The Flying Benedictine

Towering over the near south side, St James is a magnificent limestone 1870's era Church, with all the incumbent structural issues of a lumber framed, stone veneered building. Today, Fr. Ed Lytton, OSB, led an inspection of the exterior stone, and architectural adornment, shown here outfitted in safety harness.

The Society of St. Barbara would like to begin a project at St. James to get this in shape. Drop me a line, the Church and the church both need you:

ssbarbara@wapella.com

By the way, that is not an optical illusion. The crane/man-lift really is up to the top of the steeple at St. James, with Fr. Ed and an Engineer on board.

Green Square for Irish Church

Old St. Patrick's the well preserved Irish stalwart on the near west loop, has proposed a rather brilliant park to be constructed in the rather simple (but pleasant) lot across Des Plaines Avenue.

I think this really adds to the Parish Complex, which already includes a rectory, St. Francis Xavier Warde school, and the (ugh) Archives of the Archdiocese.

There is also a new statue of "Grainne" (Grace in Gaelic) donated by the City of Galway, Ireland to the Parish, certainly gracing this gem in the face of rather Soviet looking block. Well Done!

HT Lynn Becker

More Basilica's Please: St. John's, Des Moines Iowa

As always, the Society of St. Barbara celebrates Basilica's, even in unlikely places, like the Basilica of St. John the Apostle, near the (United Church of Christ) Drake University Campus in Des Moines.

The architects were from McGinnis and Walsh of Boston, who also designed the National Shrine in Washington D.C. found on the campus of Catholic University. This Basilica, in Lombardy Romanesque style, is a fine white Indiana Limestone building with a red French clay tile roof. I attended a very traditional mass at the Basilica last week, celebrated by Priests of the Order of St. Benedict.

La Crosse Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe

My family visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe two weeks ago. Notre Dame Professor Duncan Stroik and company designed the place, while local architects and builders are making it the splendid structure you see here.

Sister Christa Marie, FSGM, showed us around the building site. We had breakfast at the reception hall, which was very good. This is the first installation of stained glass

The dome is pretty well finished. Much of the painting is also complete.

July 31, 2008 is the planned opening date.

This is an awesome project. I encourage anyone interested to travel to LaCrosse to take a look, leave a donation, and enjoy the prayerful setting.

Mission Iowa: Immaculate Conception in Colfax

More details to come on this splenid Mission in Colfax, Iowa.

Vote Bohemian

American Express has a novel program to protect and celebrate American architecture, they are calling Partners in Preservation. The idea sure sounds like a pleasnt one, in sort of 1960's radio contest way: Amex will donate $1 Million to the upkeep of a Chicago area landmark, based on the leader in number of votes on their website to maintain the landmark (it also sounds a bit like the SNL skit where callers voted on whether to boil a live lobster or not).

John Mallin is the premier ecclesiastical mural painter in the United States. He did work all over the Archdiocese of Chicago, following Henry Schlacks with his finishing touches to Schlacks Churches. One of his finest works, however, was not at a Catholic Chapel, rather at the non-denominational Bohemian National Cemetery Chapel at Pulaski and Foster in Chicago.

There are many fine architectural works that Amex is considering for support. I campaign here for the BNC and the restoration of the John Mallin paintings (they are in rough shape), with the following criteria:

1) Landmarks such as the Robie House are supported by the Multi-Billion$ University of Chicago endowment, and have no need for additional funds.

2) Landmarks, such as the Humbolt Park Stables, are supported by the Chicago Park District, and have huge maintenance budgets, albeit, maintenance that is sometimes skipped for more pressing needs like Chicago style political shennanigans.

3) John Mallin lived a very long time, and was still producing classical artwork in the 1960's when the rest of the world had given up on 2000 + years of tradition in exchange for Roy Lichtenstein. We need more artists such as Mallin to uphold the fine arts regardless of the prevailing artistic norms.

4) There is not a soul in Chicago (or most of the rest of the world) that has not heard of the Unity Temple and Frank Lloyd Wright. Do we really need more promotion of architect (albeit a great one) who built his career on hype and exposure?

So, I urge you, in Chicago style, to vote early and often for John Mallin and the Bohemian National Cemetery in American Express Partners in Preservation contest. $1 Million will go a long way to keeping this gem in tact.

Vote Here

Dr. McNamara and Rev. Baker on DVD

A key member of the Society of St. Barbara has put out a new DVD highlighting some of his work. Now before you think that you already saw all the "Die Hard" series (did Matt Alderman have a bit role in those?) at the theater, think again: this is Denis McNamara along with the Most Rev. R. Baker speaking about prayer and architecture respectivley, in a lecture given to the Institute for Religious Life.

This DVD will help you discover new insight and appreciation for religious architecture when you hear this informative talk, or in the case of this Blog's readers, re-affirm and reinforce your current holdings. There are many good video shots of the beautiful chapel at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, where the talk was given.

19th Century Version of "New Urbanism"

Went shopping in Valley Junction (Circa 1846) today, the 19th Railroad Stop in southwest Des Moines, Iowa that once hosted 26 passenger trains per day. Commuter trains, street cars, and long distance sleepers all called on Valley Junction, making this neighborhood a thriving competitor to the central business district of the city. Restaurants, boarding houses, fraternal halls, banks and dry goods stores all kept the economy humming here.

The buildings have some fine brickwork, a planned amount of congestion (giving one the impression that the area is very busy, which it is), and a wide variety of shops and stores, all within a short walk of each other. The area is still going strong (though more functional than charming, in many cases), and worth a trip to look at the railcentric layout and fine 19th century building technique.

New Book on Lutyens Published

Just picked this up at Prairie Avenue books, by the Driehaus winner Allan Greenberg. A bit small format, but important information about one of the most influential architects of the last 150 years. He had some Burnham influences, was a grand designer, made New Delhi look imperial, gave more than a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan and made a great deal of stylistic growth (perhaps too much) in his career. Buy it at PA Books.

The unfinished Liverpool Cathedral is one of the missing masterpieces in Architectural History. How would that look in the vacant lot across from Holy Name Cathedral?

De-Christianizing Wilmette

In an effort to rid Wilmette of any outward signs of Christianity, developers in the Park District sponsored spendall at Mallinckrodt continue to cover any reference to Christ, Mary, or the fact that the Sisters of Christian Charity once had a huge convent and school in Wilmette.

Sun Times cheers on the De-Christianizing here

Gone are:

1) The Cross atop the steeple

2) The Chapel, converted to housing units

3) Marian statuary and grottos in the adjoining park

4) Textual reference to Maria Immaculata

5) The beautiful stained glass from the Chapel and porch leading to the chapel

I was involved in trying to maintain the Liturgical Elements from the Chapel; not that I am much good at such things, but this one was outlandish. The building was sold to the developer for a song. The village claimed that they had to remove all Christian symbols from Park District property (Hmm...does LaCrosse Wisconsin need to remove the "Crosse" from its name) An agent of the developer tried to ransom the stained glass to my foundation and a Priest from the west suburbs. The developer claimed he could not make enough money if he did not destroy the chapel (heard that one a few times). The developer then uprooted 20 huge 100 year old trees. The village stepped in to demand "affordable" housing, so that people making 100K+ could get others to pay for their residence.

This is one botched project, and the botch is on the taxpayers of Wilmette and the many generous donors to the Sisters of Charity and Loyola University over the years. (Then the same thing happens in Lake Forest 2 years later).

If St. Louis is Rome, is Belleville Florence?

Friend of the Society of St. Barbara blog Mark Scott Abeln has some stunning shots of the Cathedral of St. Peter in Belleville Illinois. If you haven't already, please visit his blog at

Rome of the West

which showcases one of my favorite cities, St. Louis, in much the same way as St. Barbara's showcases Chicago. Mark posts a series of photos of the

Belleville Cathedral

which really make the St. Peter's look awe inspiring. Yes Mark, St. Louis, the Society of St. Barbara considers St. Louis the Rome of the West, but does the analogy make it that Belleville would then be the La Belle Florentine?

James Morris launches Website

In my opinion, the best architectural photographer in the world, James Morris, has just launched his subtly named portfolio website.

James Morris, photographer

Morris, the photographer of two of my favorite books Heavenly City, the Architectural History of Catholic Chicago, and Londons Churches and Chapels specializes in large format photography, showing such depth of field as the sequence of arches and columns at St. Marks Coptic Church in Egypt, and a series of rectangular doorways from Villa Sarceno in Vincenza Italy (pictured).

I suggest that you get the largest LCD Monitor you can buy, take a long draw from a Guinness, and spend a few hours perusing and enjoying the portfolio of the master of architectural photography.

Gothic Chicago

Gothic Chicago
Originally uploaded by jlurie

From Flickr

Fine shot of Howells & Hood—John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, Tribune Tower at 435 N. Michigan.

Brooklyn's Cathedral that Never Was

Brooklyn is the ethnic heart of New York Catholicism, a borough whose inhabitants still remember that coming to America needn't mean converting to the comforting blandness of beige Catholicism. A view across the East River shows a low cityscape still dotted with German steeples and Polish domes. With a few notable exceptions, (A San Rocco statue covered in dollar bills followed by a truck filled with small Chinese girls dressed as angels, for instance), all things weird and wonderful in the world of the popularly pious ultimately go back to the Maronites, Italians and Hispanics of the outer boroughs.

While Manhattan may have St. Pat's and Our Saviour's, you won't find the dancing Giglio with its cast of priests and brass bands, or an advertisement for a visit of the Holy Robe of the Infant of Prague to some crusty, dusty church in Queens.

We often forget the borough of Brooklyn was once a whole separate city, and the last hundred years of rule from downtown Manhattan is somewhat of a novelty in the great scheme of things. Indeed, had Bishop Loughlin had his way, Brooklyn would be the home to a behemoth cathedral that would have easily rivalled St. Pat's in sheer bulk. The illustration above is of its facade--a massive, somewhat unremarkable mid-century Victorian Gothic pile, though not without a certain hefty, muscular charm.

Robert A.M. Stern writes in his equally hefty (1,164 pages) New York 1880:

Far and away, the most ambitious church project undertaken in Brooklyn was the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, intended for the block bounded by Clermont, Greene, Vanderbilt, and Lafayette Avenues. A Pugin-inspired version of the Cathedral at Rouen, designed by Patrick C. Keely, it was to have been the second-largest cathedral in the country, exceeded only by New York's St. Patrick's [...], then under construction. [...] As described in 1871, the approach taken by Keely abounded in "clustered shafts, moulded bases, varied statuary, pinnacled and gabled canopies." The cathedral was to have built of blue granite. Two 98-foot-wide, 350-foot-high corner towers were to have marked the 160-foot-wide entrance facade facing Lafayette Avenue, beyond which the 354-foot-long church with its 98-foot-high, white granite nave soaring to a roof framed in oak. The project was extremely ambitious given that the archdiocese had only been in existence for eight years when the site was acquired in 1860, but Bishop John Loughlin was deeply committed to the idea of the cathedral as a beacon for Catholicism in Protestant Brooklyn, as were many laypeople, forty thousand of whom showed up for the laying of the cornerstone on June 21, 1868.

Money soon ran low, and the walls had only creeped up a paltry ten feet before construction was halted. Only one of the church's six chapels, St. John, was completed. The walls and chapel remained until 1931, when they were bulldozed to build a high school named in honor of the late bishop.

One of Loughlin's successors, incidentally, approached Westminster Cathedral designer John Francis Bentley (Keely having died) to figure out what to do with the Cathedral's foundations and stubby walls. Bentley himself visited Brooklyn and began drawings, but the British architect died before Bishop McDonnell could visit London to see the architect's work. The project was shelved, and now the only thing that remains on the site is the former Bishop's residence, now the chancery, which that pompous doorstop The AIA Guide to New York City--at least the 1978 edition--describes as "an orphan asylum for a Charlotte Bronte novel."

The Liturgical Art of Leonard Porter

From Creative Minority Report:

The next installment on Creative Minority Report's quest to show who is out there doing good work in the liturgical arts profiles painter Leonard Porter of New York. Porter is part of the under-40 crowd who was trained as a Modernist painter. Some years ago he rejected his Modernist training and taught himself to paint in the classical tradition. His specialty is the painting of scenes from classical mythology, but in recent years has been kept busy doing some religious and liturgical painting. His first large mural (21 feet wide) was for the Sacred Heart Chapel at the Catholic cathedral in Sioux Falls, SD.

This image of Christ Enthroned With Angels and Saints dedicated to the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart earned him great praise from the client and the traditional art community, and beyond Porter's obvious and virtuoso technical skill is a layering of narrative and detail which equals or surpasses any art painted in all of Christian history.

Another of his works is a small devotional painting of St. Dominic's Eighth Way of Prayer. This small 11"x14" painting nonetheless contains an incredible level of detail and layers of symbolic meaning including a background including the Cathedral of Albi, France, the center of the Albigensian heresy which Dominic founded the Dominican Order to combat.

Porter is just now completing another mural for a church in Fort Worth, Texas of Christ enthroned with imagery based on the description of heaven in the Book of Revelation. This mural shows Christ surrounded by the 4 winged creatures and the rainbow, with all of humanity washing clean in the Blood of the Lamb below. Particularly good are Porter's still life symbolic details, like the oil lamp (image of Christ's light) in the shape of a pelican, another image of Christ because the mother pelican was believed to feed her young from the blood of her own breast.

Creative Minority Report: List of People Not to Hire for Church Architecture - A Catholic Blog: Religion, Politics, Current Events, Humor, and more.

Here is a new Blog that lays it on the line about Church Architecture and Restoration projects.

Creative Minority Report: List of People Not to Hire for Church Architecture - A Catholic Blog: Religion, Politics, Current Events, Humor, and more.

A quote from CMR

"If you like the last gasps of the 1970s, theories of liturgical architecture which depart from the authentic meaning of Vatican II, and a "We Are Church" approach to liturgy and building, this is the place to go for information. Otherwise, consider it a list of people NOT to hire. A valuable resource indeed."

Veterans of many wasted restoration projects are singled out here. Personally, I would hesitate to automatically reject all of the listed consultants and architects, yet, to save time, it is a good practice to use this lis of a guide on what to avoid. That is reject the advice from the Envision Church website and use traditional architects and liturgical designs.

Did Preservation Actually Work?

Notoriously corrupt, obsessed with Foie Gras, leftist by degree, dictatorial by nature, the Aldermen of Chicago have been (accurately in most cases) called many things. However, in Brendan Reilly, we have at last found somemone moderately concerned with the public nature of the built environment. Reily put the squeeze on developers wanting to crush Jarvis Hunt's 1927 marble clad Lakeshore Athletic Club, owned by the notoriously history-hostile Northwestern University.

Yes, the ordinance stinks, and yes it infinges on property owners making right minded people dependent upon a vile bunch of crooks to preserve Chicago at its most beautiful. But, in this case I can only thank Alderman Reilly for maintaining a lakefront gem. Three Cheers for Brendan Reilly!

More Motu Proprio

There is a wealth of information about Motu Proprio on the web that is worthwhile.
1) For technical details: Try the New Liturgical Movement at http://thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/ Sean Tribe's smart blog about the Liturgy.
2) For a serious look at how to implement Traditional Latin Mass, the Institute of Christ the King website is excellent.
3) For some high-spirited commentary and enthusiasm, Matt's Holy Whapping Blog is tops
4) For some occasionaly amusing logo'd items It's Better in Latin is out there a bit.
5) Fr. Philips and the Society of St. John Cantius is one awesome place for the Latin Rite. The website is not up to date, but the Mass is timeless.

My own take:

1) More sacramental delivery is good. The Latin Mass pulls people into the Church and connects with the long history of the Church via the Eucharist. Hugely positive effect.
2) The buildout and logistic operation of the pre-1933 physical church is setup for the Roman Rite. Churches look better when built at designed. The post 1933 church, especially the post 1967 church could use a re-arrangement. Now is a good time to make Churches look like Churches rather than grocery store or bombsites.
3) The mainstream press is a dumb and divisive organization. There really needs to be little controversy stirred up over the Motu Proprio, as most places have Latin Masses as it is. As Msgr. Schmitz explains, the Latin Mass is a Liberalization and very Orthodox Liturgy, contrary to the press condemnation of it as a Conservative throwback. UPDATE: Fr. Neuhas also shows the Liturgical Liberalism of the current Pope in First Things.
4) The unpleasant blog posts about the Archdiocese of Chicago website not mentioning the Motu Proprio are also uncalled for. The Archdiocese of Chicago has been a great supporter of the Latin Mass at St. John Cantius, The Institute of Christ the King, and at St. James in Highwood for many years. I would expect little change necessary in the Archdiocese of Chicago to further support the Latin Mass, as it is already supported quite well, with a top notch group of clergy and institutions. Besides...the poster the Archdiocese is promoting looks really nice, and it looks like it has my book photos on it.
6) The only time I ever met with a Cardinal at the Vatican, he asked me what people in Chicago thought of the Latin Mass. I told him about St. John Cantius, and the way they brought out over 750 people (on Election Night) for a truly awesome All Saints Day mass. He said "Good, I think we should just allow the Latin Mass. It has worked for 2000 years, why not now?"

Motu Propio-Learning about the Classical Roman Rite

Tired of going all the way to Nebraska to learn about the Roman Rite? Well look no further than the glorious South Side of Chicago, because the Institute of Christ the King is offering training in the Classical Roman Rite.

A great addition to the Chicago Archdiocese, the Institute of Christ the King has been celebrating the Roman Rite ever since they came to Chicago in 2003, shining the Light of Christ in the Hyde Park-Woodlawn neighborhood.

Need more information? Contact Cristina Borges (yes, Cristina from EWTN) here.

St. Louise de Marillac with St JtB

The Chapel at St. Louise de Marillac at 721 N. LaSalle in Chicago was the the setting for the Order of Malta Mass Celebrating the Feast of St. John the Baptist. Flags, robes, a baptism, homily by Cardinal Francis George, and the most serene music by a choral quartet from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel highlighted a very beautiful Mass.

Thanks to the Federal Association of the Order of Malta for the kind invitation to the Mass and to Catholic Charities for hosting 75 + Knights (from as far away as Bohemia) at their Chapel.

The Chapel is quite picturesque, worthy of better than my snapshots, but here are two starter shots.