IN THIS excellent 2009 piece, “The Cult of Ugliness in America,” Fr. Anthony J. Brankin correctly locates the real source of the hideousness of modern architecture and American life in general. The problem is spiritual. He writes:

[T]he cult of ugliness is so pervasive, so all around us, in every nook and cranny of our lives, that we stand the risk at every moment of missing it, of no longer being able to see it or even be repelled by it.

He laments the extreme ugliness, not just of strip malls and contemporary clothes, but of church architecture. He writes:

Look at some of our newest churches and cathedrals. Many of them are stunning and awesome — no, not for their homage to tradition and the Catholic sense of beauty. They are stunning and awesome in their utter inhumanity, their complete lack of scale, their thorough and total sterility, and their horrifying proportions. There is not an angle that could please nor an arch that could comfort. Not a piece of molding that could hold us in its shadow. Not even a little statue before which we could light a slender taper. Like the gaping mouth of the pagan, child-sacrificing furnaces of Moloch, some of our new churches will consume their people in holocausts of visual horror.  

It would be better to pray in catacombs than in these inhuman structures.

                                                                — Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

I recall a few years ago seeing photos of the interior of the “Taj Mahoney,” .ie., the new Los Angeles district cathedral Our Lady of the Angels (of which your attached, very good, article shows one photo of Our Lady.) I looked at the interior and my eyes, at least, saw:

* an altar that looks like a platform for sacrifices or perhaps a morgue slab; 

* two windows or light panels that look like the two eyes of an evil entity. 

* a chute-type structure right underneath, maybe where young, bound sacrificial children come rolling out, not unlike a bowling alley ball-return system.

I had to look through many photos, over and over, to make sure I wasn’t imagining these things, but they are indeed there. As to the exterior, there are no words.

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