Cathedral "Wreck-o-Vation"
A Visit Home
The controversy surrounding the renovation of Sacred Heart Cathedral is something I've followed off and on since the bishop announced his intentions in 2000. Clark’s plan was to "update" the small 1928 cathedral with an $11 million renovation. Yet so incensed were some Rochester Catholics that a Sacred Heart Preservation Committee was formed to declare the cathedral a city landmark in an ultimately failed attempt to thwart the bishop.
Sacred Heart is around the corner from my high school, Aquinas Institute, and several of my school friends belonged to the parish and attended its school. Accompanied by my father and my seven-year-old son, I decided to visit the Cathedral during a recent trip home to see what the fuss was about.
Now, I am not an architectural expert — far from it. To date my Catholic focus has been on catechesis. So my recognition of a bad renovation is, on a certain level, like Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum for identifying obscenity: "I know it when I see it."
Yet another unfortunate example of a bishop and his "liturgical experts" who do not recognize that church renovations most often destroy the beauty of an older church rather than improve it. If "updating" requires another grand old church to lose it's beauty, charm and heritage, then I must confess that I prefer to be stuck in the stogie, pre-modernist dark ages.
The controversy surrounding the renovation of Sacred Heart Cathedral is something I've followed off and on since the bishop announced his intentions in 2000. Clark’s plan was to "update" the small 1928 cathedral with an $11 million renovation. Yet so incensed were some Rochester Catholics that a Sacred Heart Preservation Committee was formed to declare the cathedral a city landmark in an ultimately failed attempt to thwart the bishop.
Sacred Heart is around the corner from my high school, Aquinas Institute, and several of my school friends belonged to the parish and attended its school. Accompanied by my father and my seven-year-old son, I decided to visit the Cathedral during a recent trip home to see what the fuss was about.
Now, I am not an architectural expert — far from it. To date my Catholic focus has been on catechesis. So my recognition of a bad renovation is, on a certain level, like Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum for identifying obscenity: "I know it when I see it."
Yet another unfortunate example of a bishop and his "liturgical experts" who do not recognize that church renovations most often destroy the beauty of an older church rather than improve it. If "updating" requires another grand old church to lose it's beauty, charm and heritage, then I must confess that I prefer to be stuck in the stogie, pre-modernist dark ages.
Read the entire article at the link below:
Labels: Catholic, Catholicism
posted by Norm Johnson @ 7:14 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home