Bare Churches, Cold Hearts

Excerpted with permission from

Last week, at our Altar-Rosary Society meeting, I made a heartfelt request that we have vigil candles in church for people to light. Olga, a member who grew up in an Eastern Catholic church, agreed with me, but our request fell flat. The pastor cited the danger of fire, the cost of insurance, and the certainty of theft. I replied that as a rich parish, we could afford to offer candles for free. And if we absolutely couldn't have real flames and smoke, electric candles would be better than nothing.

The pastor voiced surprise that I felt so strongly about keeping up this traditional Catholic devotion. My reasons are simple. Like a lot of other post-Vatican II folks in the pews, I miss something in our spare

churches. They often feel downright chilly. Too often, the Catholic tradition's witness to material sacramentality seems faint. Warmth, mystery, and transcendence aren't present. If this is a problem without a name, it's also one I don't know how to fix. A simple-minded imitation of the past won't do.

I could not join Camille Paglia's riff praising her childhood parish church with its statue of Saint Lucy offering her eyeballs on a plate. Nor would I want to import the mural I saw in a Spanish chapel that shows a female martyr's chopped-off breasts flying away in the air. Certain Mexican crucifixes come with far too much blood and gore. These, like the display of Saint Catherine of Siena's severed head, err in too grisly a direction. At the opposite extreme, we encounter excessive sentimentality. While worshiping in a small wooden summer chapel at Lake George, N. Y., I counted 14 images of Mary and her baby. I admired the excess and the feminine ambience, but the dreadful quality of the mass-produced art spoiled the effect. Even the monumental Marian shrine in Washington, D.C., replete with a plethora of elegant Byzantine images, feels cold and inauthentic to me.

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