Much obliged,
c's_s
It does have pews but the inside is quite uninspiring.
Everybody else on the thread has done a pretty good job of posting some terrifying glimpses into the post-Catholic, Catholic Church. But something someone posted on an unrelated thread--(although all these threads are probably related somehow)--provided me with a chance to express why I think the two-hundred-million-dollar Turd on the Freeway is more horrifying in the long run than even the sexual scandal currently vexing the faithful.
A freeper commented that wars are often fought over aesthetics rather than for logical reasons. That really got my antennae twitching, because I, of course, believe that aesthetics are one of the few truly just causes over which to go to war and that the logic of aesthetics is at the very heart of reason.
This is from George Santayana's The Life of Reason:
".....Of all reason's embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and complete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be articulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived, would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went with no actual remodelling of the outer word, to render men's dwelling more appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible. Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. What makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the Life of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions of existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the brain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain will last and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses an idea will serve to recall it in future....."
So, my objection to Mahoney's Prison Monument is a combination of fury over what it signifies is the Am Church hierarchy's true internal vision; and fear over the complacency, collaboration and passivity of the Faithful as this structure slowly and cancerously grew on it's construction site.
I've only seen it by examination of several internet sites (one of them offering three-dimensional views), pictures in magazines and from the testimony of a friend who did happen to have the misfortune of viewing it with his own eyes. This friend is one of the most mild-mannered human beings I have ever met. In the time I have known him I have never heard a curse word pass his lips no matter how hot the discussion or how horrible the subject. I don't think I've ever heard him raise his voice, in fact. So you can imagine how surprised I was to hear his voice choked with rage, nearly inarticulate--except when a few really juicy curses were flowing out--as he described his initial reaction to the Thing.
The Turd is a monument to the values of our present Church Leadership. Which are, of course, hostile to traditional Catholic ideas of transcendence and other-worldliness; even to the cult of the saints--with their transcendent messages; and totally alligned with the materialist view of human nature held by the post-modern Western welfare/police state. Most of the Church heirarchy believes that the "good" of the Catholic Church is as a servant of the State. For example they like to brag that the Church "educates" disadvantaged children--and doesn't oppress them with distasteful Catholic dogma. Bascially, I think most American men who have become priests did it because it seemed like a more dignified form of social work.
But, its resemblance to a prison is the most revealing thing about it. Because, after all, that is the great achievement of modern Western progressivism--to have turned all of society into a prison of one sort of another; prison schools; prison work cubicles; prison legal code (if we pass enough laws then everybody will be an outlaw, whether they have been detected yet or not.)
In its rejection of the traditional playfulness, humanism and transcendence of the Catholic Church of Greco/Roman and European pagan influences, it has embraced the sterile, massive look of that culture of death--Ancient Egypt; mere bigness and solidity is the fundamental architectural comment.
At the dedication Mahoney mentioned that his Turd was specifically meant to convey the image of the survival of the Church through its many travails. But he is either too stupid, or too evil, to realize that the Chuch did not survive by erecting fortresses or prisons. That is how the Leviathin earthly States in history have attempted to survive. Not coincidentally they have all failed, so far.
The aesthetic sensibility that built Chartres Cathedral--and kept rebuiding fire after fire--was maintained for centuries right up to my parent's time. So much so that when I--a post Vatican II baby-- entered Chartres, I instinctively understood the who, what, when where and why of the anonymous, inspired guildsmen who built it. It was all so beautiful and reasonable. It was my culture, you see.
I recognize the enemy in Kosovo as it tears down ancient orthodox monasteries and replaces them with rows of male bottoms. Just as instinctively, I know that Mahoney's Turd is the inspiration of an enemy, alien culture.
We may inflict a few wounds upon the "foreign" foe. but only where the global interests of that foe clash (or, is it really "intersects") with the economic and cutural interests of our leaders.
But we won't raise a finger against our most dangerous enemy--the one among us. Contrary to our mythological image we are the most passive people on the planet. Look how helplessly Americans accepted the destruction of so many of our mid-west and western cities by the architecture of a hostile, alien culture.