Fota II Summary Report Press Release

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St. Colmans Society for Catholic Liturgy

Second Fota International Liturgy Conference

Fota, Co. Cork (Ireland)

12-13 July 2009

SUMMARY REPORT

The Second Fota International Liturgy Conference was held in Fota, Co. Cork, from 12

13 July 2009 on the topic: Benedict XVI on Church Art and Architecture. It wasorganized by the St Colmans Society for Catholic Liturgy. His Eminence, George

Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney gave the keynote address.

In his introduction, Prof. D. Vincent Twomey, SVD (Maynooth, Ireland), who chaired

conference, decried the iconoclasm that wrought havoc on so many church buildings in

the name of the conciliar reform of the liturgy and suggested a number of theologicalcauses. He pointed to the difference between treating beauty as something peripheral, a

matter of taste or a decoration, and (following Ratzinger) seeing beauty as being as

integral to liturgy as truth and goodness are. The utilitarianism of the age favours theformer, as was manifest in the reform. Benedict XVI, on the other hand, is acutely aware

of the necessity for reason to combine with aesthetic and intuitive sensibility, both in

liturgy and art. Twomey also pointed to the profound theological implications of the

reordering of the liturgical space in the wake of the recent liturgical reforms, something

that few adverted to at the time. To quote the English philosopher, Roger Scruton:Changes in the liturgy take on a momentous significance for the believer, for they are

changes in his experience of God Once such change was the removal of thetabernacle from its former position on the altar to a side-altar. The theory of Francis

Rowland, mentioned by Twomey, that the post-conciliar liturgical reforms, with their

stress on reducing everything to the essentials, were inspired a kind of neo-Scholasticismthat was a historical and a cultural was hotly disputed later in the discussion.

All the papers were inspired by Pope Benedict XVIs aesthetics, i.e. his understanding of

the nature of beauty. This was the topic of the opening paper by Monsignor JosephMurphy (Rome) and the keynote address by Cardinal Pell. Mons. Murphys paper was

entitled: The Fairest and the Formless: The Face of Christ as Criterion for ChristianBeauty according to Joseph Ratzinger. For the Pope, the most persuasive proof of thetruth of the Christian message, offsetting everything that may appear negative, are the

saints on the one hand, and the beauty that the faith has generated, on the other. Hence,

for faith to grow today, we must lead ourselves and the persons wemeet to encounter thesaints and to come in contact with the beautiful. After outlining the patristic debate with

regard to how Jesus Christ could be said to be beautiful, Murphy describes the way

beauty wounds the soul and so awakens man to his higher destiny. The beauty of truth


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appears in Christ, the beauty of God himself, who powerfully draws us and inflicts on usthe wound of Love, as it were, a holy Eros that enables us to go forth, with and in the

Church, his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us. His beauty is the manifestation of his

love, a love poured out for others. Finally, addressing one of Ratzingers favouritethemes, seeking the face of God, itself one of the primordial themes of Scripture, Murphy

points out how seeing Christ is only possible to those who follow Him. As in much else,here Ratzinger takes his inspiration from the Fathers of the Church.

Cardinal Pell, in his paper entitled: Benedict XVI on Beauty: Issues in the Tradition of

Christian Aesthetics took up several of the themes mentioned by Murphy and developedthem. He stress that, for Ratzinger, the truth of love can transform the ugliness of the

world manifested in its extreme on the Cross into the beauty of the

Resurrection. According to Plato beauty is profoundly realistic: it wounds man and so

makes him desire the Transcendent. Thus beauty causes a painful longing of the humanheart for God. By way of contrast, falsehood suggests that reality is ugly and so promotes

either a cult of the ugly or the craving for transient pleasure to escape from the ugliness.

Addressing the question of the interaction of the Gospel and culture, Ratzinger arguesthat the Logos purifies and heals all cultures and so enables them to achieve their full

potential as culture. Though the Hebrew and Greek cultures retain their unique

significance for the faith as the linguistic vehicles of Salvation History the Gospelitself transcends all cultures. Pell also examined Ratzingers theology of music. One of

the points he makes is that music is the place where the clash between good and evil is

played out at a certain level of society. Ratzinger rejects pop-music, the music equivalent

of kitsch, because through it the soul is swallowed up in the senses. Finally, Pell pointedout that, for Ratzinger, there must be a proper understanding of Church, of liturgy, and of

music. The Church is not simply the local community but is always Catholic, that is, the

whole Church universal, including the cosmic dimension of salvation. Liturgy must beunderstood as the work of God, not some human fabrication or action. Each rite,

therefore, is an objective form of the Churchs worship. And when the languages of

Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic are put to music, they should evoke awe andreceptivity for what is beyond sense. Sacred music should be a synthesis of sense,

sensibility and sound. Finally, Cardinal Pell stressed that simple, orthodox faith remains

the single most important factor in the celebration of the liturgy.

The philosophical implications of the above understanding of beauty were the subject of

Fr Daniel Gallagher (Rome) paper: The Liturgical Consequences of Thomistic

Aesthetics: exploring some philosophical aspects of Joseph Ratzingers Aesthetics.Gallagher formulated the basic question as follows: what has reason to do with beauty.

This led to a discussion of Thomistic aesthetics (is beauty for Thomas a transcendental?)

and the subsequent theory of Emmanuel Kant. For Thomas, beauty, though originating insubjective experience, is a form of objective knowledge. Kant sets out to find what he

considered to be objective criteria to determine the validity of the subjective experience

of beauty. The basic question was resolved with the help of Jacques Maritain (in theThomist tradition) and in opposition to Umberto Eco (in the Kantian tradition). Maritain

seamlessly connects aesthetic beauty to transcendental beauty, whereas Eco despairs of

finding a passage from transcendental beauty to aesthetic beauty. Gallagher drew out


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some of the implications of this for liturgy: Beauty is not instrumental, but the very wayof experiencing the Triune God in the liturgy. Thus beauty engages the intellect such that

Gods Word and life are apprehended in a way that transcends the imparting of

information. Most importantly, if beauty is most especially related to the good, then thebeauty of the liturgy is directly connected with moral life and thus concerned with

culture as the context for the promotion of virtue. This paper provoked perhaps the mostlively discussion of all the papers.

Dr Janet Rutherford (Castelpollard, Co. Westmeath, Ireland) in her paper, Eastern

Iconoclasm and the Defence of Divine Beauty outlined the turbulent politicalbackground to, and profound theological issues at stake in, the first major iconoclastic

controversy in the Church, which culminated in the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the

Second Council of Nicaea (AD 787). At stake was nothing less than the unity of divine-

human nature of Christ as defended above all by St Maximus the Confessor. For thelatter, the icon was not a sign of absent realities; the realities themselves were made

present to the beholder of the icon. The icons are thus for the believer windows onto

eternity. For the East, Second Nicaea is the orthodox Council par excellence, anindication not only of their appreciation for the teaching of the Council but also of the

centrality of the icon in the life, liturgy, and theology of Easter Christians. According to

Maximus, icons, by stressing the humanity of Christ, evoke the possibility of ourhumanity being divinized, theosis, whereby, according to Rutherford, the Greek notion of

theosis is other than the Western notion of divinization. With deft strokes of the brush

Rutherford sketched the rich theology of the icon developed by medieval Orthodox

theologians such as Nicholas Cabasilas and modern theologians like Paul Evdokimov.These were inspired by the great Fathers of the Church, such as St John of Damascus,

who stressed that the Incarnation restored material humanity to its original innocence,

and St Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople, who defended the veneration of imagesand paid for it by resigning and going into exile to die in obscurity until his reputation

was restored at Second Nicaea. Rutherford eloquently demonstrated what Ratzinger once

claimed in one of his writings, when he wrote that, with regard to the liturgy, we have alot to learn from the East.

One of the most fascinating papers was delivered by Dr Helen Ratner Dietz (Chicago,

Illinois, U.S.A): The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture. She describedhow, after Constantine, the Roman basilica was transformed by the inheritance of

Judaism. The main influence here reached back to Sinai, which was understood in terms

of the bridal covenant between God and Israel. This in turn led to Israels expectationthat, in the final days, God the Bridegroom would consummate his union with Israel, His

Bride. This final consummation was anticipated in the Temple liturgy, which determined

the architecture of the Temple of Solomon. There the Holy of Holies was understood interms of the Bridal Chamber in imitation of the wedding canopy used in the Jewish

wedding ceremonies (as was used up to the Christian Middle Ages). The High Priest

represented not only the Bridegroom, but, when he entered the Holy of Holies, the Bride,Israel. The Jerusalem Temple was divided into three, with three sets of steps leading up to

the Holy of Holies. The Temple Veil represented this world, or rather the whole of

creation, symbolized by the colours of the elements (white, blue, red and purple), which


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also have bridal significance. These colours were likewise those of external vestments ofthe High Priest who represented Israels God, the Creator of heaven and earth. The Holy

of Holies was a perfect cube, symbol of the spiritual world, the heavens above the

heavens. As in the Jewish tradition, the bridegroom takes on the vulnerability of the brideto protect her from the dangers inherent in child-bearing (and is vested accordingly), the

High Priest, divesting himself of his glorious vestments and clad in a simply linen tunic,takes on the vulnerability of the Bride Israel when he entered the Holy of Holies once ayear on Yom Kippur (cf. Is 61:10).. Christ called himself the Bridegroom and so claimed

to be the High Priest. What is less noticed is that, when he took on the vulnerability of

humanity in the incarnation, he identified Himself with the Bride when he into theTemple not made of human hands through his Death on the Cross. Dietz stressed that for

the Jewish and later the Christian tradition God is totally hetero, other, and Israel is

hetero to God. Only in this way, can we understand the role-exchange between

bridegroom and bride that is characteristic of both Jewish nuptial ceremonies and theTemple liturgy. The form of Christian church-buildings was profoundly shaped by this

Jewish tradition, which itself was rooted in the pagan Semitic traditions of the ancient

Near East. The Church took over the tripartite division of the Temple and, in the place ofthe Holy of Holies, the wedding canopy or baldachin over the altar that, like the nuptial

chamber, was surrounded by curtains that were only opened to reveal the elevated Host

and Chalice. Like the Temple it faced east, but now with a new meaning: the rising sunrepresented the return of the Bridegroom in glory at the end of time for the final

consummation now anticipated each time the Sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated on the

altar.

Fr Uwe Michael Lang, Cong. Orat., in his paper entitled: Louis Bouyer and Church

Architecture: Resourcing Benedict XVIs Spirit of the Liturgy, showed both the

indebtedness of Joseph Ratzinger to his friend and esteemed colleague Louis Bouyer butalso the differentiated use the former made of the latter by avoiding Bouyers more

controversial theses and polemical points. Lang showed how Ratzinger took up and

developed Bouyers insight into the cosmic and eschatological significance of theEucharistic liturgy. Bouyer drew attention to early Syrian church architecture, where the

"Liturgy of the Word" was conducted on the bema, a raised platform in the centre of the

nave. Moving to the altar in the apse for the "Liturgy of the Eucharist", priest and people

faced the East, acknowledging the cosmic dimension of Christian worship. In the firstplace, the rising sun symbolizes the final Return of the Risen Lord now anticipated in the

Sacrifice of the Mass. Lang referred to Bouyer's and Ratzinger's observation that

celebrating the Sacrifice facing the people tends to eclipse the transcendental dimensionof the liturgy. God tends to be absorbed into the community whereas in facing East what

is expressed is the dialogue between the People of God and God Himself. Further, the

sacrificial character of the Mass tends to be downplayed while the Mass tends to be seenprimarily as a sacred meal.

Dr Alcuin Reid (London, England) read a though-provoking paper entitled NobleSimplicity Revisited on Sacrosanctum Conciliums article 34. He traced the origins of

the term noble simplicity back to its Enlightenment origins as a reaction to Baroque

splendour. Looking at scholars such as Edmund Bishop (1899), Dr Adrian Fortescue


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(1912) and Dom Gregory Dix (1945), Reid concluded that, historically, it is not possibleto find in either the early Liturgy or in the mind of Bishop, Fortescue or Dix, an

endorsement noble simplicity as it was widely interpreted following the Council. Dr

Reid then gave a detailed exegesis of the text of article 34 of Sacrosanctum Conciliumread in the context of the Constitution as a whole. The call for noble simplicity, which

is a practical policy of the Council and not a dogmatic definition (and thus open to criticalevaluation), cannot be used as an ideological super-principle of reform, Reid asserted, tobring about a rupture with tradition. He then asked whether this principle is in need of a

critical reappraisal? He noted Kieran Flanagans assertion that it had given rise to a new

Puritanism and that the reforms satisfied none of the constituents to whom the reformswere supposed to appeal (youth, etc.), who find the liturgy mostly boring. The

contributions of Catherine Pickstock and David Torevell to this debate were noted.

Interestingly, he observed, Sacramentum Caritatis does not use the term noble

simplicity, speaking rather of the ars celebrandi. Has the Church experiencedsimplicity ignobly visited upon the liturgical life of the Western Church in recent

decades, Reid asked? If so, he concluded, perhaps now we should concentrate more on

the fundamental principle of liturgical reform, true actual participation in the Liturgy in its true meaning of contemplative engagement with the liturgical rites and not be

preoccupied with simplifying the Liturgy and liturgical spaces or items if they in fact

serve that actual participation well.

Mr Ethan Anthony (Boston, USA), a practicing church architect in the tradition

established by Ralph Adams Cram (1889-1942), gave an illustrated talk on the topic:

The Third Revival: New Gothic and Romanesque Catholic Architecture in NorthAmerica. Crams basic policy as an architect was summed up in his statement: I want

people who come into church to be taken out of themselves. For him, beauty is a

manifestation of the divine. We simply need beauty to be human. However, as in all art sotoo with architecture, inspiration can only be received not fabricated. We need architects

who see though the eyes of faith. According to Anthony, the First Revival was inspired

by Newman and Pugin. The Second was under the influence of Willam Morris and theArts and Crafts Movement. Under the influence of Gropius and the Bauhaus movement

that flourished in the Weimar Republic and came to the USA from 1939, there was a

period in the 1950s in the suburban Catholic Church when concrete-block churches

became fashionable. The Third Revival began with work on the restoration of olderchurches, which in turn required the re-learning of older skills more akin to the building

of the medieval churches. Soon congregations wanted new churches built in the older

style, a more distinctly sacral style than found in the modern buildings. The question wasraised: could we build churches in the traditional styles, where faith was expressed

through the medium of stone and glass. In dialogue with the pastors and their

congregations, architects began to design new church buildings under the inspiration ofthose medieval masterpieces scattered around Europe and using new materials that were

both cost-effective and, in terms of design, modern. Anthonys power-point presentation

of many of these magnificent churches of the Third Revival captivated the audience.

In another fascinating power-point presentation, Professor Duncan G. Stroik (Notre

Dame, USA) addressed the topic All the great works of art are a manifestation of God:


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Pope Benedict XVI and the Architecture of Beauty. Stroik used the magnificent churchbuildings of Bavaria that formed the background to Ratzingers theory of beauty and gave

it its existential depth. Here in particular the meaning of the Baroque period was made

accessible to an audience that has little experience of that style and indeed are oftenrather sceptical of its value.

All of the papers highlighted new aspects of the theme. However the final paper was themost surprising of all. Dr Neil J. Roy (Peterborough, Canada) discussed the topic The

Galilee Chapel: A Medieval Notion Comes of Age, which certainly opened up new

vistas for the participants. The Galilee Chapel has its origins in the Cluniac monasteries,where it formed the place where processions started in memory of the beginning of the

public ministry of Our Lord in Galilee. From thence, the procession moved to Jerusalem,

the sanctuary area. Using Durhams monastic Cathedral as his starting point, Roy

described the development of the Galilee Chapel, in particular in Cluny, before makingsome important suggestions about restoring the institution and with it the baptistery to

the front of the church and decorating it with suitable motives. With this paper, the

conference looked to the future and the possibility if innovation based on the inspirationtaken from the Cluniac tradition.

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