The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, and the Eternal by Duncan G. Stroik (review)

285 Book Reviews The book has a few drawbacks. Endnotes are used, which makes finding a note difficult at times. Also, it can be somewhat difficult to flip through and find a specific text or liturgy. Perhaps, as is often done with biblical commentaries, titles at the top of the page could tell us which liturgy is being discussed on that page. This would make finding a particular text much easier. Still, the book is well-researched, the notes thorough, the index complete, the commentary fascinating, and the author generally refrains from ideological editorializing—all of which makes for a useful and interesting book. Jacob Runyon Pastor, St. Jude’s Parish Fort Wayne, Indiana Duncan G. Stroik The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, and the Eternal Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2012 182 pages. Hardcover. $75.00. This collection of essays by Duncan Stroik is a monument to the vitality of sacred architecture today. Few other areas of the Church’s life were as affected by the ideological storms of the twentieth century as the building of churches. The combination of theological anxiety, liturgical confusion, and architectural modernism led to forms of churches that fail to serve the function (to use a cherished term) of the building in a profound and meaningful sense. Few architects have had the courage to stand against the tide, and they have had to battle with fierce opposition. More recently, however, rise of the new classical movement has also brought about a renewal in church building that is nothing short of astonishing. Duncan Stroik is distinguished not only by the number of significant churches he designed—such as the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, or the Chapel of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California—but also, as a Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture , by his academic reflections on the subject, which engage with the rich and varied history of church building. This volume contains twenty-three contributions that were published in various journals and magazines, along with more than 286 Antiphon 17.3 (2013) 170 photographs. It is the strength of the book that church design is approached from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. On the one hand, general principles of sacred architecture are presented, such as the verticality and directionality of the building , the role of thresholds towards the sacred, above all the façade, and the indispensable place of figurative art. Stroik elaborates on what Benedict XVI defined as “the purpose of sacred architecture” in his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 41, namely “to offer the Church a fitting space for the celebration of the mysteries of faith, especially the Eucharist. The very nature of a Christian church is defined by the liturgy.” On the other hand, the author has very concrete and useful advice to offer on the building and renovating of churches, including such aspects as how to determinate the budget. Today a project of this kind requires considerable resources, and hence a renewal of sacred architecture depends as much on courageous patrons as on enlightened architects. Such a renewal is not linked to one particular style. It would be misleading to think that only a stark and simple style, or only an ornate and exuberant one, is capable of expressing the sacred. However, an architecture that is not ready to be formed by the Church’s liturgy does not work as a church building, as the historical styles of Christianity do. It is this reviewer’s conviction that the recovery of these styles, as proposed, with different nuances, by Thomas Gordon Smith, Duncan Stroik, James McCrery, Steven Schloeder, Ethan Anthony and others, is our best option today. We should not be afraid of imitation, because in this process something new is created, as the historical periods of the Renaissance or of Classicism show us. Looking at what has been achieved in this field in North America, I can only express my hope that a similar movement will gain ground on this side of the Atlantic, where the Hegelian mentality of progress still has a stronghold on the world of art...