It Is Not Obligatory To Build Ugly Churches.

I sincerely hope and pray that I live to see this Church's completion. I can guarantee you that by hook or by crook, I'll get to St Mary's for Mass in it!

From Fr Z's Blog

I have always admired those in the Church who can think big, create projects, and bring them to completion.

Hence, I found this project fascinating.  I’ve been following the videos.

The SSPX is building a huge church in Kansas dedicated to the Immaculate Conception.   Apart from the fact that this is a new church, on a huge scale, that looks like a church (and then some!), the video is interesting from the point of view of the details of the construction.  It’s worth viewing just to see how they use scaffolding to get into the cupola and prepare it with sprinklers so that the heads coincide with the stars that will be painted in the dome.

It is not necessary to build churches that look like municipal airports.

Each age of the Church and each cultural ethnic region has its own self-descriptive art forms. Church architecture expresses the Catholic identity of those who build it. If you look around at a lot of our churches, built in the past few decades, that’s pretty frightening. It’s as if they either didn’t know the Faith, or they hated it.

The space we choose to create for our sacred liturgical worship both shapes and reveals our identity. Worship interiorized leads to outward expression, both in our concrete acts in life and in the “ornamentation” of our liturgical action. All of these components express and form.

Liturgy is doctrine. Doctrine informs our minds and hearts. Hearts and minds hunger for more. Grace builds on nature. Love compels us back to worship and further study of the Faith.

Everything we are and all to which we aspire must begin in our worship and be brought back to it.

This is why the attack on Tradition is suicidal. But, there are some want to commit suicide and bring others with them. They don’t realize it, but those who actively attack traditional liturgical worship are ecclesial suicide bombers. It’s all so very sad. It urges us to try to understand what made them want that. They weren’t born that way, they were made into that. We, for our part, have to examine ourselves carefully to discern what part in their mortal devolution we may have played.

I digress.

These days we see grand churches such as the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin and the new Cathedral in Knoxville.

It is not obligatory to build ugly churches.