How Churches Kill the Church

This is my church, St. Agnes. I love it. If I move away from Brooklyn, it will be one of the things I miss most. However, I also know that it is an albatross around the neck of the Church, that is the Roman Catholic faith to which it is such a beautiful monument.

This past week was the kickoff of the annual appeal that the Diocese of Brooklyn conducts to raise funds. After the homily, the lights went down and we saw a video outlining all the good things the diocese will do with our money if we give it to them. Then, after the video was concluded, our priest reminded us that the majority of what we give will come back to the parish and go towards maintaining the building.

In that moment, it occurred to me why the Catholic Church feels so weak and passive: parish priests have been turned into caretakers for massive, under-peopled buildings like St. Agnes. Their minds are full of the latest contractor's estimates, fundraising plans, worries about the state of the roof, and heating bills. This seems to leave remarkably little time for instruction and evangelization. Heck, we're lucky they still have the time and energy to say mass.

And what about the parishioners? Their plight is summed up by the annual appeal: asked to sit back and watch as folks from a diocesan office provide things like 'immigration services' that they will never see. Told to send money, to fix a building built to hold the thousands of immigrants who built the neighborhood, but now hosts only the few families who have hung on, and the chance newcomer who keeps the faith. Their priest doesn't ask much of them, may not even know them (although, I will say, my parish priest is making a real effort to change that), but constantly reminds them that more funds are needed.It starts to feel a lot more transactional than inspirational, and the faithful become slowly discouraged, and even more drift away.

The Church must either renew or wither, and if the buildings it constructed in earlier days are now holding it back, they should not fear letting them go. After all, Jesus himself said, "If your eye betrays you, pluck it out." It would be painful to see the great built heritage of Catholicism pass away, but the Church is greater than the sum of its churches.

Madness? THIS. IS. PARIS!

The picture to the left depicts some modernist architect's vision of an updated Paris. And while it might be hard to imagine a sophisticated (read: wimpy) Parisian parroting Leonidas' words from 300, I'd argue Sarkozy, the French leader trying to implement a massive modernization plan in the City of Lights, deserves to be dragged to the top of the Eiffel Tower and thrown off for his treachery. The thought of turning the world's most harmonious and beautiful city into the set of Blade Runner 2 is more than I can tolerate.

David Brussat, the tireless architecture critic writing for the Providence Journal, routinely highlights the many modernist horrors inflicted upon our great cities. And I am right with him in believing that the current style of architecture is a destructive force when applied to existing cityscapes.

Yet, the part of me that thinks we have abandoned the search for the future to better enjoy the familiar comforts of the past knows that without experimentation, a city risks becoming a museum. So what to do? I think you can find a hint of the answer in New York. While the city has its classical structures, it embraced the latest techniques and trends of the time of its great expansion, the 19th and early 20th centuries. The skyscraper works in New York in a way it simply cannot in Paris, because the development happened organically and the cityscape was built around this new form.

The new styles and building techniques are not going to originate in New York, or Paris, nor should they. The growing cities of the world (for example Sao Paolo, or Shanghai) should look for approaches that solve their unique problems, and these solutions will diffuse to other cities. And even more importantly, when we find ourselves building under the ocean, or on Mars (assuming we ever do) those environments will reflect new needs and new thinking about the best way to live.

The other option is to destroy our built heritage and model our urban cores after Dubai. That is to say, a series of monumental, impressive buildings that fail to congeal into anything like a liveable, cohesive cityscape. But if that comes to pass, I think we'll have a lot of architects and leaders that we want to throw off the top of their monstrosities.