Does zeal for the Lord’s house consume us today?

The Gospel for the Third Sunday of Lent this year (unless your parish is using the “scrutiny readings”) is John’s account of Christ cleansing the Temple (Jn 2:13-25).  Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the Passover, entered the Temple, witnessed the rank commercialism within its courts, fashioned a whip, and drove the sellers and moneychangers from the courtyard, to the consternation of the Temple authorities (who got a cut on the profits). Witnessing Our Lord’s sign, His disciples “recalled the words of Scripture,” i.e., Psalm 69:9 (which prefigures the Passion), “zeal for your house consumes me.”

Is it fair to ask whether zeal for the Lord’s house consumes us today? In time or in space?

We’ll start with time, since Pope Francis maintains its priority over space.

The Third Commandment, which was read as part of Sunday’s First Reading, speaks of “keeping holy the Lord’s Day.” It apportions time: “six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord.” Keeping holy the Lord’s day, for Jews and Christians, meant a day of rest that was ordered to divine worship, since the company of the Lord is not labor but joy. (If you don’t think that, what do you plan on doing for eternity?)

In the Catholic tradition, that rest was ordered to worship which translated into the dominical precept, the obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and holydays.

Do we see Catholic zeal to participate in Mass?

To the credit of Catholics in the United States, their Mass attendance numbers still exceed their European counterparts. But the pandemic reduced them and those numbers have not recovered to pre-COVID levels.

Even when it comes to Sunday Mass, however, how often does that lack of zeal manifest itself in lateness for Mass?

A Polish priest, writing in the national Catholic newspaper Niedziela, put it this way. If you were invited to meet the President or the Pope and the invitation said to be in such-and-such a place by 9:45 a.m. for an 11:00 a.m. appointment, wouldn’t you? Would you say, “when I get there, I get there?” Would you be so cavalier as to imagine he should wait on you?

And yet that is what the tardy Mass attendee is communicating. Although every part of the Mass is intended by the Lord to speak to him, the late Mass-goer decides what parts he is free to ignore and skip.

I am invited to meet the Living God and to talk with Him. As that priest noted, wouldn’t I otherwise want to prepare what I say? Wouldn’t I take time to put myself in the “spirit” of the event? Why, then, am I content to beat the celebrant up the aisle by 30 seconds?

I enter the house of God. Does my demeanor indicate that? On the basis of my comportment, would somebody see anything different from how I arrive in a movie theater or play and select my seats?

There are even parishes that abet this lack of reverence. There is the ideological parish whose “welcoming” is taken to mean everybody should have vibrant conversations prior to “gathering for Eucharist.” There is the parish where the organist feels a need to rehearse the choir in church. (What concert have you attended where the conductor “runs through” some pieces before the “real thing?”) There is the parish where lay minister or even priest feels a need for fidgeting around the altar. Yes, the celebrant must ensure that what’s necessary is there: chalice with host, water, and wine as well as proper accompaniments, sacramentary and lectionary, etc. But does it really matter if the sacramentary is on a 50◦ degree angle to your reading eye rather than a 45◦ one?

One can, of course, observe the problems in reverse at the end of Mass: the “just-on-time” arrival who preceded the celebrant’s entrance by half a minute often demonstrates a reverse capacity to beat the celebrant’s exit by an equal amount of time.

These are all questions of zeal for the House of God in time. But there are also problems in space.

Zeal for the House of God is supported by the appearance of the House of God that says, “here dwells the Living God!” That is, after all, what a church with a tabernacle should be saying.

Even when Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple, the pericope is introduced by the wonder of disciples as to its beauty. “Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with votive offerings to God” (Lk 21:5). Could that line be repeated in front of a modern church that looks like a decommissioned Pizza Hut franchise?

We have been building churches for decades that do not communicate the message: “this is the House of God and the gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17). Ecclesial architecture has imitated the worst of the secular mean, either trying deliberately to be “innovative” and “push the envelope” or—in a sense a worse choice—“functional.”

Alexandre Cingria, a Swiss artist of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote in his La décadence de l’art sacrée, that when churches are made “ugly,” for whatever ideological or utilitarian reason, that is the work of the Devil. The Devil abhors beauty which has the power to lift the mind to God: there’s a reason why modern theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar focused on beauty alongside truth and good. When something is rendered not beautiful—whether deliberately ugly or boringly banal—it alienates the viewer from it and thus from reaching further for God. Satan can only approve.

I’ll share a personal anecdote. When we moved to Bern, Switzerland in 2008, we went to our first Sunday Mass in the parish where the Dominicans from Fribourg hosted the English-speaking apostolate. It was essentially a hall with some colored windows and a few pieces of random metal hanging around in varied hues, along with the essential church architecture. It was written up as recognized by Swiss architects. But my then eight-year old sat through Mass looking around and, at the end, asked me, “Daddy, I thought you said this was a very rich country! So why does this church look like this?” Ex ore infantium ….

Happily, the architecturally “innovative” seems to have been abandoned by many parishes, but—as I noted—perhaps a worse tendency persists. I’ll call it “functionalism” or “utilitarianism,” because it wants to make church space “multi-functional.” In practice, that’s meant that a basic auditorium has been outfitted temporarily with moveable ecclesial furniture that can be rolled away when another “function” is needed.

But what does that say? If this is the “house of God,” of Him who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8), then why does His House not share in those same characteristics? How do we expect to reinforce belief in God’s unchanging oneness where the place we claim to encounter Him bespeaks the transitoriness of discount and replaceable IKEA furniture?

The converse of that lack of a feel of “permanence” has impact on our sense of the holiness of a place. “Holiness” as an attribute is permanent, abiding. What has been raised to the service of the holy should not suffer subsequent downgrade.

But the “multifunctional” approach to church buildings does exactly that. It suggests that while the church is “holy” on Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., its holiness subsequently is up for grabs. Need a concert hall with good acoustics Sunday afternoon for the local orchestra? Just roll away the altar! How about a venue for the Christmas choir? Nothing says “Noël” (or sells tickets) like cassocks, robes, and choir benches! Just make sure you wrap it up by 7 p.m. for the Sunday evening Mass, when we can make it “holy” again.

Now, of course, there are those who would insist there is nothing “unholy” about these activities. True: it’s not as if you were turning the church into a fundraising disco party, complete with cash bar! (Those planning such events, please contact Canterbury Cathedral). But if everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. The human mind requires contrast, and total sacralization of reality is an eschatological, not temporal feature.

Rather, however, I share the sentiments contained in a commentary by the Italian website, La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana. Writing about a Caritas event last year at an Italian cathedral, where the church was turned into a dining hall for a Saturday event, LNBQ commented: there was no lack of secular dining venues in town. Siting the event in the cathedral was not the consequence of having no other place to go. It was a deliberate, ideological statement. And that statement was the evanescent sense of sacrality: today, the smell of pasta and bolognaise sauce wafting through the nave, tomorrow, pungent frankincense!

Olfactory dissonance leads to cognitive dissonance.

Holiness, when it comes to places consecrated to the Lord, is not something “here today, gone tomorrow.” It is not a fleeting “functionality” that adds aroma or ambience to a setting: it is the very lifeblood of the setting. There is a reason people viscerally sense something different about a church that has served as a house of prayer for generations: it exudes an atmosphere, a certain je ne sais quoi (because holiness, in the end, surpasses our understanding).

The “multifunctional” church collides with that reality.

Nor is it just about the temporary substitution of “secular” for “sacred” in sacral space. The problem finds expression in the mania of some American bishops to “downsize” the Church in the United States by closing churches. Yes, the canonists will say a closed church has been “deconsecrated.” But, no matter how many decrees bishops with visions of liege lords dancing in their heads issue, most of those buildings still say—if not scream—“church!”

Last year, the New York Times featured an article about a “decommissioned” St. Louis Church, St. Liborius, “the largest Gothic revival church west of the Mississippi.” The church had been turned by community activists into a roller rink, “Sk8te Liborius,” a play on the name. Former churches have been turned into all manner of secular enterprise by entrepreneurs who need large spaces and especially those “edgy” enough to make a buck on their re-designs. What’s worse, some of those churches have been repurposed by other denominations or even religions for their cult, as if what was once a Catholic Church is simply a “worship space” (an execrable term used by some liturgists). But everybody knows: they’re churches, even if they’ve been turned into churches in drag.

When Catholics protest their bishop’s plans to close churches, it’s not just some misguided hankering of “sentimentality.” Those same bishops who are quick to claim a sensus fidelium among doctrinal and moral dissidents refuse to acknowledge that the faithful stripped of their church by canonical fiat are also expressing a sensus fidelium that was once the House of God is always the House of God, that holiness is not a temporary quality that can be removed at will or decree.

I recognize some will say, “but we cannot keep ‘useless’ churches forever!” Well, why not? This property is tax-exempt. It was usually paid for long ago. As communities change, the Church’s presence in that community may also change. Perhaps the church is not “needed” as a church (though that is always to me a debatable proposition). But is the Church needed in that place in some other form? As a Catholic school? A social care institution? A low-to-middle income housing site?

I wrote last year about a project in South Bend to use the multi-block “church plants” of two adjacent parishes to provide an inner-city Catholic school along with affordable housing for teachers and married Notre Dame students. That capitalizes on ecclesiastical property that still makes the Church present there, reaching to those “peripheries” using tax-advantaged property. And if you are going to be doing all those “Catholic things” on that property, methinks you probably need at least a chapel somewhere (and you’ve got two churches).

So, why are we not doing this instead of selling off property, collecting cash, and probably paying it out for other kinds of “settlements?” “Settlements” occasioned by other scandals occurring in the House of God?

The Apostles marveled that “zeal for Your House” consumed Jesus. That zeal was not just for Jesus’s consumption, it should consume His followers. Because one must ask today—Luke 18:8, revised—“when the Son of Man comes, will He find zeal on the earth?” Or at least in the House of God that is His Church?

Catholic World Report