QUITE the most mystifying phenomenon of the past 30 years has been the Catholic Church's curious inability to build churches. It has commissioned architects to build places of worship which resemble airport terminals, car washes, typing pools, school gymnasiums, weather centres, banks and dance studios, but not churches. Why? What fatally disruptive event occurred which caused such a tragic amnesia about the art of church building?
It is not enough to blame Vatican II. No doubt it caused liturgical changes. No doubt the current liturgical mood would rather the hokum of the folk Mass, with a spotty teenager playing the guitar, to the treasury of music which the Church has at its disposal. No doubt there is something to be said about bringing the priest down from his pulpit. No doubt we are all enriched by shaking hands with strangers and calling it peace.
Church Building Tradition
But does this mean that the tradition of church building which goes back fifteen hundred years should be jettisoned, and instead a new building form, all plate glass and steel and strange metallic devices suspended from ceilings, should be installed in its place?
The monks who worshipped in Gougane Barra or Glendalough could be taken into any of the Catholic churches built after the easing of the Penal Laws and would have recognised these structures for what they were places of worship, with a recognisable nave and apse and transept. So it remained through the 19th century, when many fine churches were built, and into the twentieth, and then the architectural calamity occurred and we lurched into a visual Dark Age in which every single lesson learned over one and a half millennia seems to have been lost.
And of course, all the meretricious piffle being passed off as church architecture in recent decades is hideously dated. It is a response to passing tastes, and if the Catholic Church manages to survive the next couple of decades, it will find itself pulling down the warehouses and assembly rooms which it has been erecting in the recent past, and returning to building churches on traditional lines, churches which one can love, no matter what your religion.
Love is the quality lacking in modern church architecture. One is not actually meant to love these things. They are statements of the architect's courage or reassurances of how trendy the commissioning priest is. But nobody falls in love with a modern church, nor do such places cause one to reflect upon life or death. They are ecclesiastic halls, as bare of intrinsic structural meaning as an aircraft hangar; to which spiritually they are probably related.
We used to build lovely churches, such as the Holy Rosary Church at Kilcoe, outside Ballydehob. It is a place of quite astounding beauty and a reminder of what great taste and refinement the ordinary priests of Ireland once possessed. No doubt it could be argued that the Church of the Holy Rosary was far too expensive relative to the real incomes of the people of Kilcoe. But that aside, one senses within it a regard for the waiting eternity which should inspire all church builders, but no longer seems to.
Majestic and Stately
It is modest in its proportions, but it is majestic and stately too, and it is the work of more than one generation of priests. It was built in 1906, but the wonderful Harry Clarke stained glass windows are obviously of a later vintage, and the beautiful altar has been retained, and not wrecked, as so many fine altars have been.
The interior decor is a little marvel of elegance and sensitivity; whoever chose the colours, the present incumbent or his predecessor, has inspired and inspiring taste. And even the Stations of the Cross, an area of church design often least influenced by good taste or restraint, are very fine indeed.
The best view is from the choir balcony, where one can more fully appreciate the harmony between line and space which the architect achieved within what is not a large building. But it is a striking building, not least in its orientation, set at an oblique angle to the road to Ballydehob.
There are, of course, other reasons for going to West Cork than the Church of the Holy Rosary, but do not drive by without going in, not merely for your own edification and pleasure, but to remind you how well the Catholic Church once built its churches; and how abominably it does so now.
You can learn the same lesson in Skibbereen, where St Patrick's Cathedral offers the same rebuke to the modern church builder. No doubt St Patrick's was an exorbitantly grandiose building for the poor peasants of Cork to have to pay for one and a half centuries ago; it is nonetheless a building of great beauty, whose integrity seems to have survived the post Vatican II Cromwellian ravages.
Astonishing Improvements
It says something about the astonishing improvements of so much of Irish life that Skibbereen was not even placed in the SuperValu Tidy Towns competition. Many people dislike the florification of Irish towns, although there is no doubt flowers on buildings are something of a foreign novelty. But so is penicillin, television, motor cars. Done well, they can enhance the traditional qualities of a town or hamlet.
In Skibbereen, and so many other towns in Cork, the buildings and shopfronts have been hugely enriched by enormous displays of flowers. They are not chintzy, pseudo Swiss cottage presentations, but a fresh expression of the traditional Irish preference for strong colours.
Skibbereen's shopfronts are brilliantly painted and marvellously festooned with flowers, and the result is quite superb. I have seen countless small towns the size of Skibbereen in Britain. France, Belgium, and none has its vigour or visual vitality or, most important of all, its obvious happiness.
We have nourished ourselves for so long on self criticism that sometimes I suspect we do not always realise how so much has improved in Irish life. Delightful places like Skibbereen and Dunmanway and Bandon should remind us of this truth. The reason why they look so good is the same as the reason for the beauty of old churches. They are the product of love, and it shows.