It is a good day to pray for and with our catechumens. And in fact, one of the minor exorcisms in The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults takes Saint Paul’s election, witness, and spirituality as its theme. This prayer would be especially suitable today.

The RCIA has this to say about the minor exorcisms: “They draw the attention of the catechumens to the real nature of the Christian life, the struggle between flesh and spirit, the importance of self-denial for reaching the blessedness of God’s kingdom, and the unending need for God’s help.” (RCIA 90).

Here is the prayer:

God of infinite wisdom, / you chose the apostle Paul / to proclaim your Son to every nation.

We pray that these your servants, / who look forward to baptism, / may follow in the footsteps of Paul / and trust, not in flesh and blood, / but in the call of your grace.

Probe their hearts and purify them, / so that, freed from all deception, / they may never look back / but strive always toward what is to come.

May they count everything as loss / compared with the unsurpassed worth of knowing your Son, / and so gain him as their eternal reward, / for he is Lord for ever and ever.

Amen.

(RCIA 94.J)

The originator of the Christmas crèche, if only he could have copyrighted the idea, clearly would have made a fortune. Using figures to meditate on the mysteries of the nativity is just a great, great idea. It works for so many people, young and old! You can’t beat it for encouraging imaginative engagement with the story of Christ’s birth.

Like any religious devotion that makes its way into truly popular culture though, there’s no saying how far it may get pushed over the edge into… well, tasteless trash.

A friend of mine shared this website post of whacky nativity sets. He found it hilarious.

I have to admit, however, that seeing this collection of the world’s worst nativity sets (and reading that the list is growing) made me grimace rather than smile.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I think there is only one way to do this. In fact, I’m all for inculturation. I think it’s wonderful, for instance, to see the Holy Family depicted as members of all races and peoples. It can be a beautiful witness to how Christian believers around the globe own the story — it’s our story, wherever and whoever we may be.

I think there’s a place for anachronism in engaging with the Christmas story. There’s a way of putting our contemporary world around the Christmas crib, thus symbolizing the coming of Christ into our everyday life—a popular motif in Italian crèches. The idea behind that sort of thing is grand.

Let me hasten to add that not all religious art is fine art, and that’s perfectly, well, fine. Folk art is genuinely valuable. I’m even OK with sentimental art or “religious kitsch” in the home. Placing, say, the little drummer boy or a kneeling Santa into the nativity scene under someone’s Christmas tree may not be to my taste, but I respect the devotional impulse behind it.

But a Holy Family made out of rubber ducks? The Savior in sausage? A crèche of kitty cats? Here’s my question: Is there a point at which the point of the crèche is lost? Or can anything be dressed as the Holy Family, and it still works? In other words, is it impossible to evacuate the meaning from the symbols (the figures and their arrangement), and therefore it really doesn’t matter?

Maybe a Holy Family made up of dogs is just a bit of foolishness, and we should all have a good laugh. Maybe we should even admire all the novelties people have thought up. On the other hand, we are heading into a post-Christian culture, in which images that made sense in a Christian context are losing that context. Maybe frivolous treatment of the Christmas crèche is not a laughing matter.

What would St. Francis think?

What do you think?

Architecture addresses and expresses. It touches and repels. It narrates and remains silent. It encloses and excludes. It is definitely permissible to speak of a language of architecture. The horizon of architecture covers a wide span across the history of mankind, from the basic housing afforded by the mud hut to the complex systems of cathedrals and skyscrapers. It would be naïve to suggest that this is a metaphorical way of speaking that could be avoided or even replaced.

This quote is from an editor of Closer to God, a collection of photos and comments on contemporary religious buildings. You can find an introductory essay and a sample of the photos here.

The introductory essay continues this theme of ‘a language of architecture’:

…with buildings of religious designation … connotation and context are read as intelligible, tangible symbols of the content they embody. Reaching far beyond functional considerations, architecture’s usual criteria of purpose – access, capacity, construction technique and financial viability – are simply not enough. More than any other type of construction, religious buildings seem to be essentially about the ideas they contain, and the abstract principles they materialize throughout the interplay of form and content.

As I flipped through the photos on that site, I was struck that virtually all of the buildings convey a sense of openness, of the lightest possible separation between ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’ spaces. It is not just a matter of altar rails: in almost every case there is little demarcation between the place for worshippers and the sanctuary.

It would be easy to attribute this openness to ‘modernism’. There are plenty of traditionalist sources that emphasize the importance of keeping the people out of the presbyterium. This essay, for example, quotes the GIRM:

§ 295 The sanctuary is the place where the altar stands, where the word of God is proclaimed, and where the priest, the deacon, and the other ministers exercise their offices. It should suitably be marked off from the body of the church either by its being somewhat elevated or by a particular structure and ornamentation.

Other sources connect the separation between people and sanctuary with the levitical rites and the holy of holies (e.g. Lev 16.2ff), or even the Garden of Eden after the fall.

So is the opening of forbidden spaces purely a modern phenomenon? I don’t think so. When the Jesuits built the Church of the Gesù in 1584, they made the nave wide, unbroken by aisles or much of a transept. The sanctuary is wide and shallow, the high altar easily visible. There is no narthex. The pulpit was thrust forward, so that the people could easily hear the word of God.

This continues in Jesuit architecture up to the present day, at well-known churches such as St Ignatius Loyola in New York, Immaculate Conception (Farm Street) in London and Sacred Heart in Wimbledon. Today Sacred Heart describes itself as ‘an inclusive, welcoming and open Catholic parish serving the wider community’. As early as the 1900s, its architecture sent a similar message.

So openness or closed-ness in architecture may not be aligned with tradition or modernity, but rather a matter of choice.

How open or closed, architecturally, is your church? How open or closed do you want it to be? And what do you think of the openness of the religious buildings in Closer to God?

Jonathan Day is a consultant and writer; he is also a member of the parish council of the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception (Farm Street) in central London.

Any comments?

H/T: The Deacon’s Bench.

Publishers have long since gone to high quality cover art for seasonal and multi-year soft cover worship aids. Below are some examples, all with art pieces by classical and contemporary masters.

But I’m not sure that such great art is appropriate for this use. Great art is for contemplating – sometimes more devotionally, sometimes more aesthetically, most always a mix – at least for believers. A beautiful picture is a shrine of sorts. It deserves to be respected as such.

But hymnals and missalettes and annual music issues are for sticking in racks, setting on the pew seats during the liturgy, storing on carts. Am I the only who worries about Fra Angelico and Ade Bethune and the rest being thrown into all these places?

My preference is hopelessly monastic: one solid color. Same for hardcover hymnals – I’ve always preferred the look of The Hymnal 1982 to RitualSong or JourneySong. And you all think my preferred color is black – I admit it, I like the look of the Antiphonale Monasticum!

OK, if a solid color is too severe for you, how about (and now I’m thinking about seasonal aids) an abstract splash of colors, an ensemble with energy and dynamism but also calm stability?

What do you think?

I grew up with the practice of having a stack of envelopes on the altar during Mass—donation envelopes on which people wrote the names of the deceased for whom they wanted prayers. I never liked it. An uncluttered altar brings our attention to rest on the Eucharistic elements in their beauty and simplicity. A packet of envelopes, even if listing names of the dead, looks like a reminder of… well, money. The impulse to remember and pray for the dead is certainly understandable and laudable, but is this the best organization of our symbols?

Liturgy Training Publications at one point came out with a Book of the Names of the Dead—a handsome ledger, soberly illustrated, in which the faithful could write the names of people who have died and for whom they wished the prayers of the community. (I believe they were the first. There may be others. Does anyone know?) This seemed like a good idea—better than a stack of envelopes, anyway—but where is the book kept during November? In the narthex? By the baptismal font? With votive candles?

One parish I worked at had a very long white scroll hung on a pillar, on which the names of all the persons who had been buried from the parish during the preceding year were written in large, calligraphic letters. It had a particular focus in that it spoke to the recently bereaved. The bereavement committee wanted it to remain for the whole month of November. But once Advent began and the whole environment of the church changed for the new season… Shouldn’t the month of November give way to Advent? People disagreed about that.

Recently, I was touched to receive an invitation from St. John’s Abbey to fill out a small slip of paper with names of my own beloved dead. It was explained that these are put in a basket, and as the monks come into church, they each take one and pray for those souls during the service. This felt more personal, yet it was also a reminder of the communion of saints in that intercession extends beyond praying for the people we know personally. I liked this idea.

Cemetery visits during the month of November are another way that Catholics bring together prayer and remembrance, grief and hope. Numerous rituals surround such visits.

Surely there’s no single answer or best solution for every community or individual, even if there are some general principles to be observed, such as respect for the liturgical seasons and integrity in the use of symbols. There are probably many effective customs and practices, according to the local setting, culture, and sensibility. Your thoughts?

As a lead-up, a panel was held a few weeks ago with Thomas Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, and Bill Franklin, Episcopal bishop of western New York and former theology professor at St. John’s. Do listen to it.

Fr. Hilary Thimmesch OSB, former president of St. John’s University and youngest member of the planning committee back in 1961, has written a delightful account of how we got the abbey church, Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir. LitPress says this about the new book:

The junior member of the twelve-monk planning committee recounts in warm and frequently humorous detail how its members related to the Hungarian-born Bauhaus-trained architect who had no background in church architecture but shared their belief in the enduring quality of simple materials sympathetically used. How the strong architect-client relationship survived the strain of disagreement at a critical moment in completion of the church is the narrative high point.

Now he has written a column in his diocesan newspaper on beauty and truth in the liturgy.

Like many essays of a similar stripe, this one starts out positive but turns to the negative.   After a quick swipe at Lady Gaga – and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to bring her work into the liturgy – the column zooms in on the Marty Haugen song, “All Are Welcome.”  You can find its lyrics online, but the bit that the bishop finds offensive is the chorus:

All are welcome, all are welcome,
All are welcome in this place.

He says to us that this cannot possibly be “appropriate-for-liturgical-use” because the chorus is not true and hence not beautiful.

And why is it untrue?  In Bishop Morlino’s words, because “People who have little interest in doing God’s Will don’t fit at the liturgy.”  Very well, then, let us bring back the ostiarii, in case someone who has little interest in doing God’s will turns up in the narthex.  Have these visitors committed sexual impurity?  Have they even thought about doing so?  Out with them.  Has this man called his neighbor “fool”?  There’s the exit door.   Has this woman been greedy, loving money more than she loves her neighbor?   Sorry, not welcome here.

Eventually, the saintly Bishop and a few of his true followers – a very few – can celebrate Mass on their own, perhaps rewriting Haugen’s words:

Few are welcome, few are welcome,
Few are welcome in this place.

But it’s not only unworthy humans whom Bishop Morlino wants to exclude.  He continues:  “… certainly, by their own choosing, the poor souls who suffer in Hell for all eternity are not welcome. Those are simple, but true facts.”

No false facts here!  Apparently the threat of an errant lost soul weighs heavily on the Bishop, because a commenter reported that he had repeated this theme in a recent speech.   Until I read his article I had supposed that Hell was a sufficiently stout prison to keep any soul from escaping.  But perhaps CS Lewis was right in his speculation about a refrigerium (see his The Great Divorce).  We could post signs at church doors: “No sinners!  No lost souls!”  That would keep the riff-raff away.

A chilling Jansenism is creeping over the Church. It seems to begin with people who celebrate “for you and for many” in the new, bungled translation; goes on with bishops who want to exclude erring politicians from Communion while turning a blind eye to us sinners in the pews; and continues with nonsense like Bishop Morlino’s essay.

If anyone manages to sneak out of Hell and turns up in my parish church, I shall welcome them warmly.  And although my weekly musical diet at Mass is Byrd and Mozart, Palestrina and Buxtehude, the next time I am given an opportunity to sing “All Are Welcome” I will do so with vigor and conviction.

Jonathan Day is a consultant and writer; he is also the chairman of the parish council of the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception (Farm Street) in central London.

Fr. Lawrence wrote, in part:

…it may be well to remind ourselves that the beauty of art and material things in the sacred liturgy is meant to lead us to contemplate God who is beauty…As such, as we reflect on the holiness of beauty in the liturgy, let us pray that it leads to the beauty of holiness in our lives. Let us recall too the warning of St John Chysostom that if we adorn our liturgies with precious items and artworks, we should be all the more mindful to also cloth the naked, feed the hungry, and extend mercy to those in need.