The 2008 National Meeting of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions will be held at a convention center near the Milwaukee Airport. This event, which is the meeting of the heads and committee members of worship commissions from dioceses around the country, was co-sponsored by the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions and the USCCB Committee on the Liturgy. Here you see the logo designed for the meeting: ten scrawls of finger paint in black and red overlaid by five minutes worth of Photoshop text. Formless, hastily made, theologically vacuous, emotion-driven rather than content-driven. If this is the image that represents how the people who run liturgy for the dioceses of the nation think we should shape Catholic identity, then there is much work to be done indeed.
November 29, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Really D Mac, you just don’t understand the richness and beauty of post modern art. This shows how utterly you lack in sophistication and genuine taste. I see in the bold red and black lines the fluid and graceful movements of liturgical dance, and in the stark greyness of the tabula, I see the struggle for acceptance of non-traditional liturgical viewpoints in an all-too-often black and white church. I guess you do not have any formal training in aesthetics and art like most of our distinguished liturgists nowadays… tut tut.
Really, no, that was sarcasm. I often resort to sarcasm (but not with my wife) when trying to keep my sanity in an upside down world. I should really just pray more instead. It is interesting to note that an “aesthetician” is a person who is trained to work in a spa (giving backrubs, facial scrubs, etc.?).
November 30, 2007 at 3:09 am
Good grief. How embarrassingly, purposefully, premeditatedly ugly that is.
I like the above commenter’s sarcastic interpretation, though. May I borrow from it? 🙂
I see in the bold red and black lines the desire of modern feminism to shred apart the black clericals and scarlet vestments of the ordained male priesthood, in an outpouring of their rage at being denied this, which of course stems from their deep and fathomless ignorance of the liturgical structure of the church. In the grayness of the tabula (which on my monitor looks more fuzzy than stark) I see the calculated incoherence of modern liturgical practice, most of which could only seem like a good idea to someone who made recreational use of…but I don’t want to offend anybody.
Taken as a whole, the logo looks like the postage stamp about to be affixed to the box containing the handbasket to a certain nether region which is the ultimate destination of liturgical goofiness–though not, however hard they try, of the Church itself.