ARTICLES
April 2001 ARTICLES
Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
You Can Dress Her Up, But You Can't Take Her Out
The Man Who Will Deck Out the Cathedral
By Christopher Zehnder
As Southern California Catholics await the completion of Los Angeles archdiocese's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, they wonder: will it be all that we expect it to be? Frequent reports in the Los Angeles Times only further stimulate their all too whetted appetite for news of the cardinal's project. The sanguine tone of these reports lead many of us to think that the new cathedral will be everything we feared it would be -- and, perhaps, more.
The February 11 Times ran an article featuring Father Richard Vosko, a priest of the diocese of Albany, New York, whom the archdiocese has hired to draw up a master plan for the interior of the cathedral. According to the Times, Father Vosko's credentials "are both eclectic and rare -- he holds advanced degrees in art and architecture, divinity and adult education, and he runs a business as a designer and consultant for sacred spaces in Albany, New York."
The name Richard Vosko is not a revered one in many Catholic circles. A visit to his website, http://www.rvosko.com, where one can peruse his handiwork in interior design of churches, will indicate why. One of his more "interesting and eclectic" projects is the Corpus Christi University parish church in Toledo, Ohio. The church features an altar table set at the center of a labyrinth painted on the floor. Tall candlesticks mark the "four corners" of the labyrinth, which conference-room-style chairs surround in ranks of concentric circles. Plain glass windows let in the natural light illumining a church that has all the flavor of a seminar conference hall.
One of Vosko's current renovation projects is the historic San Fernando cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. A renovation in the 1970s removed the old high altar, the altar rail and side altars flanking the sanctuary. Vosko's proposed renovation will remove the pews and the elevated pulpit, place a square table-altar further into the nave, flanking it on three sides with conference room-style chairs. The renovation will enclose the historic sanctuary with a high altar inside gates.
Such a design recalls Roger Cardinal Mahony's recommendations for the design of churches befitting his liturgical guidelines outlined in Gather Faithfully Together, his 1997 liturgy pastoral. In the cardinal's "worship space" the altar stands surrounded by the faithful on three sides, with the choir on the fourth. Vosko's renovation of St. James' cathedral in Seattle, Washington echoes this plan, as does Our Lady of Lourdes in Oakland, California. That Vosko and the cardinal so closely agree in this area is not surprising. An April 2000 National Catholic Reporter article noted that Vosko proposed that the United States bishops should issue a liturgy proposal similar to Mahony's.
Vosko, says Michael Rose, editor of the Saint Catherine's Review in Cincinatti, Ohio, "is the ubiquitous liturgical design consultant." Rose, author of The Renovation Manipulation, has done a good deal of research on Vosko. Vosko, said Rose, is one of the nation's foremost liturgical design consultants. "He's won design awards from his cohorts in the design community," said Rose, who all "pat themselves on the back. They all do the same sort of iconoclastic, modernist designs that aren't too appealing to the traditional Catholic or to the Catholic who wants some sense of sacramentality in a church." Though the Times reported that Vosko held advanced degrees in art and architecture, Rose said that the priest's Ph.D. is in adult education," though he has a master's in art. A look at Vosko's résumé confirms that he has a Master's in Fine Arts, though it does not indicate in what discipline he holds his Ph.D.
In his résumé, Vosko outlines his philosophy of church design. "I believe," he writes, "that, over time, where we worship shapes our prayer and how we pray shapes the way in which we live. Using metaphorical equations to design the worship arena my intention is that the assembly will be transformed by the very sacred space it helped to create. This is why participation of the congregation in the building or renovation journey is extremely important. The time-honored ingredients of a worthy place for worship include stories of faith, pilgrimage pathways, transforming thresholds, intimate settings for personal prayer, art work that prompts works of justice and seating plans that engage the community in the public rituals. The utilization of proper proportions, scale, color, light and textures all serve to build the house for the gathered assembly. Finally, sensitivity to ecological and economical factors cannot be overlooked."
In this statement, Vosko interestingly omits any mention of transcendence, of sacramentality, of mystery. Rose said that Vosko's design style is influenced by his studies in adult education. "His [doctoral] thesis," said Rose, "which I have read, is on the arrangement of spaces for adult education, and he concludes that the best recommendation is a circle -- chairs in a circle with a facilitator in the center. Now, does that sound familiar? He applies that to the design of Catholic churches or synagogues, forgetting that we are not talking about adult education here but about worship that is tied to a certain tradition."
Vosko, said Rose, invokes Vatican II as the basis of his design ideas, though "nothing in Vatican II supports his ideology. What does support his ideology," continued Rose, "are the Protestant, and some Catholic, architects of the 50s and 60s who had theories of re-arranging spaces to de-emphasize the sacrifice of the Mass. There was a movement, especially in the 60s, led by Edward Sövik, a Lutheran architect who designed a number of churches. Sövik wrote an interesting book back in 1972, about five or six years before Environment and Art in Catholic Worship [a document issued by the United States Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy] came out in 1978. Many of the recommendations he gives are the same as Environment and Art gives. What's interesting about Sövik is that he gives his own ideology which leads to his design proposals, which are, first, re-arranging the chairs around a central table (not an altar); getting rid of a any religious imagery, such as statues, any kind of iconography -- anything that can be construed as specifically religious. His reasoning is that he wants to go back to the first centuries of the Christian Church before it became 'perverted' with theology and all the added things that Catholics like to cling on to.
"One of the things Sövik wants to do is to get rid of anything that would remind Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants, of traditional churchy-type things. For instance, he recommends getting rid of the pew, because the pew reminds us of church. He also advocates setting up a separate room for the Eucharistic species, if that is necessary at all.
"If you compare the two design ideologies," continued Rose, "and also the execution of the designs of Vosko and Sövik, they're very similar. Now, of course, Vosko doesn't come out and say the things Sövik admits to."
In his book, Rose quotes Vosko, who describes his "church of tomorrow" as a building "similar to the other public spaces, buildings that are well designed and constructed to accommodate large numbers of people in comfortable and pleasant ways." Such a church will, writes Vosko, focus on the assembly "gathered about the font and table."
Rose said that the impression one gets of Vosko is that "he wants a Disney World sort of feel" in his churches. Among the elements Vosko favors in churches, said Rose, are "a data base of biographies so that the community are able (in Vosko's words) 'to interact with holographic images of religious folk heroes'; mobile art and computerized projections; and natural scents to 'trigger the full sensual capacity of the community causing interactive, conscious and subliminal participation in the celebration of word and sacrament' [Vosko again]. Now, how is that a play on 'full, conscious, active participation'?"
"The funniest story I've heard about Vosko is a proposal for the cathedral in Colorado Springs," said Rose. "I met a young lady who was on the committee there several years ago. What he wanted to do there is to have an altar and the choir platform on tracks. He doesn't always achieve getting these sorts of things, though."
Rose says that Vosko discourages the use of images of saints and of Our Lord and Our Lady because "he's opposed to anything that comes off as strictly religious in nature. One of the things he's doing, in Milwaukee, is getting rid of all the shrines, and putting multi-cultural pieces of art in their place -- such as hanging tapestries -- to celebrate the different cultures that make up diverse Milwaukee -- which isn't all that diverse, mostly Germans and Poles. Yet, there's not going to be any German art work or Polish art work. There will be Buddhist and Native American art work -- that sort of thing. This is consistent with his other work."
Vosko's Los Angeles cathedral project, though, will use religious imagery -- perhaps because Sir Daniel Donohue, president of the Dan Murphy Foundation, sits on the committee that approves Vosko's choice of artists. (The Dan Murphy Foundation contributed $25 million to the cathedral project). One of the artists chosen by Vosko and the committee, John Nava, is working on 36 tapestries, seven feet long by 20 feet high, that will feature portraits of 133 saints, according to the Times. Nava, an artist residing in Los Angeles, has a natural, almost classical style that contrasts with the abstract, amorphous milieu of the cathedral's architecture. He told the Times that he wanted his saints "to look like people we know, not like stylized saints. Before I got this commission, I hadn't thought a lot about the communion of saints. Now I see it as the core image of the faith. Redemption, hope and life."
Most of Vosko's artist choices are not Catholic. One who is, is Lalo Garcia, who will design an outdoor shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. One who isn't, is Lita Albuquerque, though she was raised in a convent in Morocco. Albuquerque, whom Vosko chose to design a waterfall and pool, has an abstract style -- mere lines, circles, and intersecting planes. Commenting on one of her works in an interview on the website of the "(Floating Invisible) Museum of Actual Art," she said her piece represents the issue of truth and lies "from the point of view of representing a philosophical condition about the nature or reality. By presenting the whole cosmos as a fragile film, an ethereal breath, is it as the Buddhists believe that life is in fact a dream, a reflection only of what we are dreaming? Or is there some large being somewhere breathing these particle stars into existence and if that is so, if each inhale and exhale is the pulse and the in-between breaths our reality, how and when will we ever perceive it? Will we ever know the nature or the truth of our existence?"
If such angst exudes the spirit of the New Age, so, it seems, does the work of M.L. (Mary Louise) Snowden who will make four angel images to flank the altar. Snowden, called a third generation protégé of Auguste Rodin, is a skilled sculptor in bronze. Since 1989 she has produced a number of statues which personify the forces in nature. When she was asked to make the angels for the cathedral, she questioned, said the Times report, "their extraterrestrial image. 'Angels are pure energy,' she concluded. 'Energy is the essence of the Earth.'"
An American Indian artist, Johnny Bear Contreras will cast a work that will honor Native Americans. When the cardinal asked to meet with him, Contreras told the Times that he thought it was about the controversy Indians, whom he represented, were having with the archdiocese over whether the cathedral site were an Indian burial ground. Instead, though, the cardinal asked about Contreras' work as an artist. Contreras will make a bronze work, called "The Spirit of the Earth," depicting, said the Times, "Native American signage and figures of animals from [Contreras'] culture's myth of creation."
The Church, Michael Rose thinks, "can appropriate certain pagan symbols for a good reason; for instance, if one is converting a pagan tribe of Indians that had certain symbols that have deep spiritual meaning, and if using them would convert a lot of people to Christianity. In that case, it would make sense to appropriate those symbols, or baptize them, if you will. But what many people want to do now is erect a totem pole in front of a church, or replace true Catholic spirituality and doctrine with native American pagan spirituality." It is not clear, though, how, or whether, Vosko or the cardinal will "baptize" an Indian creation myth.
The use of pagan symbolism and the choice of artists that have what seems a New Age world-view may witness to Vosko's distaste for purely religious symbolism -- tempered, perhaps, by the character of the project in Los Angeles. But, mayn't Vosko's be an attempt to break down what some have criticized as a dualism, or opposition of the Church to the world, characterized by traditional architecture? Stained glass windows have shut out the world; darkness has lured Catholics into an individualistic piety; mystery and transcendence have turned Catholics away from engaging the world with the Gospel -- or so runs the criticism.
"People can criticize that, because Catholics have scandalized others" by their separation of faith from life, said Rose. "That doesn't seem to me to be a reason why we should break down a 'dualism,' though. That would be almost like saying that the liturgy is opposed to the world, which doesn't make sense. Christ Himself withdrew from the world to pray. Obviously, any of our work in the world should flow from the Mass, and be indirectly related to it in many ways. This criticism always comes down to fallacious logic and a misunderstanding of Catholic teaching about living the Catholic life because, let's face it, most Catholics in this country don't know how to live a Catholic life anymore, if they ever did."
Vosko's whole approach, though, seems to stem from a fundamental questioning of Church authority. In an address he gave at St. Theresa Church in Succasunna, New Jersey in 1982, Vosko said he thought that "it may not be opportune for me to say here and now that in our Church there are a lot of people who absolutely agree with everything the Church teaches. You know people like that? Are you a person like that -- who never questions anything that the Church teaches? My mother's like that. My father's like that. I think my sister is like that and I got to admit that when I go to bed at night I'm a little like that. But there are a lot of people who just rely on blind faith and trust and accept everything the Church teaches without ever thinking about it. Can you identify with that? Morality issues? Fish on Friday issues? How many of you had meat tonight? Not too many, I bet. Good, old time Catholics when you come down to it. Friday is for fish." In the same talk, Vosko said the reason for the Faith is "to help to make the world a better place to live in. I mean that's the bottom line of all this; it's the only thing Jesus taught us how to do."
I e-mailed questions to Father Vosko to get his response to concerns raised in this article. To date, I have received no reply from him. In the April 2000 National Catholic Reporter article, Vosko explained that "the reason for the new focus on the assembly" in his architecture "is derived precisely from the recovered role of the people of God during acts of worship and not because of any subversive movement to discount the presence of God in the church." But how is God present? Does His presence transcend the assembly, whom Mahony in his pastoral calls the "body and blood of Christ"? Is any hierarchy proposed among what the Reporter called Vosko's "key liturgical symbols -- the altar, the bread and wine, the assembly"?
Rose quotes a statement of Vosko where he ironically treats adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and reduces its reservation in the tabernacle to practical concerns. "One reason why our churches are so susceptible to crime is because they are empty during the week," said Vosko. "Maybe people who have organized vigils before the sacrament -- that's a wonderful practice to keep vigil -- to take turns keeping vigil over the Blessed Sacrament, that is primarily saved to take to the sick and dying -- that is what the Church teaches us. And I think that's a wonderful practice to take turns keeping watch just in case. Well, just think if your mother or father needs Holy Communion on their death bed. Wouldn't it be nice to know that you can go to the tabernacle and find the Body of Christ in it?" In contrast, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that reservation in the tabernacle "was first intended for the reservation of the Eucharist. so that it could be brought to the sick and those absent outside of Mass;" but since "the Church became conscious of the meaning of silent adoration of the Lord present under the Eucharistic species," the Church has since reserved the Eucharist in "an especially worthy place in the church."
Despite the seeming ubiquity of the Vosko-esque in church design, Rose thinks "it is essentially dying." It is the "design consultant crowd," he said, that keeps it alive. "They're all educated, basically, at the same place, which is the Catholic Theological Union; some are educated at Notre Dame," continued Rose. "They're all basically taught the same sort of things, exposed to the same sort of architecture, given the same sort of arguments -- it's sort of an apologetics course they take. I think, though, that there's a growing appreciation of the sacred, in sacred architecture, in traditional forms, because we've been starved of that over the past thirty years. There are architects, such as Duncan Stroik and Thomas Gordon Smith at Notre Dame who have made big waves in building traditional churches. People are seeing these and saying, wow, we can build these things today. Many have been under the mistaken notion that we can't build the churches we used to because we don't have the money to do it anymore."
"My sense is that, across the country, Mahony is seen as a laughing stock, his whole cathedral project is being ridiculed. I don't know anyone who is praising it. Everybody looks at it and says, it's ugly; why would you waste this amount of money on a thing like that?"
For information on St. Catherine's Review, or on Michael S. Rose's book, The Renovation Manipulation, write to St. Catherine's Review, P.O. Box 11260, Cincinnati, OH 45211-0260. The Review may be found on the internet at http://www.aquinas-multimedia.com/catherine/index.html