Over the past decades, modern church architecture, not unlike church music, has been notoriously uninspiring. Airplane hanger-like constructions, fan-shaped congregational seating and bizarre stained glass have dominated worship space in the last sixty years. One author could not help but title his critique “Ugly as Sin.”
However, Church architecture is changing. American Catholics are demanding that their new worship spaces look more like, well…churches. Some schools of architecture are now turning out graduates who propose church buildings that reflect not ugly sin but the sacred.
The Institute for Sacred Architecture
In 1998, architects at Notre Dame University got together to found the Institute for Sacred Architecture—a major center for the general movement away from modern ugliness. Its goals were to return to the sacred, explore the richness of the Church architecture heritage and commission new classical and Gothic churches in America.
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To this end, its founding members published Sacred Architecture Journal, a bi-annual publication reporting on developments in the field. They have also sponsored seminars and scholarly work that promote their goals.
The result of efforts like these has been a flowering of beautiful churches all over the country. The Journal regularly features articles on outstanding projects with stunning pictures, historical perspectives and critiques of ugly-as-sin structures and art.
A Sea Change Turned Toward the Sacred
In the latest issue of the Sacred Architecture Journal, architect-editor Duncan Stroik notes a sea change in church architecture against all expectations. No one could have imagined how postmodern buildings have fallen out of fashion.
After nearly twenty-five years of effort, Mr. Stroik lists three things that have changed dramatically in the field since the journal’s founding. These changes correspond not only to where one worships but also to how.
Using the “S” Word Again
The first significant change is a return to the notion of the sacred. “Twenty-five years ago, people did not use the ‘s’ word in relation to church architecture,” Mr. Stroik reports. “Today the sacred is often used in modern parlance,” referring to houses of God.
This return is related to a spiritual transformation inside the souls of Catholics who yearn for the sacred. They are tired of brutal secular designs that try so hard to eliminate the sacred. These Catholics want to pray in a beautiful sacral place corresponding to these yearnings.
One way the sacred manifests itself in design is what the architect calls “a general appreciation for verticality and directionability.” In other words, churches now look like churches pointing upward toward God with steeples, arches and vaults. The amorphous floor plans and amphitheaters are gone. On the floor level, churches maintain a direction pointing toward God in a sacred sanctuary.
These changes reflect the need for prayer to be a physical image of what is happening spiritually. Prayer is an action where the soul is uplifted to God. A church should reflect a hierarchy of places where the person feels a special, uplifting presence of the sacred, not the egalitarian sameness that makes modern structures so unbearable.
Going Back to the Sources
A second development of sacred architecture is a return to sources. Gone is the universal, everything-goes attitude that dominated in the seventies and eighties. Pastors and congregations are rediscovering the “great richness and variety of churches built over the last two millennia.”
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Also gone is the hostility toward the past. The age of wreckovation from the sixties onward sought to destroy all ancient styles and décor. Renovators rejected the Church’s rich heritage and experimented with new and horrific structures and furnishings without attachment to the parish or locale. Thus, church architecture has been unanchored.
Now, people are looking back to the richness of the past that never grows old. They are finding beautiful expressions of the truths of the Faith, not trendy fads and fashions.
This return to sources also reflects the older manners of worship that so enchant many Catholics, especially the young.
Our Great-Grandparents’ Artwork
Mr. Stroik’s third development is a trend he describes as people “investing their churches with artwork that our great-grandparents would recognize.” He says this trend took off once people “realized that it was allowed.”
Thus, the new buildings have beautiful paintings recounting salvation history. Touching scenes adorn side chapels, ornate ceilings and walls. They reflect beauty that spans generations.
Indeed, the latest issue of the Journal highlights huge new and highly ornate chapels at universities, like St. Mary’s Chapel at Texas A. & M. in College Station, Texas, which seats 1,500 people. Such projects are popular and gaining traction. They have excited the attention of young people.
The Development of Sister Arts
Working on the growing number of buildings are craftsmen specializing in the arts needed to adorn the churches. Painters, sculptors and stained glass makers are emerging as “sister arts” to architecture to supply the demand for the sacred.
Many who work on these churches are trained in making their crafts reflect Church theology in addition to their crafts. Their work becomes a labor of love.
This bottom-up movement must go hand in hand with schools of music that fit with the surroundings (and acoustics!) of the new buildings.
All these things reflect an organic return to tradition that suggests a strong action of God’s grace that inspires and works inside souls. Thus, people have come to realize that worship spaces influence the way they pray and worship. There is a direct relationship. When a building is ugly as sin, it does not favor something as beautiful as grace and virtue.
Tradition Represents the Future
The future of sacred architecture is bright because people are immensely attracted to the sacred. Mr. Stroik believes the movement’s message needs to be expanded beyond America. He proposes “international conferences on sacred architecture for architects, pastors and contractors from Africa, Asia, Latin America” and other areas of expansion.
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Man-centered worship inside ugly-as-sin boxes will yield the inevitable fruit of empty churches. There is a connection between where one prays and how one prays. The resurgence of these new churches happened because people sensed the postmodern emptiness that could only be filled by the sacred.
Thus, through working with the grace of God, great and unexpected things can be accomplished. The apostolate of sacred beauty attracts multitudes because it speaks a timeless and universal language. Tradition represents the future.
Updated August 20, 2024.