Bogus Gold

As many of you know, I'm a Catholic, born and raised entirely in the post Vatican II Church. If any of you think the Supreme Court interpreting the U. S. Constitution has gotten ridiculously complicated, it's a paragon of clarity compared to the contortions and cartwheels Catholics go through interpreting Vatican II.

A typical example is on display in Ireland, where a local bishop has decided Vatican II requires him to vandalize an historic and beloved cathedral.

The alterations are part of his plan to extensively remodel the sanctuary, nave and transepts of the cathedral designed by Edward W Pugin, a man regarded as one of the most important Victorian architects of the Gothic revival.

Dr Magee, the Bishop of Cloyne and the former secretary to the previous pope, believes the changes are necessary to bring the style of worship in the cathedral into line with Vatican II guidelines that modernised Mass by ending the use of Latin and bringing the priest closer to the congregation.

Dr Magee wants to strip out 20 pews to extend the sanctuary into the body of the cathedral and lower it to the same level by removing three steps. He also wants to bring the bishop's chair and altar forward.

The move requires the removal of large portions of the mosaic floor laid by Ludwig Oppenheimer, of Manchester, who worked on the Co Cork cathedral built between 1867 and 1919.

The delicate mosaics depict religious symbols as well as the harp, signifying St Colman's sixth-century role as the Bard of Munster.

Bishop Magee would also like to redesign the adjacent marble-floored chapel built by Pugin and his partner George Ashlin for the lying in state of a bishop. He wants to transform the chapel into an ordinary mortuary for lay people.

Breaking up the altar rail will deprive people of the place where they have knelt to take communion for almost 100 years.

If you've never been into an historic church transformed in this way, you can't quite appreciate how ugly and deforming these kind of "wreckovations" can be. Yet they've become extremely common. Almost always they are rationalized as necessary in the name of "community." Almost always the resut is a continued fall-off in church attendance, replacing actual communities with the pretend-staged kind.

Part of the reason is obvious, and has nothing to do with matters of intricate theology which cause heated debate between traditionalists and modernists in the Church. The problem lies in sacred aesthetics. Churches like the one in question were created with the explicit purpose of creating a sense of sacredness and mystery. The rennovators, in the rare cases where they pay any attention at all to this aesthetic, are uniformly inferior to their predecessors in this regard. Sometimes they seem outright hostile to such notions.

Here's the cathedral in question:




Wouldn't it look much better with a few felt banners with words like "Alleluia" and "Love" dressing up the altar, and a groovy priest sitting right out in the middle of the congregation? Wouldn't that increase the worship experience of the congregation? No? What are you, some kind of reactionary radical traditional clod?!

I'm hoping and praying the new Pope Benedict starts reversing, or at least slowing this trend. He has written many things in the past which suggest this doesn't align with his own ideas about the meaning of Vatican II.