[livius]

Alas, we’re probably even worse off in the US. We had more money to do worse things to our churches and more money to build even more hideous new ones.

Things are changing now, but it’s going to take a long time to get rid of the hippie priests in their sneakers and tatty dirty albs and their airplane hangar churches with not even a cross visible.

[Mad Dawg]

In Charlottesville and environs I'm seeing a backing away from the "ugly is good" approach. My first parish has had the cinder block plastered over and some ornamentation applied while a "community room" has been built so that we don't have our Lenten soup and bread dinners in the same room as the one in which we worship.

My second, and, current parish not only has statues of Our Lady and our patron, St. Thomas Aquinas -- with CANDLE RACKS! O M G! And a nice icon of St. Dominic. The original awful glass is there, it's still kind of semi-"in-the-round" but the tabernacle has been moved to a place of prominence and, well, it begins to look like a church!

There's still too much polyester. I bought a nice altar "linen" for our chapel (the old one was was severely fonky). But the Tsarina of the Altar Guild insisted on synthetics because we haven't really thought about how to maintain our fabrics, so they still tend to "maintenance free"plastic. Darn.