in their noisy posturing, and the inconsistencies in their agenda prove irksome: How, for example, can they denounce modern liturgical design as hackneyed, passe and "institutionalized" while damning it at every turn for being too revolutionary for the average parish community to manage? How can they claim to be the new-est of history's neo-classicists without sounding peculiarly modern themselves in their concern for fashionability?

Rote may well be a "radical," but only to artists style-conscious enough, in a modernist way, to care about such things. If Stroik and Smith were really the classicists they claim to be, they would hardly indulge in the passing polemics of contemporary church art but content themselves with the transcendent view their ancient orders are supposed to afford them.

The Notre Dame classicists' fundamental folly lies in thinking that American Catholics can easily forget all they have learned in recent decades by inhabiting buildings shaped by the internal logic of liturgical prayer -- buildings that encourage worshipers to assemble less like members of a marching band than like the integral players in an orchestral ensemble; buildings that, by coincidence of history or cultural predilection, are designed with a modernist eye for practicality; strong, handsomely appointed buildings, with decent restrooms, coatrooms, diaper-changing rooms; proper planning-and-primping-and-feasting-and-mourning rooms, all conceived with the same care as the room reserved for divine worship; buildings, in short, where the church can sacramentalize the here-and-now of its creed in surroundings linked to the here and now.