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Concrete cuckoo
In the 1960s, the Catholic Church gave carte blanche to architecture’s wild men, says Jonathan Meades,
with overwhelming resultsT
he Catholic Church’s Second Vatican
Council provides a salutary example
of a tiny ‘elite’ foisting ‘anti-elitist’
practices on the ‘non-elite’ — and coming a
cropper. Vatican II’s dates are important. The
Council was convened in 1962 and conclud-
ed in December 1965. These were the high
years of the most uncompromising architec-
tural modernism and, just as pertinently, of
the craze for theatre-in-the-round, whose
champions considered the proscenium arch
to be an authoritarian (very possibly ‘fascist’)
instrument inimical to ‘participation’.
Rome’s neophilia left much of the cler-
isy bewildered. It was admitting temporal
fashions to a spiritual domain. Maynooth’s
head was spinning. The Council’s bias was
towards the Liturgical Movement’s long-
hatched plans for modernisation. Hence
ecumenicism, the vernacular and often pro-
sey mass, herding the flock close to the host
in an act of naif literalism and turning the
matey, guitar-strumming priest to face that
congregation.
Then there was the matter of icono-
clasm, which proved to be a further form of
self-harm. Extant churches were ‘cleansed’,
stripped of altars, stained glass, paintings and
dubious bondieuserie. The result was occa-
sionally akin to the marvellously frigid post-
Reformation ecclesiastical interiors of Pieter
Saenredam. More often, it was doctrinally
sanctioned vandalism, with added carpets.Vatican II, in its eagerness to embrace the
spiritual analogues of Harold Wilson’s white
heat, dispensed with what Clement Attlee
had dismissed as religion’s ‘mumbo jumbo’:
but this was the very stuff that appealed to
the gullible, which constituted the Church’s
USP: dodgy theatricality, pious ritual, high
formality, po-faced earnestness, tonic joy-
lessness, subjugation by the invocation of a
mighty force. The essence of the sacred, theunknown and the unseen, was, apparently, to
be found in these properties that defined the
entire apparatus of mystery.
St Bernardette of Lourdes in squeaky
rubber or plastic; 3-D Christs with multiple
halos; Virgin Mary alarm clocks; toilet-roll
holders that play ‘Ave Maria’; fun-fur Last
Suppers; the Stations of the Cross in artisan-
tooled low-relief caramel Naugahyde....
The purveyors of holy tat possess a surer
grasp of the faithful’s taste than the Bishop
of Tarbes and Lourdes, Pierre-Marie Théas,
a former résistant, who commissioned the
town’s immense subterranean basilica, and
the architect Pierre Vago, who designed it
for the centenary of Bernadette’s appari-
tions in 1958.
It was one of several churches, going
as far back as Dominikus Böhm’s work inCologne and Rudolph Schwarz’s near Wür-
zburg in the late-1920s, that anticipated and
shaped Vatican II’s decrees on architecture.
The most celebrated of these is Le Cor-
busier’s Notre Dame du Haut (1955), in the
southernmost Vosges at Ronchamp. That
great, ethically dicey, megalomaniacal, athe-
istic architect’s ability to design a ‘holy’ place
was not conditional on faith, unfounded
belief, but on the suggestive management of
space, the control of light, the invention of
forms and the plastic rendering of his paint-
ings’ repetitive shapes. The numinous was
achieved by stage management. It was not
so different from a morally delinquent vegan
designing a marvellous abattoir.
Catholics take the road to Santiago de
Compostela, a road that had fallen into
desuetude until Franco had the wheeze of
exploiting piety for tourism’s sake. Muslims
perform hajj. Architects must go once in
their life to Ronchamp: any visiting Catholic
is liable to be muscled out of the way by jar-
gon-spouting acolytes in black clothes and
round-framed spectacles.
The Liturgical Movement had encour-
aged polite amendments to the traditional
disposition of nave, transept, chancel, apse
etc. Vatican II went much further. It gave
carte blanche to architecture’s sculpturally
inclined wild men, the brutalist successors to
the rogues of a century before. It is nigh on
impossible to discern from, say, the Marien-Vatican II was doctrinally sanctioned
vandalism, with added carpets