This Battle-Tent Mentality

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 21 July 2014.

Anyway, America was not like England.


Where England basically fell apart in the 20th century, America was on the rise.

The very forces that the aforementioned writers predicted would destroy England seemed propel America toward greatness. England's Oxford Movement of the late 1800s, and the writers who were directly or indirectly inspired by it, found strength in returning to Catholicism as much as their Anglicanism would allow. But America was rooted in the values of England's 18th and 19th century: scientific growth, mechanization, keeping God at a safe distance from everyday life.

These values weren't compatible with Catholicism.

And neither was revival-meeting Christianity: it rejected reason as a mode of knowing God. Culturally speaking, Catholicism was a dirty word, bringing up connotations of unwashed masses and the grime of old-world ideologies that could only clog the gears of modernism. So what were Catholics to do? Well, let's look at how three Catholic immigrant groups dealt with asserting a Catholic identity in the face of American modernism.

St. Anthony of Padua Church in South Rockford, Illinois

The Italians, contrary to popular mythology, did not generally come to America with the hope of renouncing their Italian citizenship and becoming modern Americans. Really, most came to this country to make money quickly to either send or bring back home. The intent wasn't to stay in America and become American; it was to go back home and remain Italian. Two things interfered with that plan. One was that the discrimination against Italians made making money very difficult. The other was that when Italians figured out how to make money against the odds, it was a challenge to return home and give up that wealth. The next best thing to returning home in these cases was to try to make little pockets of America as much like Italy as possible. There wasn't a desire to synthesize Old World Italian culture with modern American culture; the idea was to stay Old World as much as possible, which we see in Italian-American church design.

The Germans and the Irish generally came to America hoping to stay.

St. Mary's in Indianapolis, Indiana

The Germans tended to assimilate into American culture much more easily than the Irish did, though. Germans had two strategies: in the midwest and the west, Germans could just set up German communities around their farms which evolved into towns. No neighbors meant no need to assimilate. Just about everybody in Ann Arbor, I hear, spoke German up until WWI, when they realized that they needed to prove how American they were. The strategy in cities tended to be assimilation. Germans came to America with much more of a stake than the Irish. The Irish fled poverty and generally could only dream of returning to Ireland. The Germans had better means and were attracted by the promise of cheap land: more bang for their buck in American than in Germany.

What does all this have to do with Catholic architecture? America was openly antagonistic to the Irish, who generally felt they could only protect themselves through numbers. America was not as antagonistic toward Germans, as Germans tended to either keep to themselves or assimilate and had the money to help grow America's economy. Plus, WASPs understood on some level that the British royal family was German, which gave Germans a bit of a pass.

St. Brigid's in Manhattan, NY

Anyway, the tendency of the Irish was to put up as many churches as they could, regardless of whether or not they could afford them. Churches were a piece of home, places of spiritual comfort, and also big middle fingers to all the oppressors. Lots of Irish churches closed down because the parishes couldn't support them. The attitude was just get them up. The German parishes tended to close down less often because the Germans were thoughtful about money and placement. They would build one church to serve five hundred people instead of five churches to serve a hundred people each, and then they would put money into altar pieces and architecture.

Still, between the poverty of the Irish and the frugality of the Germans, plus the low population density of farm country, most parishes were happy to have a nice little building that looked churchy--they weren't out to create masterpieces. Only the big cities had cathedrals, and anti-Catholic sentiment must have played some role in keeping those cathedrals traditional. I would also speculate that in cities where wealthy Catholics were competing against post-Oxford Movement Anglicans, Catholics may have been trying to out-Catholic the Anglicans! In the small towns, though, I would say that churches were erected quickly and cheaply; they were tents on the battlefield, not castles or palaces.

21st century Midwestern American Catholics inherited a bleak view of Catholic architecture because of this battle-tent mentality.

Our view has been further damaged by growing up after Vatican II--that weird age in which people who hadn't even studied Vatican II used it as an excuse to tear out the organs, remove all the statues, hang up felt banners, and sing "Peace is Flowing Like a River" on acoustic guitar. I think that spirit crippled Catholic architecture in a lot of ways.

Just when Catholics had the means and cultural stability to build castles, we decided both that tents were preferable and that the existing tents were too ornate and old fashioned!

So for the most part, we worshipped in dry wall.

St. Owen

I was fortunate in that I grew up in a wealthy area. My home parish of St. Owen in Franklin, Michigan, is both modern and architecturally interesting. It is definitely a tent, though, by design--a big concrete tent to reflect the nomadic days of Jews and Christians. So it's interesting to me that these wealthy Catholics in a fairly small town (Franklin calls itself "The town that time forgot") created an ultra-modern and expensive church, but one that simultaneously said "we're just sojourners in an alien land."

To do that in concrete is very interesting and may have some connection to the Witkowskis.  I still grew up with the felt banners and the hippie guitars, but I think the church was interesting enough architecturally that I didn't lose faith in the ability of Catholicism to create meaningful and postmodern architecture.  But I find most post-Vatican II American churches uninspiring compared to the great European cathedrals. Maybe I need to see if Monaghan has built anything interesting. I guess that would be the other thing: most wealthy Americans think they have amazing taste. The Medicis, as arrogant as they were, knew to hire the best artists they could.