Maria Goretti the Merciful

Two days ago I made a quasi-pilgrimage to visit the major relics of Maria Goretti in Dallas. (I can't honestly call a 20-minute drive a real pilgrimage.) Strangely enough, the relics were not displayed at St. Maria Goretti parish, but at the even more architecturally modernist St. Monica.

I have visited relics before, but never any that drew such a large crowd. The line when I arrived lasted about an hour. At other times of the day pilgrims were reporting 3-4 hour waits. A shuttle was bringing people over from a local Protestant church that had offered its parking lot for use. One lady helpfully told those standing in line that they could easily skip ahead and sneak in through another door.

On the approach to the church, I was accosted by some well-meaning devotees selling books and laminated prayer cards. The narthex (lobby?) featured an audio loop of a priest telling the story of St. Maria's extraordinary forgiveness. Inside the church, Knights of Columbus divided us into two efficient lines. Accosted again by devotees insisting that I take a last-minute prayer card, I offended them greatly by turning them down, all while also trying to ignore the very loud video presentation playing on the projection screens. Two Ladies of the Holy Sepulchre—their Knight husbands apparently taking a smoke break—stood elevated in the sanctuary overlooking the steady stream of pilgrims.

Maria herself was a small girl when she died. She was murdered during an attempted rape at the age of eleven by a twenty year-old man. Her hair is slightly lighter than it appears in most paintings and statues of her. Everything except her hair is covered while resting in the reliquary.

While praying in the pews after venerating the relics, I reflected on the content of the presentations which still bombarded everyone inside the church. Specifically, there was much ado about Maria's pious forgiveness of her rapist while she was dying, and no talk whatsoever about her refusal to submit to his impurity. What a change from the little girl's canonization ceremony, which concluded with P. Pius XII asking the crowds of youths, "Young people, pleasure of the eyes of Jesus, are you determined to resist any attack on your chastity with the help of grace of God?"

Resistance to evil is no longer in vogue; forgiveness—whatever that now means—certainly is. And if the recipient of that forgiveness is a pedophile rapist? What better way to herald in the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy?

Strange Churches: Pius XII Edition

The list of architecturally deficient Catholic parishes in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex seems inexhaustible. Just the other day, I thought, dear reader, that we must have seen at least every style of bad ecclesiastical architecture available somewhere in this area until I re-visited a church I last saw on Good Friday—St. Maria Goretti, which was hosting relics of the True Cross that morning.

St. Maria Goretti in Arlington is a strange artifact from that transitional pontificate of Eugenio Pacelli, an age in which everything looked stable and constant on the surface, but a violent storm brewed beneath Pius' Italian crust. I last saw a church approaching this style—merging traditional concepts with modernist and minimalist art and materials—at St. Bridget in Cheshire, CT, my original parish. It, too, was built during the Pacellian era and it too represents that transitional period.

Minimal lighting, indiscernible stained glass, and varnished wood are the choices in this eclectic contribution. The shape of the church is something between thatched hut and collapsing log cabin. 

Other than Stations of the Cross, the church has one place for private prayer. Even the kitsch plaster statues have been hidden atop the confessional boxes. When the faithful added chapels to the ancient Roman basilicas, they intentionally put them throughout the temples so that nothing would detract from the integrity of the sanctuary. In St. Maria Goretti, the sanctuary has an altar and all other manner of thingamajigs with only one concession to private prayer.

Perhaps there is additional lighting in the ceiling that was not illuminated, but through the natural glow of the sun, St. Maria's is gloomy.

St. Benedict? Infant of Prague? Franciscan crucifix? St. Maria Goretti? Whichever you please....

The church was built c.1952 for the old Mass. The sanctuary is alarmingly original and un-"Bugninized" from the 1960s because it was already quite bad. Other than the movement of the altar, I cannot definitively say anything in the sanctuary is new. The altar was clearly atop the footpace at first and has descended to become a "forward" altar for versus turbam Masses, but the back wall, Crucifix, carpeting, altar rail design, and the rest are all quite of the age.

There are three ambos. Why, pray tell? Are three different people really speaking during the Mass? I know!—they are for the deacons to sing the Passion during Holy Week!

A Ukrainian Catholic deacon I know one complained that the Roman Church seems to have no sense of joy. One enters the church and sees only a crucifix. This is actually a relatively new phenomenon, and an unhealthy one at that. The gigantic crucifixes that now dominate the eastern walls of Roman parishes result from brutalistic styling that minimalizes decoration and resorts to the crucifix as the one external sign of the Catholicity of the building. Previously, churches would present images of Christ ruling, the Virgin, the patron saint or mystery of the parish, or just a stylized wall.

Also interesting is the pseudo-canopy. The 1950s saw a very brief and half-hearted revival of the baldachin, a cover over the sanctuary that all the Roman and Eastern churches possessed in the first millennium. The open gothic style of the Latin middle ages and the creation of the iconostasis in the Greek church during the decadant Palaiologan dynasty meant that only the far Eastern churches retained the tradition when constructing new edifices, St. Peter's in Rome being a famous exception. The 1950s resurgence rarely resulted in a full baldachin, only strange sounding boards hanging from the ceiling, as at St. Bridget's.

A side altar for daily Masses. St. Joseph and Our Lady watch over the two additional altars, each flanking the sanctuary.

Alas, a traditional church in DFW!