How Awe-Filled Is This Place
Today Pope Benedict consecrated the church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Here is part of his homily:
What do we do when we dedicate this church? In the heart of the world, placed before God and mankind, with a humble and joyful act of faith, we raise up this massive material structure, fruit of nature and an immense achievement of human intelligence which gave birth to this work of art. It stands as a visible sign of the invisible God, to whose glory these spires rise like arrows pointing towards absolute light and to the One who is Light, Height and Beauty itself.
In this place, Gaudí desired to unify that inspiration which came to him from the three books which nourished him as a man, as a believer and as an architect: the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture and the book of the liturgy. In this way he brought together the reality of the world and the history of salvation, as recounted in the Bible and made present in the liturgy. He made stones, trees and human life part of the church so that all creation might come together in praise of God, but at the same time he brought the sacred images outside so as to place before people the mystery of God revealed in the birth, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this way, he brilliantly helped to build our human consciousness, anchored in the world yet open to God, enlightened and sanctified by Christ. In this he accomplished one of the most important tasks of our times: overcoming the division between human consciousness and Christian consciousness, between living in this temporal world and being open to eternal life, between the beauty of things and God as beauty. Antoni Gaudí did this not with words but with stones, lines, planes, and points. Indeed, beauty is one of mankind’s greatest needs; it is the root from which the branches of our peace and the fruits of our hope come forth. Beauty also reveals God because, like him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity; it calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness.
I’ve just seen Sandro Magister’s post in which he quotes from a book on La Sagrada Familia. Here is an excerpt:
just as the portal of the Nativity is joyous, exuberant, luminous, so Gaudí wanted the portal of the Passion to be “hard, bald, as if it were made of bone.”
Executed and carved after his death on the basis of his drawings, but also with audacious innovations, the facade of the Passion embodies the vision in which Ezekiel discovers a plain filled with bones that the breath of the Spirit covers with tendons and flesh. To the exiled people, the prophet proclaims: “I will raise you up from your graves. I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live again.” In fact, the entire Passion concludes at the moment in which Jesus on the cross exhales the Spirit.
At the center of the facade, on top, stands the group of the crucifixion. Christ is naked, as Adam was, because he is the new Adam who on the cross recreates man as he was before sin, on the sixth day of the creation ancient and new, when he can finally say: “It is finished.”
Christ’s body is not resting on the cross, which does not stand vertically behind him. It juts out horizontally from the wall, and is made up of two iron beams. Christ is hanging there as from the hoist of a construction site. Subirachs, the author of the sculpture, took his inspiration from Saint Ignatius of Antioch: “You are stones of the temple prepared for construction by God the Father, raised with the hoist of Jesus Christ which is the cross, using as rope the Holy Spirit” (Letter to the Ephesians 9:1).
The rest is here.
Here are dozens of photos of the cathedral, mainly of the outside from every which way angle.
Amazing! And very Catholic — full of all sorts of things :-)!
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=sagrada+familia+photographs&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=69vWTIu2DcT7lwe33Yn-CA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQsAQwAA&biw=987&bih=545
It would be interesting to have a theologian compare the theology of this 20th century cathedral with, say, Chartres. What strikes me about it are all the small spires, and there are many more to come. This is very unlike the medieval ones which had a few, as if only a few saints were actually on their way to Heaven, Gaudi seems to be saying that lots of us are trying hard. Or maybe he just saw that today there are lots more people
I’ve seen few photos of stained glass. Does that mean that the medievals had a confident, light-filled understanding of the faith, while we are in sore need of theological light? I wonder also if the great Crucifix of the west portico was done before or after the Holocaust was made public. Looks like after it to me, or maybe Gaudi was just prescient.
In the next thread Bernard Dauenhauer points out that the Spanish Civil War was a terrible event. Maybe that’s what inspired Gaudi’s great Crucifix.
Ann,
I just added to the post an excerpt from Sandro Magister’s blog. He quotes from a book on the church that reflects on the symbols and the spirit of La Sagrada Familia.
Father Imbelli, it seems to me that Pope Benedict attempts at re-evangelization of Europe would be better served by homilies more like the above at the church dedication, than with the relentlessly negative denunciations of modernity he insists on repeating and repeating ad nauseum. We have our hands over our ears.
Many thanks, Ann, for your always-thoughtful posts. However, regarding the Civil War inspiring Gaudi’s crucifix: Gaudi was struck by a tram on Route 30 Gaudi about ten years before Franco launched the terrible conflict. He died June 10, 1926.
“We have our hands over our ears.”
That’s why He needs to shout, sometimes.
Thanks, Joe McM. I guess he was just prescient.
Mr. Holloway –
What sorts of messages do you think the Faithful need these days, at least in the West? Do you think that the prosperity preachers sort of sermons would help? Or what — better understanding of the basic teachings? I think he’s great about the most basic — charity, faith, hope. Or are those topics not relevant these days?
I’d like to hear from others as well as you..
I’m no art critic, but when I visited it this past summer,my impression of the Sagrada Famalia as a place of worship is that it is an extravaganza, in that respect reminiscent of Sacre Coeur in Paris. In other words, a “wonder of the world” rather than a place of worship.
Great cathedrals of the world are one thing. Sagrada Familia strikes me as something else. Quite what else I don’t know.
At the risk of cross-pollination at dotCommonweal from another blog, Austen Ivereigh, the European correspondent for America magazine, has been filing a number of dispatches about the Pope’s visit to Spain at America’s “In All Things” blog. I found all of his reports fascinating, especially the one about today’s consecration of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral (now a basilica). He gives his take on the significance of Gaudi’s vision.
An excerpt:
“[T]the Sagrada Familia is unsettling because, as well as seeming to be upside down, it is also inside out: the outside is within, and what is interior made external. It is, in this way, a prophetic space — one that foresaw the breaking down of the barriers between Church and world, God and man, which is at the heart of the Gospel.”
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/blog.cfm?blog_id=2
William,
thank you! I had missed the posts by Austen Ivereigh. They are splendid … and on the spot, with a couple of vivid photos. Here’s a line that particularly intrigued me. He describes the Basilica as “the most ambitious attempt since Dante at distilling the whole of Catholic teaching in a single work of art.”
Ann, that is Ms. Holloway. Winifred. For reasons not known to me, only my surname appears in these posts. I think Catholics will respond to a positive message of faith, hope and charity, the hallmarks of our tradition. Scolding remarks are not listened to. Does anyone in the Vatican have a basic understanding of Pysch 101? People want to be inspired, lifted up. Tired, boilerplate criticisims of secularism are off the point. We all want to be for something, not against. Especially not against things we cannot change. Modernity is here (thank God) and that is the world we live in. There is much to criticize in our world, but blanket denunciations are unintelligent and show a clear misunderstanding of the challenges that people face in our day to day lives. The pontificating from on high is infuriating and for those of us cradle Catholics, dispiriting b/c it shows, I think, that we gave popes and hierarchs way too much credit for their understanding of reality. In any case, a good place to start on re-evangelization is to do more and more talking about the beauty of our tradition, trinitarian beliefs, hope, love of God and neighbor and the power of sacramental life.
Thank you, Winifred Holloway. In some ways, it is a commonplace: people must be saved where they are. Yes, the hard truths of the Gospel must ever be proclaimed, but at the same time the world we live in (do we have a choice?) is not without its goodness and beauty. On the sixth day, God looked out on all that he had made and saw that it was good, indeed, very, very good. The perennial truths of the Faith must be preached TODAY (hodie) with a reverence and respect for the past, but not a fixation on it. Much of Benedict’s preaching is challenging and uplifting. But much seems to come from some ideal world that may have once existed, but is now far spent.
Handwringing and lament will only further alienate the already unconvinced.
If I sense this, with all my theological and personal limitations, what of those forty and fifty years younger than I?
I wish for the Pope a long life. But I truly hope that he has the wisdom to retire at eighty-five, 16 April 2012. For his sake and the sake of the Church worldwide.
The strength of Sagrada Familia is as a place of worship and praise. Gaudi was prayerful, inspired. A tremendous amount of thought and labor went into the building, and more will be expended. As a secondary thought, I would be interested in learning who has paid for the construction in its stages, past, present, and future. About ten years ago, I recall reading that Japanese gave magnificent amounts of financial support.
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I was one of those tourists who climbed around some of its towers twenty years ago. We were delighted also with Gaudi’s flights of fancy and imagination around Barcelona.
Winifred Holloway:
“In any case, a good place to start on re-evangelization is to do more and more talking about the beauty of our tradition, trinitarian beliefs, hope, love of God and neighbor and the power of sacramental life.”
I can’t think of anyone who is doing this better or more consistently than Benedict XVI — his homilies are masterpieces of the genre, and I’m sure they will be read 100 years from now. Reading Benedict is like reading one of the Fathers, or Newman — there is a bold confidence in Jesus, in the Scriptures and in the Tradition. There’s a profound love for and knowledge of the Church’s liturgy and artistic heritage. But, above all, what comes through so clearly time and again is a deep, personal friendship with Jesus that is a source of joy for the Pope. That joy permeates his preaching.
I wonder how many people rely on the analysis of journalists (at Commonweal or elsewhere) when approaching Pope Benedict rather than digging into his own writings.
Ms. Holloway –
Yes, the Pope is a scold, and yes, we want and need inspiration. But even if the whole world doesn’t need to be scolded, parts of it do, and I suspect parts of all of us do. The question is how to do it. I agree that that is where the Pope and his assistants fall down.
It seems to me that short sermons intended for the whole world or for just all the faithful are not the place for criticisms. Inspiration is more the order of the day. There is no time for the close analysis that such crititisms usually require to be effective. Maybe encyclicals are the place, but even they are short, I think, for some of his positions on moral issues to be made persuasive. Should the popes, then, write whole books about difficult topics? I say Why not, if that’s what it takes to be persuasive.
I dunno.
Richard Smith –
I agree that many of Benedict’s short sermons and talks are fine, even inspiring. And his very positive encyclicals on faith and hope, for instance, are also first-rate. The problem as I see it are his negative views. He is not usually persuasive, and I think that is because he does not martial his evidence, then analyse the issue, then show us his reasoning process. So he is not persuasive.
Would I that this pope, instead of being a pope, was a theologian, writer, preacher, and future father of the church! Instead, he’s been given executive, political, judicial and administrative power. He has the wrong skills for this time of crisis.
Here’s a paragraph close to the end of this homily: “Life has changed greatly and with it enormous progress has been made in the technical, social and cultural spheres. We cannot simply remain content with these advances. Alongside them, there also need to be moral advances, such as in care, protection and assistance to families, inasmuch as the generous and indissoluble love of a man and a woman is the effective context and foundation of human life in its gestation, birth, growth and natural end. Only where love and faithfulness are present can true freedom come to birth and endure. For this reason the Church advocates adequate economic and social means so that women may find in the home and at work their full development, that men and women who contract marriage and form a family receive decisive support from the state, that life of children may be defended as sacred and inviolable from the moment of their conception, that the reality of birth be given due respect and receive juridical, social and legislative support. For this reason the Church resists every form of denial of human life and gives its support to everything that would promote the natural order in the sphere of the institution of the family.”
Just for the record, the Sagrada Família, which is repeatedly referred to above as a “cathedral,” emphatically is not that. It has always been designated as an “Expiatory Temple” until now when the Pope has added the title Basilica to it.
Barcelona very much has an ancient and important cathedral that has seen much history — including the first baptisms of natives of the New World, when the Catholic Monarchs met up with Columbus upon the return from his first voyage.
And here’s a fun fact that even Gaudí’s wonderful church cannot surpass in quirkiness:
http://quezi.com/12289