Notre Dame's neo-classicists yearn to build grand old churches

Like Stroik, Smith considers the forms employed by modern architects too inconsequential to bear the weight of religious meaning. "In the 1960s," he laments in a recent essay, "the church tentatively got on the bandwagon of abstract modernism.... [And this] capitulation of Mies van der Rohe's dictum, `Less is more,' [has] led to an iconoclastic movement, rationalized by calls in the [liturgical] documents themselves for `noble simplicity.'"

Safeguarding the church from modern "iconoclasts" is an activity that has gained Stroik and Smith a loyal following among Catholics bitter over changes to the traditional style-and setting of liturgical prayer. When in an article for Catholic Dossier, for example, Smith expresses dismay that even deconstructivist architect Peter Eisenman --"[someone] who has designed for MTV"--is now dabbling in church design, his remarks seem intended to provoke an audience certain to disapprove of anything resembling Eisenman's topsy-turvy funhouses or the aggressive, music-video medium of America's youth culture.

Likewise, when in the same publication Stroik prefaces one of his jabs at modern church architects with a humorous quote about the rarity of their successes ("If you wish to see great modernist architecture you must have plenty of time and a Lear jet") he assumes his readers will appreciate both the levity and the sentiment of the quip. One could just as casually dismiss as failures the dozens of historic parish churches that dot Stroik and Smith's beloved Roman cityscape, which are a greater draw to sightseers on a typical Sunday morning than to the native Catholics who live within their shadows. But glibness of this sort only trivializes public discourse on the topic and distracts serious observers from the hard, analytical work that prefigures sound aesthetic judgements of any kind.

Systematic analysis is precisely the element that has been lacking in Stroik and Smith's critique of modern church architecture. Seldom do they bother publicly to dissect the features of one or another of the buildings they find so offensive or provide more than anecdotal support for their claim that Catholics generally hate newer accommodations for worship. Instead, they resort to making the type of sweeping generalizations that should leave even the casual student of recent church history a little suspicious: Soft-headed liturgists are to blame for the sad condition of sacred art, for example. The "vertical dimension" is what's missing in Catholic architecture today, and with it the sense that our buildings are anything but base, "communitarian" places. Parishes have been brainwashed, their buildings whitewashed, by armies of experts and consultants who are nothing but closet Protestants. Diocesan-level building commissions, architectural review boards and other policy-making bodies are part of a vast "establishment" of modernists out to despoil the church's patrimony of historic art and architecture.