Free Republic

A team has been set up, to put a stop to garage style churches, boldly shaped structures that risk denaturing modern places for Catholic worship. Its task is also to promote singing that really helps the celebration of mass. The “Liturgical art and sacred music commission” will be established by the Congregation for Divine Worship over the coming weeks. This will not be just any office, but a true and proper team, whose task will be to collaborate with the commissions in charge of evaluating construction projects for churches of various dioceses. The team will also be responsible for the...

Unchurched Americans prefer churches that look more like a medieval cathedral over contemporary church buildings, a new study showed. Although billions of dollars have been spent on church buildings and more contemporary designs, church attendance has declined, said Jim Couchenour, director of marketing and ministry services for Cogun Inc., a founding member of Cornerstone Knowledge Network. The network was thus prompted to ask, "As church builders what can we do to help church leaders be more intentional about reaching people who don’t go to church?" In a study conducted by LifeWay Research for Cornerstone Knowledge Network, the unchurched preferred more...

Upon returning to her childhood home of Oakland, California, Gertrude Stein noted that "there is no there, there." While this may have been true of the Oakland of 1934, more and more towns and cities since then, adopting the lifeless gray and brown boxes of Modernism, have become "placeless places." Rather than drawing upon the various local customs and traditions, we have found our cities over-run by the 'international style' of architecture: an architecture that has come to exist everywhere, but belongs nowhere. This Modernist modus operandi is especially devastating when applied to sacred architecture. The current design for the...