Building Churches - liturgical bureaucracy

Commonweal, Sept 8, 2000 by Joseph Schickel

Some months ago I had a spirited conversation with a friend who is a member of a nearby parish--let's call him Al. I have heard him referred to as a "traditionalist" and a "conservative." He is happy to speak his mind either way. He and his wife identify strongly with Pope John Paul II. They refer to the catechism in discussion, have aesthetic taste that is--as we say here in Cincinnati--soooo Cincinnati! They read the National Catholic Register, do home schooling, and seem borderline affluent. Al confided to me that the "so-called education program" being "foisted" on the parish in preparation for the building of a new church smacked more of "indoctrination" than education.

A few months later I had a lively talk with an acquaintance visiting from out of state--call her Tina. She worships at her diocesan cathedral, a historic building for which a renovation plan is in the works. I have heard Tina called "liberal," "progressive," and a few other things. Like Al, she is more than happy to speak her mind and she speaks it well. She is single, feminist, an artist, and as repelled by the tang of orthodoxy as Al is drawn to it. Tina reads the National Catholic Reporter. She said the "liturgical consultants' education program" underway for the cathedral renovation "process" was really not education at all, but "shallow proselytizing."

That Catholics as seemingly opposite as Tina and Al should find common ground in their opposition to these education programs bolsters my growing conviction that something is amiss in liturgical art and architecture, and particularly in the so called "education programs" and "process" that are now considered the sine qua non for enlightened projects.

In "Powers of Persuasion" (America, October 9, 1999), Nathan D. Mitchell, director of the Notre Dame Pastoral Center, states that documents like the 1978 EACW (Environment and Art in Catholic Worship), crafted primarily by the late Robert Hovda, properly belong to the literature of persuasion rather than the literature of legislation. EACW embodies some of the best early post-Vatican II principles of liturgical art and architecture. It reads, says Mitchell, "like a poem, a prayer," and is "lean, spare, strong, loving, and wise." On the other hand, Mitchell is not so sanguine about a new draft liturgical document, Domus Dei, now being considered by the U.S. bishops: "Although it seeks to persuade without legislating...Domus Dei seems to legislate without persuading." I share Mitchell's admiration for EACW and his sense that liturgical documents, in general, should persuade rather than legislate. But I think he ignores a certain irony here: namely, that it is EACW's advocates who have contributed to facts on the ground which make the distinction between persuasion and legislation largely meaningless.

Over the past decade, many proponents of EACW, perhaps unwittingly, have supported the creation of a new liturgical bureaucracy--in the form of diocesan guidelines and boards of review--that has become increasingly authoritarian in tone and judicial in procedure. Members of diocesan review boards probably do not see their role in this light, but talk to artists, architects, and parish representatives who have gone before such boards and you will get an earful. While the bulk of EACW is an exhortation to excellence in liturgical art and architecture, it is the smaller portion, dedicated to technical and specific recommendations, that has captured the attention of review boards. The result has been the production of a plethora of technically correct but banal and uninspired liturgical spaces.

In educational outreach and community consultation, the liturgical bureaucracy has nearly turned EACW inside out. In theory, church building projects involve a process that includes town meetings, surveys, and many other opportunities for community input. In practice, the drumbeat of "the people need to be educated" sounds early and often; and this mantra is so broad and amorphous that it is impossible to determine what it means. It is often used to stigmatize opponents (for their lack of piety or refinement), and thus to discourage open discussion of the many important issues that a building project brings to the fore. Has the current consultation process created liturgical art and architecture that deeply explore and powerfully express the unique soul of a worshiping community? Just look about you. The results are dismal.

My problem with today's liturgical bureaucracy is that it advances measurable technical goals at the same time it diminishes the more essential immeasurable exhortative ones at the heart of EACW. My grandfather, the American stained-glass artist Emil Frei, once remarked that a board of review eliminates the worst and the best in art and architecture. My own experience has been that bureaucracy and art are natural adversaries. Thanks to the current liturgical bureaucracy, the wonderfully paradoxical duality of local and universal in Catholicism--with its great potential for an almost infinite variety of rich artistic expression--has been nearly lost in the United States in favor of a sterile and homogeneous "American" vision, one created by committees of liturgists at academic conferences and then imposed on local communities through the so-called "education" process.