Ashamed Of Being A Church

Beautiful (for some) then, crap for everybody now.

If today is a particularly good day, you may endure clicking on Rorate Caeli and, erm, not feast your eyes with the winning proposals for three churches to be built in Italy. (Hope link works).

The proposal are extremely offensive to every sound thinking Catholic because the relevant buildings obviously try very hard not to look like churches, which says a lot about the clergymen who have selected them, and who are obviously trying very hard not to do Catholicism.

This is the more offensive to me, an Italian, coming from a Country where beauty is lost worshipped, and countless beautiful churches are such a great part of the beauty we have everywhere, from the Eternal City to most of the small centres and even villages.

These projects are, therefore, expression of people who are not only enemies of spirituality, but also enemies of beauty, which adds insult to injury.

The northern Church is to be located in Ferrara, whose (huge) historic centre makes of it one of the most beautiful cities in the world, no exaggeration. That people accustomed to such stunning beauty may adapt themselves to worship in an opprobrium like the one depicted is more than I can understand. I'd personally prefer to drive or walk longer, and worship where I feel I am, actually, in church.

People more expert than I am will be able to tell you more exactly what the consequences of this for the soul of the fake Catholics involved will be. I personally cannot avoid seeing in such work not only an insult, but an outright attack to Catholicism.

Whenever I see such buildings, I cannot avoid hoping they might one day become the target of some high-precision Israeli air raid. Though frankly more traditional methods would work fine, either.

Our shepherds work against us; either stupidly trying to get some imagined “approval” from the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons, or willingly try to demolish everything that is specifically Christian, let alone Catholic, in our spiritual tradition.

These buildings are not only eminently ugly, they are eminently wordly.

Like the people who promote them.

Mundabor

 

Wisdom For The Ages (Particularly This One).

Dietrich von Hildebrand.

 

“One of the most horrifying and widespread diseases in the Church today is the lethargy of the guardians of the Faith of the Church. I am not thinking here of those bishops who are members of the “fifth column,” who wish to destroy the Church from within, or to transform it into something com­pletely different. I am thinking of the far more numerous bishops who have no such intentions, but who make no use whatever of their authority when it comes to intervening against heretical theologians or priests, or against blasphemous performances of public worship. They either close their eyes and try, ostrich-style, to ignore the grievous abuses as well as appeals to their duty to intervene, or they fear to be attacked by the press or the mass media and defamed as reactionary, narrow-minded, or medieval. They fear men more than God. The words of St. John Bosco apply to them: “The power of evil men lives on the cowardice of the good.”

Dietrich von Hildebrand

The Shepherds And The Sheep

Bad Shepherds Reblog

Mundabor's Blog

If you ask me, Archbishop Chaput is right and wrong in his observation that if Catholic voters had been more ready to abandon Nazi Democrats  in the past, things would not have come at the point they are now. He is certainly right if we observe only the immediate cause of the Catholic behaviour; he is, I daresay, rather wrong if we look a bit further than that.

The secularisation of the American Catholics is not the exclusive result of a newly developed faith in the infallibility of the Democratic party, but rather the result of their clergy having encouraged them every step of the way toward their systematic neglect of basic Christian truths. Catholicism being a rather pervasive presence in the life of churchgoers and their offspring – and, by reflex, an important cultural element even among those who do not attend; see Italy –  I cannot imagine a…

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