LA’s Triumph of the Modern

What is it about modern church architecture that drives so many Catholics to distraction? Admittedly, there are some real clunkers out there in Catholicland. Typically, when I’m driving through a new town I can often spot the Catholic church if it’s been built somewhere around the 1950s or 1960s and looks like (a) an undistinguished blond-brick box; (b) a sort of Eero Saarinen-inspired swooping, curvy concrete monstrosity; or (c) a glass Kleenex box. So, granted, some of our experiments with modernity are failures or near-failures. But the clean lines of modernism are often just right for a Christian worship space. Witness the power of the stripped-down lines of some of the most distinguished Carthusian and Trappist monasteries in Europe. Or witness one of the newer ones: the simple renovation in the 1960s by William Schickel to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Bardstown, Kentucky. Schickel took the structure down to its original wooden beams and stucco walls, and takes the believer into a via negativa of a church. Perhaps the most recent successful example of modern liturgical architecture is here in Los Angeles. (Like your other blogger, Tom Beaudoin, I’m here for the enormous and enormously fun Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, which this year will be attracting some 46,000 participants.) Every time in Los Angeles (which is not all that frequently) I make a mini-pilgrimage to the newly built Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Of course the justly famous tapestries of the saints, by John Nava, are what most people come to see. They are a signal gift to the American church. But Rafael Moneo’s stunningly simple use in the building of stone, tile and alabaster, and his confident use of an austere style make this church one of the most successful worship spaces in this country. Yesterday, I passed a small knot of high school kids, who gathered in the grand plaza in front of the massive cathedral, holding hands in a circle, along with their youth minister. They stood silently praying while the tourists eddied around them. And today I went back again with a friend, who, when he entered the nave of the church, wept. So tired of all those “bad” modern churches? Okay, fair enough. But try to give modern churches a chance, places whose underlying goal is not only to express a sense of spirituality but to do it in the “idiom,” as architects like to say, of our times; as much of an “inculturation” of a sensibility to a culture as the Gothic and Romanesque styles were to their times. James Martin, S.J., from Los Angeles