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Post by hibernicus on Jun 5, 2015 22:59:00 GMT
Ranger; one of the sad things about that Brutalist seminary is that it was built in the expectation that Vatican II would be followed by a flood of new priestly vocations, so more seminary space would be needed. Now there is not a single seminary in Scotland - priests are trained at the Scots College in Rome
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 14, 2015 10:55:47 GMT
From Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1979, Terence Brown:
A Church without intellectual or cultural ambitions of any remarkable kind was unlikely to attract to its service the most creative and imaginative members of society. Rather it offered career opportunities to many who might have found intellectual or cultural demands upon them even more difficult to meet than the obedience, discipline and administrative ability that were required of them by a powerfully authoritarian Church. Accordingly in the first decades of the Irish Free State the Church was unhappily notable in the main for lack of interest in artistic and cultural activity. The early years of the Catholic Revival in the later nineteenth century had, it is true, stimulated a good deal of architectural enthusiasms in the Church, as many churches were built, some in the Hiberno-Romanesque style at the one time expressing the general medievalism of late-Victorian culture and, more strikingly, attempting to establish a continuity with pre-Conquest Ireland which gratified nationalist sensibilities, but by the 1920's this style had become rather hackneyed and most church architecture and art (with the exception of some stained glass) were undistinguished. An exhibition of Irish Ecclesiastical Art during Dublin Civic Week in 1929 drew from George Russel's paper, The Irish Statesman, the regretful conclusion that "none of the Churches has thought it important to give their clergy an education in good taste as well as in dogmas", and, where "some natural good taste or love of the arts" does exist in the Churches, "that appreciation is individual. It owes nothing to a traditional policy of the Churches."
"One comes away with a feeling that quality is of no importance, beauty is of no importance, anything is good enough for God and his worshippers. We have bright brass vulgarities, a gaudy lustre seeming to be the only thing required, not exquisite craftmanship, but commercialized work turned out with no more reverence than one would turn out boots or shoes."
Lest it be thought such a melancholy estimate of Irish ecclesiastical art was solely a response of the Theosophist George Russell, it can be noted in a correspondent of the Irish Independent in 1932, casting about for examples of modern Irish churches which, because of their undoubted beauty and use of Irish art might reflect glory on the Irish Church in the year of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, could only think of two, the Honan Hostel Chapel in Cork (1916) and Loughrea Cathedral (1904).
One could have several responses to a quotation like this.
1) The familiar and rather tiresome response that "people (or conservatives, or traditionalists) are always complaining about some kind of decline; their predecessors complained about decline; it's just nostalgia". Doubtless there is such a strain within social comment, but we can hardly write off every claim of decline on that account. The implication-- that nothing ever really gets worse-- is rather silly.
2) To recognize the fact that, though there are objective standards of beauty, it's very difficult to get to them. I think there is a kind of hypertrophy of the aesthetic faculties in many cultivated people. I will take as an example the frequent complaint that film reviewers see so many films that they begin to hate anything conventional and strain after novelty, forgetting that the ordinary movie-goer doesn't watch a fraction of the films they do. Aesthetes such as George Russell are in danger, I think, of becoming over-cultivated.
3) The Catholic Church seems eternally vulnerable to the accusation of 'kitsch'. The Russell quotation above ("bright brass vulgarities") seems to be complaining about 'kitsch'. But one era's kitsch is another era's glory, and very often that which has been dismissed as 'kitsch' is rediscovered as beauty-- sometimes even by the same person over time.
I would like to suggest that there is a tendency in Catholicism which might be called 'anti-refinement', which comes from what Chesterton described as Catholicism's "buoyancy which comes from balance". The mass of mankind, almost by definition, are not 'refined'. They like bright things, big things, striking things, dramatic things, realistic things. Sometimes aesthetes end up liking such things through a kind of reaction against over-refinement, but most people like them just because they like them.
So the question, what is kitsch? is one that seems destined to be eternally vexed, especially within Catholicism. You could show the same statue to three people; one might think it was awful kitsch; another might think it was glorious kitsch; while a third might think it was glorious, and not kitsch at all. (The third is probably me.)
4) One can ask how much aesthetics really matter to the ordinary Catholic. I am asking this as an open question.
For my part, visual aesthetics are not all that important. I like plain churches and I like a lot of modern churches. (For instance, Our Lady Queen of Heaven church in Dublin Airport).
But hymnology is important. I no longer even sing the hymns at my local church; I refuse to sing them; they're dreadful. But they don't seem to bother anybody else.
Of course, one might say that the use of beauty in the liturgy, sacred architecture, hymnology etc. is not only meant to appeal to us but is meant to elevate us; to actually improve our tastes, to have a spiritually ennobling effect. The question of what we like and how we like it is actually not so straightforward. I mention as an example something I mentioned on this thread previously; when I was visiting my father in the Mater hospital recently, I found myself looking out its huge windows and realizing how beautiful the church spires of Dublin's cityscape really are. Previous to this, I'd often thought that I'd disliked spires and preferred churches with low roofs; and also that I disliked stone churches because they seemed cold and dead.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 15, 2015 17:45:24 GMT
One element that strikes me about that quote is that the person who claimed the Honan Chapel and Loughrea Cathedral were the only distinguished new churches in Ireland probably had an axe to grind. There was a Celtic Revival tendency in the early C20 which argued for the Hiberno-Romanesque style over Gothic on the grounds that Gothic was finicky, excessively ornate and pretentious, whereas HIberno-Romanesque is easier and cheaper to build, gives the congregation a better view of the altar, and is a native style. (The most distinguished feature of the two churches in question is their stained glass, which has to be seen to be believed.) "Official" churchbuilders in mid-century tended to favour classical or Hiberno-Romanesque, possibly for the first reason given. I am not sure which I prefer; a small neo-classical church like St Audoen's in Dublin can be a marvel of proportion, but big ones tend to be bleak; Gothic churches can be fiddly and obstructive but they can reveal all sorts of wonders the longer you look at them.
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Post by prayerful on Jan 4, 2017 17:45:52 GMT
St Patrick's church in Newport is twentieth century, but its Celtic Romanesque form, the situation and the fine Harry Clarke windows (added two decades after completion) makes it rather different from what followed. St Pius X church on College Drive, Templeogue has the form of a Roman basilica with medallion portraits of the Roman martyrs on the architrave or above it. An awful Conciliar altar (see www.churchservices.tv/piusx) was installed in front of the fairly plain high altar. There is also a very large statue of St Pius X at the back of the church. I wonder what the saint would think of the banal liturgy in a church that bears his name. Perhaps they could give it to St John the Evangelist in Dun Laoghaire (although it would be out of proportion there) as it is run by a Society that helped preserve the Mass.
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Post by hibernicus on May 5, 2019 16:32:31 GMT
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 15, 2021 8:27:00 GMT
I caught a snatch of online Mass from Cologne Cathedral this morning. The cathedral is, of course, glorious, but the modern altar looks totally out of place in it.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 29, 2021 20:15:06 GMT
Cologne Cathedral is an interesting case, as it was begun in the Middle Ages but only completed in the C19. The completion was financed by Frederick William IV of Prussia (which acquired the Rhineland after 1815); unfortunately, this generosity reflected his ambition to exert control over the Catholic Church in his dominions as he did over the (merged) Lutherans and Evangelicals, and a few years later he jailed the Archbishop of Cologne for denouncing mixed marriages. Tom Holland has an interesting (brief) narrative of this in DOMINION.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Oct 6, 2021 20:34:20 GMT
There is a local legend in Cologne that the world will end when the cathedral is finished. There is still a lot of work planned, so there is no danger of that happening soon.
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