Today’s installment of Chicago’s Catholic Church a Day is St. Paul’s in the “Heart of Chicago” neighborhood. You might think you are looking at a German village, but you are actually seeing a Chicago building which has the unusual distinction of having appeared in “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!” in 1938 as the church built without a single nail. Dedicated in 1899, St. Paul’s was designed by Chicago architect Henry Schlacks to be completely fireproof and also to recall the Gothic architecture of the Moselle Valley in Germany, where most of its original parishioners came from. The architect decided to use all fireproof materials–all brick and terra cotta with no plaster coverings over wooden lath. Eventually they caved and got a marble altar and altar rail as well as some mosaics. Despite the fireproof materials, the church is not lacking in sacramental theology: mosaics of the 12 apostles reveal to us the celebrants of the heavenly liturgy, and statues of saints on the piers recall that the saints are the “pillars of the Church” (Galatians 2:9). This church and all of the churches in the “church a day” series are profiled in Heavenly City: The Architectural Tradition of Catholic Chicago available through the link at the left.
September 4, 2007 at 8:48 pm
D Mac,
I have a question. These churches are all so beautiful. Why is it that churches today are not built with such beauty and detail. My question is more of an economic one. Is it prohibitively expensive to build a church like that today? Have the economics of church building changed so much in a century that it is difficult to impossible to complete such a project? Or is it simply a matter of will not expense?
September 4, 2007 at 9:28 pm
There are many reasons why churches today are not built with the care and detail of years gone by. One factor is economic. Now we build bride’s rooms and parking lots and big “gathering spaces” in our churches which tend to dilute the budget of the church proper. Buildings today also need air conditioning, elevators, fire suppression systems and things that a church in 1890 didn’t. That being said, we also have very different expectations about what a church ought to cost in relation to our family budgets. Catholics are the richest denomination in the country per capita and often prefer to spend their money on fancy cars and vacations than on church fund raisers.
Another side of the question is the theological problem. For some decades now, there has been a misconception that a church is a meeting house which should be neutral and not engage the worshiper with supposed “distractions” from the liturgy. This was a very low sacramental theology of liturgical art and architecture which shares much in common with Lutheranism. We are just emerging from this period of misunderstanding. But as you can see from some of the other posts on CMR, there are a lot of great buildings going up these days.