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  • American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975 by Catherine R. Osborne
  • Gretchen T. Buggeln (bio)
Catherine R. Osborne
American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018
xii + 297 pages, 68 halftone illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-226-56102-8, $45.00 HB

In the spring of 1963, the artist and critic Maurice Lavanoux, a founder of the Catholic Liturgical Arts Society (1928–1972) and long-time editor of the society’s journal Liturgical Arts, visited the Princeton School of Architecture in order to comment on the most recent student theses. One project, designed by William Sims, consisted of plans for a lunar colony, notably including a chapel. Fascinated and energized by this futuristic idea, Lavanoux collaborated with architect Mark Mills to produce detailed drawings of a proposed “Chapel on the Moon, 2000 AD” for a special issue of his journal that appeared four years later. Mills’ inverted-funnel-shaped chapel, set into a visual scheme for an entire underground lunar colony drawn by science fiction artist Roy Scarfo, consisted of translucent plastic film stretched over ascending cables, enclosing a central, circular worship space surrounded by a ring of residential and study spaces and a subterranean garden. How could such a wonder appear, with earnest excitement and apparently not a whiff of incredulity, in the pages of an internationally respected journal of the American Catholic literati?

In American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow, Catherine Osborne explains the optimism (both social and theological), scientific futurism, and material experimentation that lay behind the lunar chapel and other similar ideas and forms generated by progressive twentieth-century “Catholic modernists.” The book’s architectural examples include parish churches, Catholic student centers, and notable Benedictine abbeys, but also lunar and submarine chapels—design ideas that existed only as improbable drawings or models. In this fascinating, interdisciplinary history, the author convincingly situates these places and designs amid two interweaving intellectual currents: a scientific, evolutionary worldview (largely progressive and optimistic) and a 1960s Catholic version of “secular theology” (a rejection of distinctions between sacred and profane). These ideas enabled Catholic modernists to make the case that, in an evolutionary sense, science proved that new times would naturally birth new forms and materials, and, furthermore, that no corner of the modern, material world was beyond redemption.

Lavanoux, one of Osborne’s main characters, was a curious, well-read, devout Catholic seeking a place for art and architecture in the new world order. Like other progressive religious leaders with an interest in the arts, he challenged Catholics to engage the contemporary world, vigorously arguing that traditional architecture and liturgy could not speak effectively to the present day. Readers will associate modern Catholic architecture with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). But even decades before Vatican II, Catholics were already applying radical ideas to liturgy and worship space. As Osborne notes, in the preconciliar decades, the arts were an area less monitored by the church’s hierarchy and served as a space for experimentation. Some Catholic architects, such as Barry Byrne, were already moving toward modernism in the 1920s (see Byrne’s St. Thomas the Apostle, Chicago, 1928, and Christ the King, Tulsa, 1926). The Council thus accelerated and authorized trends in architecture and liturgy already underway. The heart of Osborne’s book, however, is not the story of these pioneers, but developments from the late 1950s into the early 1970s, when the American Catholic landscape changed significantly. Like her doctoral advisor James T. Fisher (author of The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962), Osborne is especially interested in the Catholic Left, and her narrative comes alive when chronicling the divergent thought of radicals.

The book contains six thematic chapters. In chapter 1, “The Biological Paradigm,” Osborne presents one of the central claims of her book: popular, scientific thinking about biology and evolution shaped the way Catholics were thinking about the human-constructed world. Time and again, Osborne notices the language of “biocentrism” in her sources. She writes, “These men and women came to see the principles of change, development, and adaptation—in short, of evolution—at...

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