From the churches at Ravenna down to the most florid and overblown outbursts of the Baroque in Spain and Italy, the Roman Catholic churches have always been built in harmony with the major buildings of their period; and although the medieval mason quite certainly didn’t regard the House of God as on the "same footing with commercial and industrial buildings," he used the same mode of construction and decoration: The barns and kitchens of the ruined abbey at Glastonbury are as fine and beautiful as the abbey church itself must have been-and they are fine and beautiful in the same way.

Yet there is something ruthless in the modern skyscraper and grain elevator and factory that makes a sensitive person feel instinctively that the mode of construction is at odds with humane and religious ends.... This feeling of antagonism drives people back into the sanctuary of the past, and they build churches that have something of the outward shape and semblance of a Romanesque or a Norman or a perpendicular building; but the fate of these churches, even the best of them, is to show on every stone the arid marks of our mechanical culture.... The result is that our efforts to reproduce a Gothic or a Romanesque shell are less significant, aesthetically, than the run of buildings we seek to escape; for with all their imperfections the later buildings are alive, and, with their studied gestures, our reproductions are cold and dead....

But how express the religious purpose of the building? Does not the Gothic help us here-do not towers help-does not at least a little stained glass come in? The answer to this is that the religious aims of expressing solemnity, peace, and inner communion with Deity is not promoted by erecting a building whose details are in no wise different in execution, however different in aim, from those of a bank or a moving picture theatre; the point is that we must express the religious character of a church by doing things that a commercial building would not think of doing. One of the ways of doing this in a city is to devote the funds that are saved by a simple, vernacular mode of construction to the purchase of land sufficient for a park or garden, screening the church from the dust and noise of the street, putting it apart from the mundane buildings that now jostle it and jeer it, and, incidentally, providing a resting place for mothers and babies.

But what of tower or steeple...? Nowadays...it is as well to leave the towers to Mammon, and to achieve the same purpose not by an outward gesture but by an inward grace.... The intimate expression of the Catholic spirit must come through its treatment of the altar, the Communion table, the shrines, the baptismal font.... There should be greater room for free and gracious expressions at these points; it is absurd to think that the aesthetic expression of the Savior, the Mother of Heaven, or the saints should become fossilized at some particular moment in the church’s life, so that thereafter the robe and vesture and very anatomical form should express only the conceptions and limitations of that moment; and it is even worse when these models are stereotyped and deadened by the methods and workmanship of the commercial market....

Although Catholic communicants no doubt see beyond the tawdry reality of the living symbol, as a little girl reads into her rag-doll the glow of a living baby, the ornament and statuary that fill so many modern church point to a sad compromise with utilitarianism. All the while devout Catholics like Cézanne, and sincere religious spirits like Van Gogh, to pick out two great examples from an older generation, have shared the homelessness of the modern artist, instead of finding a place for themselves within the churches. That a robust modern art is not incompatible with Catholicism...is proved by the work in our own day of Mr. Eric Gill in England. If Catholics would have a living art once more in their churches they would single out these artists, would foster their work, would give opportunity to apprentices and disciples... From a purely practical standpoint, genuine art is as cheap as its substitutes; and it is only our own dullness, our own lack of discrimination, that lets us accept the muddled unfermented grape juice of commercial vendage instead of the true wine of the spirit.

The Commonweal

April 15, 1925