I don’t know if you have discovered the syndicated columns of Marvin Olasky. If not, you can sample them on townhall.com. Take a look. Olasky is very good. Writing from an Evangelical Protestant perspective, he fights the good fight on the cultural issues that matter to Catholics serious about the Faith.
That said, I must take issue with one of his recent columns. He used it to launch an attack on the Catholic understanding of the value of grand architecture in our spiritual lives. Olasky’s case is the one Protestant reformers have been making since the 16th century. It is not an inherently unfair attack. (Indeed, many Catholics are on his side.) There is nothing “immoral” about preferring the simple and unadorned style of many Protestant churches, as long as one is expressing merely a matter of taste. (More on this in due course.) De gustibus non disputandem. Even so, it is a proposition that needs to be answered.
Olasky tells us he wishes to offer “a valentine for every church that meets in a plain building, contentedly sings hymns and spiritual songs, and invests in mercy and Christian education rather than burnt offerings that God no longer wishes to smell.” He rejects the argument that if we “invest in ornate, cathedral-like buildings” people will be “awed by our architecture” and “respect Christ more.” He informs us that “Jesus and the apostles showed no appreciation for Temple architecture or Temple worship-forms: They emphasized how each individual believer was the temple of the Holy Spirit.”
He gets specific. Yup: Catholic churches are the “burnt offerings” he is talking about: “Ever since ancient days, some Christians driven by ego or error have tried to build Temple epigones. I’ve seen the Vatican and many of the great cathedrals of Europe, but have been far more impressed by the people of a very poor, dilapidated church in inner city Philadelphia who used what little money they had to create a youth center in one abandoned crack house and a weightlifting room for ex-drug addicts in another.”
Fair enough. But contrast Olasky’s priorities with Cardinal Newman’s. “The Church,” says Newman, “regards this world, and all that is in it, as a mere shadow, as dust and ashes, compared with the value of one single soul. She holds that, unless she can, in her own way, do good to souls, it is no use her doing anything…. She considers the action of this world and the action of the soul simply incommensurate, viewed in their respective spheres; she would rather save the soul of one single wild bandit of Calabria, or whining beggar of Palermo, than draw a hundred lines of railroad through the length and breadth of Italy, or carry out a sanitary reform, in its fullest details, in every city of Sicily, except so far as these great national works tended to some spiritual good beyond them.”
I hesitate to put words into Newman’s mouth, but I think Newman might add that it would be better to spend our money on a spiritually uplifting cathedral that brings one lost soul back to the Lord on a quiet prayerful Saturday afternoon than on a thousand weightlifting rooms and youth centers in our inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
Come on: What’s bugging Olasky? The Catholic Church has nothing to apologize for about our efforts to attend to corporal works of mercy. Wherever there is a Catholic community of any size on this planet, there are Catholic orphanages, hospitals, schools, and programs to aid the poor. Our missionaries travel to the most destitute places on earth and spend their lives in the service of the poor. I would stand our efforts in this area up against any of the Protestant denominations that worship in white clapboard buildings that could have come from the set of Little House on the Prairie.
I hope that last comment does not come across as snide. I have no disdain for the simple and unadorned style that many Protestants favor for their places of worship. I am willing to accept that a member of one of those congregations, praying silently while looking at nothing more than a simple wood lectern and a shaft of sunlight, can be brought close to the Lord; that his experience can be as spiritually intense as that of a Catholic kneeling in the glow of stained-glass windows, beneath the vaulted marble columns of one of our great cathedrals.
My question is why certain Protestants refuse to accept that the purpose of traditional Catholic architecture is to raise our souls to the Lord, rather than construct “Temple epigones”? Would those who are critical of the money spent over the centuries on Catholic places of worship accept Cardinal Newman’s equation? Would they agree that it is more important to provide the setting that helps one person experience a life-altering spiritual conversion than to offer him a year’s worth of lunches at a soup kitchen?
The churches that Olasky considers “ornate” have provided that kind of setting for Christians over the centuries. I guess he will have to take our word for it, but those solitary individuals kneeling in quiet prayer in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York during their lunch hour break are not reacting to the artistic splendor of the building in the same way they would if they were in one of the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are deeply immersed in the life of the spirit. And the beauty of St. Patrick’s helps them reach that state of religious intensity.
I am not charging Olasky with harboring a disdain for the value of such spiritual encounters, or doubting that they are genuine. His point is only that expensive churches and cathedrals are not necessary; that it would be better for us to spend our money on charitable works. Well, perhaps those who have not grown up with the beauty and evocative power of the Catholic liturgy as part of their lives will have a tendency to react this way. One can hope that the day will come when they will open their minds to why so many Christians for so many hundreds of years have disagreed with them; why we think the financial sacrifice required to build our churches is worth it — in a spiritual equation.
But let us not forget that there can be other roots to a disdain for “opulent” churches. There are those who dismiss the value of art that lifts the soul to an encounter with the spiritual world because they dismiss the existence of the spiritual world. There are those who preach the Social Gospel and a “horizontal” view of Christianity because they do not accept a literal understanding of Jesus’ promise of a reward in Heaven for those who follow His teachings. In their eyes, Christianity has value only to the extent that it promotes human love. They don’t worry about saving souls because they do not believe in the eternal life of the soul.
It is this understanding that informs their conviction that it is a waste to spend money on churches that lead Christians to focus their attention on a spiritual dimension separate from the world around us. Those who share this conviction (Again: I do not include Marvin Olasky in this group) have more on their minds than whether it is in good taste to build expensive houses of worship as long as there are some of us living in poverty. Their criticism of our “extravagant” churches is part of a larger secular humanist agenda. Those who share in this agenda are the “Christians” Newman was spotlighting in his defense of the otherworldliness of Catholicism.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
