Tea at Trianon: Restoration of Sacred Beauty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, October 10, 2014

Restoration of Sacred Beauty

From Crisis:

Some of the most jarring evidence of internal unsettledness in the Church over the past century has been the drastic physical alteration of older church interiors, often to a point of becoming unrecognizable as what they once were. Such alterations were enforced based on the assumption that the buildings, along with the liturgy and other sacraments inside them, needed to cede to the thinking of the times in order to remain relevant with modern Catholics.

Had this been a truly successful endeavor—or even a correct initial assumption on which to base such an endeavor—we should be able to observe, after all these years, that the majority of lay people actually want their churches to look and feel like casual living rooms or concert halls. Yet, according to Fr. Jamie Hottovy of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, a growing body of evidence would seem to suggest exactly the opposite.

A priest with a background in architecture, Fr. Hottovy is part of a team that advises on church renovations throughout the diocese. He finds that more often than not, parishioners have not so much embraced modernism as tolerated it over the years because they’ve felt that they had no choice. “When they’re shown what their church could look like, the enthusiasm and response is amazing,” he says. “Every renovation has very intentional theological and symbolic weight to it, and people have been hungering for that.”

The point is not only to have a church that looks nice, but that communicates and teaches the truths of the faith to a world bombarded by competing messaging. “We live in the most visually stimulated culture the world has ever seen,” he says. “We as a Church have to have a valid and compelling visual language. To recapture that is needed now more than ever.” (Read more.)