The latest issue of First Things, (Jan. 2011), has an article Miraculous Box praising an inexcusable travesty masquerading as ecclesiastical architecture where my first thought when reading the article is : no one can actually experience the architecture in the manner the writer and architect describes, and further and more importantly, there is zilch cultural memory by which to know and understand the architecture as he describes it. The structure is freeform concrete virtually devoid of all signs Catholic, and the inside of the Church is even worse.
It is one thing for the socialist atheist Le Corbusier to design sickeningly vile architecture, it's quite another for a magazine published by Catholics to praise it.
Not that any of this is unusual, by any stretch of the imagination. It's almost as if Catholics are blind to seeing the signs of the Church.
Where as on the other hand those who hate the Church are very capable of seeing those same signs of the Church and signifying their hatred with their obscene art displays by using those signs?
The worldly secular media always shows women religious in their habits. Because the world, including the media, know the signs of the Church, and know how to use those signs, for good or ill.
So why does the world get it right in recognizing and using the signs of the Church, but Catholics can't?
This is a question that continues to perplex me as as see my own local FSSP parishforging new frontiers in architecture where the parish recently broke new ground by constructing the first ever wreckovation style church designed by traditionalists for a traditionalist liturgy forgoing an established cultural, i.e. architectural typological, identity in preference for the vanguard architectural typology of a stranger.
Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and God did create us to see the beautiful subjectively, but it's a subjectivity within a natural limit.
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