Recycling the Churches

Sandro Magister reports on the ever-growing problem of using Catholic churches – once the clergy and faithful are gone:

Closed Churches. Two Criteria for Their Best Reuse

Here are excepts with my commentary.

More than attacks, thousands of churches in Europe suffer from abandonment. With ever fewer Catholics at Mass, they find themselves empty. And so they are being closed. In Germany, in Holland, in Belgium, the figures are dizzying. But in Italy as well there is a growing number of churches in disuse. 

(In Italy), at least, the churches are not state but ecclesiastical property, and therefore enjoy spontaneous and lasting protection on the part of their respective diocesan and parish communities. (Is this intending to be humorous? In the US, where the Church, in various forms, owns its own properties, such protection has been nonexistent. Indeed, it is largely because of state ownership (where such regimes prevail) and state-imposed restrictions that the Catholic architectural heritage has been preserved.)

But when these communities dwindle and disappear, for their respective churches it is the end. They are at serious risk of going under and ending up on the market, perhaps turned into supermarkets or dance halls, or in any case into something contrary to the purposes for which they arose.

(Again, speaking for the US experience, the churches are at risk even if the “communities” still exist. For one thing, all properties are de facto exposed to the financial problems of the entire diocese and its insatiable need for funds.)

A conference at the Vatican issued recommendations in 2016 for the disposal of such churches:

(The conference) produced “guidelines” advising against “commercial reuse for speculative aims,” and instead encouraged “reuse for aims of solidarity,” with “cultural or social” purposes: museums, conference halls, bookshops, libraries, archives, art studios, Caritas centers, clinics, soup kitchens, and more. Still leaving the option of “transformation into private homes” in the case of “more modest buildings with no architectural value.”

In the same vein, Giuliano Zanchi, a priest from Bergamo, professor of theology and a “great expert on art and themes on the border between aesthetics and the sacred” has now made his suggestions.

 (T)here are two criteria that Zanchi suggests be followed in the reuse of churches that have ceased to be such but want to “relaunch themselves in civil life with the function of cultural crossroads and spiritual threshold.”

The first criterion, he writes, is that which “harnesses the artistic dignity normally connected to historical sacred buildings…..”

There is in fact today a “social sect of art, which has its shrines, its liturgies, its priests, its myths, its sacraments, its pilgrimages, and its holy days of obligation,” which in turn, together with music, cinema, literature, “delimit a rather hospitable space of a common and shared ‘pensiveness’.”

The historic precincts of many religious buildings no longer functioning as places of the liturgy have all the qualities to be able to accommodate these social needs so deeply rooted,  and to bid to act as a true crossroads of a ‘cultural fraternity’ in which to enliven, in debate, in encounter, in plurality, in hospitality, a common sense of the human.”

(So, henceforth Catholic Churches will function as museums and cult locations for the “social sect of art.”)

The second criteron, according to Zanchi:

consists in “that typical need of the contemporary city” to have liminal areas, thresholds, “capable of steering toward the profound and the transcendent, which in the absence of anything else are identified in theaters, museums, libraries, and other places of non-utilitarian ulteriority.”

 “In our cities, which remain mercilessly horizontal even when they build skyscrapers that defy the heavens, there is a need for spaces that can be traversed as ‘spiritual thresholds’ and embody a vertical impulse even when they remain hidden on the ground floors of urban life.”

We cannot say that any of this typically European, Roman Catholic gibberish makes sense or imposes any real restrictions on anyone regarding the future use of former churches. What is clear, however, is the Church’s acceptance of the elimination of Christianity from modern society, as vividly symbolized by the closing of Catholic churches. The decline of Catholic practice is silently assumed to be an unalterable fact of life. In place of Christianity, secular functions are acknowledged that provide psychological benefits to the man of today (the “sect of art,” a “common sense of the human,” a “shared pensiveness” and “spiritual thresholds” that embody a “vertical impulse.”) Moreover, this psychological and emotional assistance is apparently viewed as an adequate substitute for the Christian cult previously practiced in these buildings. And are we not forced to conclude that the Catholic Church already sees its own primary role as providing such benefits (the “field hospital” of Pope Francis)? Did not the great Christian writer Novalis in 1800 denounce “pious” contemporaries for whom the Christian religion was “dope.” (emotional and psycholgical comfort). Such a “religion” is doomed to extinction. By actually endorsing such principles, the Catholic Church acquiesces in its own marginalization – and eventual elimination – from the world of modernity.