On Thursday, July 21 at 6 pm there will be a sung Requiem Mass according to the Extraordinary Form at St. Mary Church, Norwalk, to commemorate the third  anniversary of the death of Fr.Kevin Fitzpatrick.

The Student Schola of St. Mary Church, Norwalk is scheduled to sing in Masses in Madrid this August for World Youth Day.  The schola together with the Sisters of Life Scholawill be performing in a benefit concert at the church under the direction of David Hughes on Friday, July 22 at 7:30 pm to raise the funds needed to travel to Madrid.  Advance tickets are $20 per person/ $40 per family, at the door $25 per person/ $50 per family.  Clergy and religious are admitted for free.  To purchase tickets in advance, please visit the website www.chantwith.us. or purchase them after Masses at St. Mary’s this coming weekend.  CDs of the schola are also available.

This Saturday, July 16, at 9:00 am, the regularly scheduled Extraordinary Form Mass at St. Mary’s Norwalk will be a Missa Cantata in honor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.

Church of Our Saviour

59 Park Avenue at East 38^th Street

By the time of Cardinal Spellman, the ecclesiastical landscape of Manhattan was largely complete. The Cardinal has a well deserved reputation as a great builder – the Ramesses II of the New York Archdiocese.  But in terms of new churches in Manhattan itself he was largely confined to various niches:  a commuter church for Wall Street, shrines for the new saints connected with New York, churches related to  institutions ( NYU, the United Nations) and, finally a couple of new parishes for developing well-to-do areas. The Church of Our Saviour falls into the last category. The parish was established only in 1955, the church itself finished in 1959.

The construction of this church occasioned some controversy at the time. For it was built not just to fill a utilitarian need but to create a new showpiece on Park Avenue. We heard that Archbishop Sheen was particularly incensed over the disproportionate cost of the construction of this church – he alleged that per pew seat it was the most expensive church in the archdiocese. And the results seemed hardly commensurate with the cost.

Those of us who have lived through the post-1960 course of Catholic Church architecture may find it hard to understand this disappointment. For Our Saviour’s, with its tower,  gray stone facing and numerous carvings, makes a handsome but appropriately restrained impression on the corner of East 38^th Street. The external appearance conceals the modest dimensions of the church. In common with many other Manhattan churches, a complex of parish hall, church and rectory has been squeezed into a very small plot. The style seems to be a variant of the modernized, vaguely Italian Romanesque that had become by the 1950’s dominant in Catholic church architecture.

Perhaps there lay the problem. There is nothing that bad about Our Saviour’s – it is a very handsome church – but little remarkable either. The Archdiocese was seeking to make a statement, yet the result of all its efforts  was not that different from that obtained in many other more modest parishes. The contrast with the achievements of the not too distant past – like Blessed Sacrament or St. Vincent Ferrer – is all too glaring.

 “Throne and Altar”: Cardinal Spellman’s  assertive patriotism later became anathema to secular and ecclesiastical elites.

The interior is relatively simple: a rectangle with a shallow sanctuary. Yet above the sanctuary is an impressive triumphal arch. And the high, small windows, filled with stained glass, help to create a dark, prayerful atmosphere when the electric lights are out.  There are good statues, paneling and metalwork that seem inspired by the decorative program of earlier churches like St. Vincent Ferrer – if executed with considerably less success. The intricate stone flooring is impressive – the high gilt cassette ceiling looks even better. Other elements, like the stained glass and the Stations of the Cross, do not rise anywhere near the same artistic level. Downstairs, the “undercroft” (which had served as the church while Our Saviour’s was under construction) is one of most splendid parish halls in New York City.

The Last Hurrah of the Spellman era – 20 years ago this would have been the epitaph for this parish. Just a few years after the completion of Our Saviour’s, Catholic sacred architecture in New York took a new and radical direction before entirely expiring. The parishes of New York either struggled grimly for survival or lapsed into a musty decadence. Yet under Our Saviour’s current pastor, the remarkable George Rutler, this parish has awakened from its somnolence and has achieved a citywide and even international presence.

We cannot detail here all the multitudinous activities of Our Saviour’s under Fr. Rutler in liturgy (including the sacrament of penance), preaching, music and a great variety of “special events.” Although this parish had not been associated with the Traditional Indult mass, it became a city leader in implementing Summorum Pontificum and encouraging the celebration of the Traditional Latin rite. But what most strikes the visitor to Our Saviour’s is the artistic renewal. Under Fr. Rutler’s direction a vast program of paintings in the Byzantine tradition has filled the sanctuary. These works are in remarkable harmony with the mysterious darkness of the church. A new tabernacle has been set up in the place of the old altar – as well as a crucifix and candlesticks on its Vatican II successor. And the pace of restoration is relentless. Upon every visit one encounters a new icon, statue or expanse of gilding. Last year, Our Saviour’s was the first in the city (the country?) to dedicate a shrine to blessed john Newman immediately after his beatification. While all this new art was in the process of creation, major repairs and rebuilding had to be carried out on the organ and the fabric of the church.

 Three examples of renovation: the new tabernacle and altar furnishings; icons (by Ken Woo) and a statue of Bl. Kateri.

And the amazing thing is that this renovation is entirely consistent with and proceeds from Tradition. The Byzantine/Early Italian styles used in Our Saviour’s may be the only version of sacred art that still exists today. These styles also harmonize effectively with the architecture of this church. Perhaps the only recent example of successful Catholic sacred art in Manhattan, Our Saviour’s avoids both the amateurish classicism of St. Agnes and the incorrigible commitment to an outdated modernism of the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts. Judging from the large congregations (often standing room only) and their youthful average age, it seems that this parish has rediscovered a formula for success (indeed, the only real one). Going back before the artistically and spiritually ambiguous age of Spellman, this parish has returned to the roots of Tradition and has come up with something new. And in so doing, Our Saviour’s has found a way to connect with young Catholics adrift in the world capital of modernity.

 Website:  http://www.oursaviournyc.org/

The Newman shrine – compare and contrast the shrine to St. Elizabeth Seton in St. Patrick’s 0f 20 years ago…

The approaching end of an era: window of the original decoration commemorating John XXIII’s first “progressive ” encyclica.

Church of Notre Dame, West 114th Street

By Joris-Karl Huysmans

(Plon, Paris 1908)

It is hard to find a pre-World War II church in Manhattan that does not commemorate in some way the apparition at Lourdes. Sometimes it is a window. More often it is a depiction of the Lourdes grotto itself ranging from small statue groups of Bernadette and the Virgin to life-size recreations. These images give an indication of the impact of Lourdes on Catholic popular piety of that era. And the role of Lourdes in New York was not confined to pictures and statues. In the 1890’s the Redemptorist church of Most Holy Redeemer began dispensing actual Lourdes water – miracles were not slow to follow. Finally, in 1914 New York acquired its own duplicate shrine of Lourdes at the church of Notre Dame on West 114^th Street.  It functions as an authentic, if little known, “Lourdes in Manhattan” to this very day.

In the early 1900’s Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) undertook to explore personally the realm of Lourdes. Although the author was by then a Catholic, this book is not at all a conventional exercise in piety. For the spirituality of Lourdes was deeply contrary to the author’s nature. He was a lover of the solitary mystic experience, of the Gothic cathedrals and of the traditional chant of the church. The raucous popular devotion he would encounter at Lourdes was for him a deep challenge.

He encountered armies of pilgrims arriving every day by train from every region of France and beyond. The incessant music – brass bands and popular pilgrimage hymns – was ear-splitting. (Participants in today’s Chartres pilgrimage will recall many hymns that Huysmans specifically mentions: “Laudate Mariam,” “Nous voulons Dieu” etc.). Some of these groups – such as the Bretons – still wore their national costumes.  And it is fun to read how Huysmans makes his way into the crowded shrine behind a phalanx of Spanish women wearing mantillas and waving their fans. Many of these pilgrims, of course, were seeking a cure. The author describes their maladies – often cancers or advanced tuberculosis – in almost unendurable detail. The depiction of the stench and the filth, the sweat and the blood can be overpowering.

St. John Nepomocene Church, East 66th Street.

Huysmans calls Lourdes the “boiler room” of piety. Everyone seemed to succumb after a while to kind of frenzy. Reports of fresh miracles circulated daily – regardless of whether the official Lourdes bureau accepted them or not.  The pilgrim felt cut off from the rest of the world – only Lourdes existed now. Again, it is only on the Chartres pilgrimage that I have felt his same exclusive focus on the immediate, this forgetfulness of the world otherwise so insistent in its demands.

A highlight of this book is the memorable description of the Grotto at night before the arrival of the pilgrimage crowds. It is a veritable sea of light from the thousands of candles. Huysmans explores the symbolism of the candle in these startling terms:

“The candle is composed of three parts; the wax that is the flesh so white of Jesus; the wick that is inserted in that wax which is His most pure Soul hidden under the envelope of his body and the fire which is the emblem of His divinity.”

 Elsewhere Huysmans contrasts the ‘living” light of the candle to ‘dead” electric light.  And he condemns those who try to deceive God by offering candles not made of beeswax but of poisonous industrial products. In a truly bizarre passage he compares the caretaker of the candles to a gardener tending a bed of different kinds of flowers – which weep waxen tears. By skillfully moving about the candles as they expire, the caretaker enables the various sizes and kinds of candles to mutually support each other – it is an image of the communion of Saints. In this remarkable chapter Huysmans unites precision of observation, esoteric knowledge and the hallucinatory style of his earlier “decadent” novels.

St. Vincent de Paul Church, West 23rd Street.

At times the shock of what he experiences compels Huysmans to abandon the role of the erudite observer and to mingle his prayers with those of the poor and sick. As a procession with the Monstrance circulates among the most severely afflicted pilgrim, the author raises his voice to heaven – Please Lord, help these ones now who have come so far and endured so much!  And Huysmans is heartbroken when a young grievously afflicted pilgrim who had appeared cured suffers relapse.  How can such a cruel deception happen? Why are so few helped? Yet he already knows the answer to the question, albeit one hard for us to accept. By their prayers and suffering these sick pilgrims are “completing the sufferings of Christ” and in a mysterious way obtaining graces for others or for themselves.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church, East 83rd Street

Why review this book now?  To recall a monument to a now-vanished world of European popular piety?  To inform ourselves about Lourdes from what is even today a treasure trove of the most amazing information about all aspects of the shrine, its history and its operation? Yes – but if we look closely we will see that this work, describing an era situated between the medieval and the modern, also says much about developments we have all lived through in the last half-century.

First, Huysmans a great champion of returning to proper liturgical practice and of plainsong, found little to praise at Lourdes. The liturgical life he experienced at Lourdes was a disaster. The normal form of liturgy was a low mass accompanied by totally unconnected hymns.  The hours and office were not sung. Only once did he experience a solemn mass with the appropriate chant – at least for the first half of that service. Huysmans in this book is arguing for a true liturgical reform of a kind that only in our day  certain Traditional parishes have partially realized.

Second, Huysmans perceived a distinction in messsage between Lourdes and the immediately preceding apparitions in the Rue du Bac and La Salette. At Lourdes the emphasis is no longer on penance and a warning of disasters to come. Instead, there is the free disbursement of graces, a mission of mercy and clemency. It is obviously a more popular message. Do we not see parallels here with the “non-judgmental” spirituality of the Vatican II Church? (After the author’s death, of course, our Lady at Fatima reiterated the note of warning and the call to repentance of the earlier apparitions.)

But third, and most important, is Huysmans’ meditation on beauty in ecclesiastical art set forth in the extraordinary chapter VI. For Huysmans saw himself totally surrounded by ugliness at Lourdes: the architecture of the churches, the paintings, the music, the attire of most of the pilgrims etc. He had no doubt that this was of satanic origin. For Satan’s chosen weapon against the graces of Lourdes from the very beginning was ugliness. Huysmans explains that art is special gift that may be employed for good or for ill but which always retains its divine character. It is the reproduction of Beauty unique and multiform like the Divinity itself – even though it can only be a feeble mirror of the Infinite Beauty. The beautiful thus has a necessary relation with God (Lamennais). To Huysmans, the contrary is necessarily true -the ugly has a necessary relation with the demon. To depict our Lord in an ugly work art is thus in a sense of work of black magic – transforming divine images into infernal ones.  Those are strong words coming from an author who had had much more experience than most men in the occult arts. The ugliness at Lourdes also proceeded from the intrusion of modernity into the Church – this in 1908! The problem of the Church was not that She was behind the times but that She was all too obviously a captive of the taste of the age.

Immaculate Conception Church, East 14th Street.

I cannot imagine the author’s reaction to the contemporary music and art of the Catholic Church. We get a hint of what he would likely think in his condemnation of the intrusion of popular melodies into the liturgy and his savage denunciation of the Rosary basilica at Lourdes because its architecture could just as easly serve as a machine shop or shed for locomotives. A structure, by the way, already bathed in electric light (like St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York today).

 
St. Cecilia Church, East 105th St.

Although he does not mention it in the text, Huysmans was dying of a very painful form of cancer when he wrote this book, which appeared the year before he died. He had left Lourdes deeply impressed by the unbroken piety of the humbler classes and the charity practiced by the staff of the shrine, the medical personal and certain of the sisters. And once we are forced once again – this time by the author – to compare the pilgrimages to Chartres and Lourdes. For Huysmans states that in 1200 one would have encountered at Chartres the same crowds, the same faith and charity as at Lourdes. Only the architecture, the liturgy and the costumes of the people were of an entirely different order. Now  on the pilgrimage to Chartres today the music sung on the march may not be according to the late M. Huysmans’ taste. But he is undoubtedly pleased to see that on every day the solemn mass is celebrated with all its propers sung!

St. Stephen’s Church, East 28th Street.

You can find HERE the original text (this invaluable site has many other texts of Huysmans).  An English translation appeared in the 1920’s – it would be well for a publishing house to make this work available to the English-speaking readers again.

St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven CT .

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, East 115th Street.

These photos were taken this morning at the low Mass, which is celebrated every Sunday at 8:30 at the beautiful high altar of the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford. The celebrant, substituting for Msgr. DiGiovanni, was Father Cyprian La Pastina, pastor of St. Gabriel Church, Stamford, celebrating the external feast for the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

This Extraordinary Form Low Mass can be viewed live on line every Sunday. Visit the St. Johns parish website at 8:30 am on Sunday: http://stjohnsstamford.com/, and click the photo of the church up top.

Hauptsachen
Thoughts and Insights on Faith and the Church.

By Lorenz Jäger
With an Introduction by Martin Mosebach
(Fe-medienverlags GmbH, Kisslegg, 2010)

Hauptsachen: the Essentials, Main Things. Or should I translate, treading on someone else’s copyright, First Things? It’s a collection of brief essays by the noted German academic and journalist, Lorenz Jäger, who has trod a long intellectual path from Marxism to Traditional Christianity. But, as Martin Mosebach points out in his introduction, the rule of today’s Catholic intellectual life is Salus Extra Ecclesiam est. The homegrown products of an institutional Church in fealty to modernity’s civil society are worthless. I should add that the author is only one of a seemingly endless series of intellectual champions of the Traditional Christianity who have arisen in the last few years primarily in Germany, Italy and France. It is a veritable “Oxford Movement” of the 21st century.

Now most of these essays first appeared in the Sunday edition of the leading German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Strange to Americans used to the NY Times, the “FAZ” runs a column with spiritual observations appropriate to the day. But make no mistake: Essential Things is no vacuous “word from your pastor” as found in the typical parish bulletin: love, peace and give money to the poor. Jäger’s deceptively simple and engaging essays offer unanticipated depth of analysis, a penetrating critique of society, state and Church – and not a little wit. Jäger is unafraid of challenging the innumerable sacred cows of the German-speaking world. Indeed, I identified one point of his so outrageous that I am amazed Jäger got away with it at all (I had best leave it in the obscurity of a learned language).

The usual starting point of each 2-3 page essay is scripture. Jäger’s knowledge of the bible is profound and the way he utilizes some of the more obscure passages is a revelation. For example, from the detailed requirements of Leviticus that a priest must be whole in body Jaeger develops a meditation on modernity’s separation between nature and belief. The best evidence of that are the current battles on homosexual marriage and the ordination of women.

Jäger takes aim at some of the champions of the Conciliar Church and its progeny: Karl Rahner, the unspeakable organization of Catholic laity in Germany, Medjugorje, various ecclesiastical “movements.” He reflects on the lives of the saints and emphasizes the importance of reconciliation with the Orthodox world. He takes up arms against the press campaign launched against Pope Benedict after he freed from excommunication the bishops of the FSSPX. There is a swipe against the lodge of the Freemasons in France that I am sure will delight certain Catholic circles. And everywhere in this book Jäger battles against a nebulous Christianity without the cross, dogma, reverence or the supernatural.

Like Martin Mosebach, Jäger insists on the necessity of form in the liturgy. In “Julien Green in der Kirche” he observes that artists were among the earliest enemies of the post-conciliar liturgical changes, because: “They respected the form, without which the most venerable content evaporates.” Jäger tells us of the reaction of Julien Green who had visited a convent chapel in 1976:
“‘The birds don’t sing in the winter. Winter has come to the Church.’ What (Green) was seeking was a liturgical form that made the mystery present. And so he began to turn to the Churches of the East.”
The author does not restrict himself to the “merely” religious realm but ventures into the intersection of belief and politics. Indeed, the only fault of these essays may be their topicality: they often take as the point of departure some current issue arousing controversy in Germany or the world. He is not a little suspicious of the “neocon” ( we would say in the US) critique of Islam, given that said “experts” tend to be uncritical supporters of Israeli expansionism. And he cannot get enthusiastic about a Sarah Palin who thinks the Iraq war was a holy crusade.

The style of the essays is eminently readable – even if much reflection is often necessary to fully savor them. You will indeed find much to think about – even if you may not agree with everything that Lorenz Jäger writes. But this book will be welcome reading for every supporter of the Traditional faith – especially for the reader willing to explore the fundamental theological and philosophical issues of this age. I would hope that Essential Things may soon find a translator so that a broader segment of the English –speaking world may get to explore these essays.

The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny will be sponsoring a Solemn Mass for the Feast of St. James on Monday the 25th of July at 7 PM at the Cathedral-Basilica of St. James. The address is:250 Cathedral Pl.
Brooklyn, NY 11201.

2011 Corpus Christi Mass, procession and Benediction at St. Mary parish, Norwalk, CT – with the participation of the massed musical resources of the parish.

The altars, reflecting a variety of customs and nationalities.