First order of business is podcasts. I know very little about them but two readers have independently suggested I attempt to produce some. Should any of you think this a worthwhile endeavor (those of you who know what my voice sounds like know it is not!) suggest a topic or two and I will mull it over.
Now on to the day's material. Every church I visit in this area is progressively stranger and stranger. The first church I saw was St. Francis of Assisi in Frisco, a modest attempt at Romanesque which, as Rubricarius pointed out, did not entirely work owing to the ceiling, but which was an interesting none the less. Then I went to a pair of Byzantine churches and St. Thomas Aquinas in Dallas, each good representations of what a parish ought to be. Then I came upon this bereft barn and St. Jude's, both very.... modern and.... pastoral....
With every new parish I find that evidence for the complaints Catholics have made for the last seven decades about the decline of Church architecture. When I lived in the northeastern United States churches tended to look more or less the same as they did prior to the mid-20th century. Yes, a great many were "wreckovated" and some were re-modeled with a forward altar, yet the integrity of the buildings usually survived. With the death of American cultural Catholicism in the 1960s and 1970s and the influx of Mexican immigrants to Texas very few "traditional" looking parishes from the "old days" survived in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Almost everything is new and monstrously repulsive, an aesthetic assault on those of good taste and piety! Worse than being ugly, these edifices, aside from altars and crucifixes, have no discernibly Christian features! Today's feature could well have been a rented venue or a local cinema.
The approach
The ticket desks. No kiosks apparently.
The holy water font?
It is no holy water font. It is a baptismal barque!
I took a sniff just to be sure and confirmed my
suspicion of chlorination.
It looks strange enough as is. The stain glass windows
depict nothing in particular other than the vague outline
of a crucifix and some Roman numerals one assumes correspond
to the Stations of the Cross.
Then I realized that the sanctuary is "sunken" to create a
theatrical effect. The lighting arrangement seems to agree
with this intention.
Not quite the traditional Roman choir style either!
It begs the question: why imitate the Evangelical megachurches and promote
an entertainment-focused style of religion? The protestants have always
and will always do it much better than us.
