The Tyranny of Blandness

Yesterday I asserted that secularism imposed its ideology onto us.

This is true in countless ways, I believe. But it is an idea I rarely hear anywhere – yet which I think needs to be raised far, far more often.

As I have admitted, this weblog is fragmentary, being written at the moment under much personal pressure. I would like soon to more fully develop the idea of secularism as an imposed ideology.

But for today, I will simply quote from a book. An unfortunately sometimes bitter and cynical book, unfortunate because bitterness and cynicism serve no-one. But a book suffused nonetheless with a noble consciousness of BEAUTY, that makes many fine and important points.

The book is Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Spaces to Meeting Places and How We Can Change Them Back Again by Michael S. Rose.

Among other things, Rose is analysing the impact of secularism and modern political correctness on one facet of our society – the architecture of modern Catholic Churches.

Here, I think, is a revealing passage concerning modern churches:

“The building recedes into the background of the landscape. There’s nothing memorable here. Nothing inspiring. Nothing particularly inviting.

[One] finds that the façade, the ‘face’ this church pre-sents to the world is ‘faceless’.,,

****It simply fits in more or less with the other buildings on that street.****

No passerby would be curious enough to go out of their way to explore this edifice; neither skeptic, nor pious pilgrim will be drawn to its portals, attracted to or even intrigued by any inherent meaning.

The faceless façade of the modern church ***fails to communicate meaning to anyone*** …

Designers and architects of the modern church are careful not to offend anyone in the community by using particularly Catholic symbols such as the crucifix or even the Latin Cross.

Following the modern church fashion of the 1990’s a circular window … is divided into four panes to form a ‘Greek cross’.

Since the horizontal and vertical pieces of a Greek cross are equal in length, the Christian symbolism is lost in the window, and therefore it’s doubtful that the frequent passerby will be offended by such inconspicuous Christian symbolism.

Neither will the pilgrim immediately (or perhaps ever) perceive the Greek cross form. To everyone except the liturgist, the round window is nothing more than a round window with four panes of equal size.”

A round window then, with a ‘plus sign’ in the middle, as Rose also observes …

The emphasis in the above is my own, and what I want to emphasise is that in modern architecture as elsewhere, we are being subjected to a Creeping Tyranny of Blandness and Mediocrity …