Agreed. Churches have to put their money where their mouth is on this stuff. God does not want us to build Him palaces while poor people suffer or His Word stagnates.
This is also not to say that I do not understand the value of good facilities for worship, study and outreach.
I am Baptist, not Catholic. I go to a HUGE Baptist Church in Houston. We have over fifty-thousand members, several large campuses throughout Houston, and an international television broadcast of weekly sermons. Our campuses are large and expensive — but they are functional, not ornate, and they serve a purpose of spreading the message and doing the work.
There is an automotive maintenance garage where mechanics in the church do free repairs to the cars of the poor. There are dozens of Bible Study classrooms. There is high-tech broadcast equipment for spreading the message worldwide. Parking and seating alone for a 50K-member church is daunting ... and that money needs to be spent to keep membership growing.
But, we must give in proportion to what we have ... and there needs to be a functional, Biblical, Christ-centered purpose for every expenditure.
I’m just not sure architectural beauty qualifies.
SnakeDoc
Architectural beauty can be a celebration of God’s many gifts and blessings to us. While there is a use for things which are functional, there is also a use for things which express beauty and honor God.
It does. Trust me. And having a glass sided swimming pool halfway up the wall of your auditorium to serve as a dunk tank, right between the giant flat screen television monitors, strikes me as excessively ornate, as well as in poor taste.
Church is not beautiful in order to be pleasing to God, though that would be a worthwhile purpose. They are to be beautiful in order to inspire worship and sacredness.
And one more thing — many of those ornate parishes were not built with money from Rome. They were built through gifts of the congregation and the sweat of their brow. These iconoclasts had no RIGHT to throw out what previous generations had sweated and died to create, all in the name of communism and modernism.
Have you read the OT specifications for the temple, given by God Himself? He was quite specific. Just as God was present in a different way in the temple then, He Himself is made present in the Eucharist now; which means that the church is a temple for Him, and God is worthy of the best that man can offer.
Also recall Matt. 26:11, when the woman poured the precious ointment on the head of Jesus, and Jesus said the poor you will always have with you? Well, the Catholic Church has managed to have both beautiful churches (until the last 50 years, that is) and be the largest charitable organization in the world.
Our campuses are large and expensive — but they are functional, not ornate, and they serve a purpose of spreading the message and doing the work.
Give me beautiful architecture which reminds me of God over plush seats and diamond vision screens; give me the natural acoustical qualities of a vaulted, soaring nave which lifts the heart and mind to God over the latest in audio-visual electronics!
There is an automotive maintenance garage where mechanics in the church do free repairs to the cars of the poor. There are dozens of Bible Study classrooms. There is high-tech broadcast equipment for spreading the message worldwide. Parking and seating alone for a 50K-member church is daunting ... and that money needs to be spent to keep membership growing.
This is a false dilemma where one must choose between beauty and utility. The beauty is for God. The utility is for man.
Every denomination has it's own identity, what a marketer would call a brand. The brand identity for Catholicism has been rooted in the concept that the Catholic church is an age old institution, never changing and rooted in the authority granted to St. Peter by Jesus himself. With this ancientness came a set of fixed and never changing rituals and prayers.
In this way, Catholics could feel a connection to the ancient past, to the history of the Church and it's roots with the apostles. There was a sense of awe and majesty for the institution of the church and it's role as gateway to Christ. Certainly people can disagree that this is good or desirable, the reformation saw a direct repudiation of all that with the formation of denominations such as the Calvinists. But if you didn't like the "brand" of the catholic church you could go be a Baptist or a Lutheran or whatever church you felt best fit your idea of what a church should be.
In the 1950s onwards, the Catholic Church systematically destroyed it's own brand. They got rid of majestic churches, they demolished the separation of priest and congregation, they eliminated compulsory mastery of catechism, in essence they took everything that supported their claim to be the one, true, immutable church, and they made it all flexible and soft and changing. And when they lost their brand, they lost much of their flock. Hardly anyone actually goes to Sunday mass now.
The closest real-world consumer analogy I can think of is the Cadillac Cimmaron. Prior to that, Cadillac was a luxury brand, the place where you got special and unique styling, the latest innovations, and the best materials and workmanship. Then some genius at GM decided that if you took a generic Buick and you put in leather seats and fake wood trim, you could call it a Cadillac. It wasn't and people weren't stupid enough to think that a junky Buick with fancy trim was a real cadillac. Sales plummeted. Substitute "Cadillac" for "Catholic Church" and you get the summary of this article.