Apologies for the week of lull time here at the Cornell Society for a Good Time. I can’t speak for the other bloggers, but the Doctor and I went away for a few days to spend Thanksgiving with some friends, and we didn’t get a lot of opportunity for posting while we were away. I’ll try to get some things up in the next few days — I have a few different ideas of things I’ve been wanting to post — but I should mention that we are going away again this next weekend for the annual conference of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. (And I still haven’t finished the paper I’m supposed to give at this conference, so it might be a busy week.) However, I will try very hard to write a post tomorrow or the next day about an unexpected delight that we encountered our trip back home today. We got caught filling our Mass obligation at… the Christ the King Teen Life Mass in Lexington, KY. More details on this harrowing experience to come.

However, it’s a bit late to write that up tonight. For now, I wanted to reflect on something we were talking about after the Mass, with regards to the Church building itself. I’m not a specialist in architecture, but I found this cathedral a bit scary-looking. It did not look like those lumpy monstrosities of the ’70s and ’80s, which almost seem to have been built with the thought, “After the sex scandals break and bankrupt the Church, it’ll be easy to sell these since there’s nothing distinctively Catholic, or even particularly church-like, about them.” No, this was a bit different, and we were not surprised to hear that it had been built in the 1940’s, though no doubt it had undergone some wreckovation since then (it did not, of course, have a high altar.) But honestly, it had the decade written all over it. And it was, quite frankly, an eyesore. The austere white cubic look put me in mind of something pagan (or perhaps a Masonic temple?), and the tall, metal spike in the center was positively forbidding. The windows were not the lovely stained glass creations of old, but rather a kind of modern imitation, no doubt chic in the time of their making, but now just dated. The building will probably be serviceable for some time to come, but it isn’t one you’ll want to put on the glossy brochures, and unless a future pontiff gets baptized there (unlikely) I think it very unlikely that tourists will ever come to that place.

Obviously budgetary restraints sometimes prevent a parish from building the church they would like to have, but it’s unlikely that this was a low-budget project in its own time. They wanted the cathedral to look like that. As with so many things, the eager desire to be modern and “engaging” betrays the fact that the builders were thinking in the moment. They were not looking to leave a lasting monument to God, that would stand apart from the ages, representing in the minds of the faithful how the Church herself stands in a sense outside of time. Likely they were thinking more about what kind of feature story their building would get in the local paper.

A gothic church stands outside of time. It never fails to impress, and it doesn’t get dated in fifty years. Furthermore, by having the gumption to build one, a church says to the world, “We are the real thing. No, we don’t feel that this is a little too much.” It would be like the president who dared to build himself a castle… except, in this case that breezy confidence would be justified. And when the parishioners step into a church like that, they’ll be much more likely to get the feeling that they’ve come to an “other-worldly” place.