9 comments

  1. Hm… well, I don’t think you’d be completely satisfied with Arlington then, as I would definitely not say there are “lots of pretty churches” here. (Go to http://www.arlingtondiocese.org, find the parishes list and click all the website links for samples…)
    Don’t know about that diocese in Nebraska when it comes to church appearances. What are some other relatively good dioceses supposed to be — Denver? Philadelphia maybe?

  2. Actually, I grew up in Brooklyn where the churches tended to be pretty, but I got the sense that very few people actually believed Catholicism as taught by the Church. So I tend to think that some of the prettiest churches will be in dioceses that are just plain old, in cities where the people may not have the most vibrant faith but the diocese didn’t shell out for major “wreckovation” to 50 or 100 old parishes in the 70s.
    We used to go to a pretty (in the dark-wood, colorful statues, not-understated sort of way) church in DC, the building must have been about 100 years old, and they do both the current and the Tridentine Mass in Latin as well as the current Mass in English, and the priest was in the old-fashioned confessional right before the 7:30 p.m. lazy people’s Sunday Mass… and the church where my husband was confirmed was a pretty church in DC that seemed to have “vibrant” orthodox types in its clergy/staff/congregation. But I still prefer Arlington with its spaceship style 70s and 80s architecture 🙂

  5. I agree with Davey’s mommy — I think the ugly “spaceship” churches tend to reflect the fads of the 60’s through ’80’s — that and the population boom in the suburbs — they just slapped the churches on up and tended to concentrate on the schools. There are some pretty awful-looking specimens here in ADW that were built under the supervision of faithful Cardinal O’Boyle.
    Now that the “Church Moderne” fad is over and some of the parishes have come into some money, they are renovating their churches and installing more ornamentation, art, stained glass, etc.
    Some of the ghastliest liturgical messes I have ever seen have been in lovely old church buildings.
    Smock — if I had stayed in San Antonio I am 99.9% sure that I would have started going to Our Lady of the Atonement.

  7. You could always send up a novena to a former bishop of Rochester (NY) who needs a couple of miracles to be declared a saint. He was a terrible administrator during his life — a friend knows priests who loved him and couldn’t wait for him to be replaced — but from heaven I’m sure that Bishop Fulton Sheen would be glad to take on the reformation of the New York dioceses as his first miracle.

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