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Being entirely objective, the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome is the best building in the world! We ask Duncan Stroik, the founder of the Sacred Architecture Journal, to explain why this is, and why churches, and other buildings today, don’t match it.
Why don’t we build churches like St. Peter’s anymore? Architect Duncan Stroik is next.
Cy Kellett:
Duncan Stroik is Professor of Architecture at Notre Dame University and the founding editor of Sacred Architecture Journal. And we had the great, good fortune of having a visit from him here at Catholic Answers. So we sat down to talk with him and you might think we just sat around complaining about modern churches. And that’s not what we did. We did a lot more than that. We do some complaining about modern churches, but we also got to talk with him about what makes a church beautiful. We used the example of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and then we talked a bit about how can we make beautiful churches. Should we just copy those old churches of the Renaissance? No, not exactly. Here’s what Duncan Stroik had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Duncan Stroik from the University of Notre Dame, thank you very much for being with us.
Duncan Stroik:
Honored to be here, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
And want to talk to you, you’re an architect. You produce beautiful sacred buildings. So first of all, a review from you, what do you think of a little place I call St. Peter’s in Rome?
Duncan Stroik:
St. Peter’s in Rome. Well, one of my favorites.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, good.
Duncan Stroik:
I always ask people what their favorite church in Rome is. Actually, I asked my students, architecture students at Notre Dame, what their favorite church in Rome. It’s hard not to pick that.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Duncan Stroik:
It’s so good and there’s something for everyone there.
Cy Kellett:
Because when you’re in Rome, it’s amazing church after amazing church. And then you go to St. Peter’s and you go, there’s just nothing like this.
Duncan Stroik:
Yeah, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
It’s beyond.
Duncan Stroik:
It’s wonderful. And you could say it always has been, but certainly the Renaissance popes wanted to have that kind of universal sense and size. And then that continued through the Baroque in terms of the Piatsa.
Cy Kellett:
And so say a Bishop today was, my diocese needs a new cathedral and wanted to build something, not on the scale of St Peter’s, but something that approaches that kind of beauty. Is it still possible? Meaning would donors donate to such a building? Would there be the artisans and architects who could do that kind of work or have we lost that ability?
Duncan Stroik:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. So yes, we can do it. We can do it faster, not necessarily better, but we can certainly do it faster than they did in the Renaissance. Interestingly, people think of the Gothic cathedrals as taking hundreds of years to build. It’s not true, but St. Peter’s took 150 years. So it’s a magnificent work of art, but it took a long, long time. I think the architects would be okay to find, the artists is the bigger challenge because we have wonderful people that want to do it well, but to do something on that scale is kind of over the top.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. And by the artists, you mean those who would do the decorative work inside the church?
Duncan Stroik:
Interestingly St. Peter’s is one of the unique churches in Western Christendom where all the paintings, all the side altars, I think was about 50, are mosaics.
Cy Kellett:
Oh my gosh.
Duncan Stroik:
So they look like they’re paintings, they’re based on paintings, most of them, their mosaics. And then there’s one painting, and then there’s lots of great sculpture. And there’s lots of great frescoes on the ceilings in the different domes, all the smaller domes, and of course the main dome. And then those, I always like to say 365, but it’s like 180 saints, in the colonnades outside. And those are all mega-sized statues, so a lot of sculpture actually at St. Peter’s.
Cy Kellett:
And those, you think we might not have the skills to do that kind of work?
Duncan Stroik:
I think the skill in general, the skill at St. Peter’s in architecture, in marble work, in construction, in composition is, the high Renaissance, the Baroque, it’s much better than anything we are today. We’re just not that good. We have the technology to build it. We have the money to build it. You asked about money, we’ve got so much money, Catholics, especially in this country, we could do anything we want. But we do like building football stadiums and giving money to our alma mater or to our museum or whatever. So we could definitely do anything on that scale, but it would be hard to design it and then it would be hard to find the artists. Not the craftsman, the craftsman I have no problem with, the marble work, the stonework.
Cy Kellett:
They could do it.
Duncan Stroik:
Yeah. We can do amazing things today, but actual beautiful sculptures, like Michelangelo’s Pieta or the four statues under the dome, which is St. Helen and St. Veronica. They’re all super life-size, amazing images so that would be harder. All the founders of religious orders are on the walls, in the niches. That would be harder to do. Those are just top, some of the best ever.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Duncan Stroik:
And we’re just staying with St. Peter’s. We’re not even talking about the Vatican and the great Vatican complex, which has the best art in the world.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And if you were to build something like that, you would probably actually, if you’re the Bishop say, you might go get Renaissance art and put it in your cathedral.
Duncan Stroik:
Sure. Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting idea and it’s very Catholic to reuse things and I’m not a big fan of copies, but preferably original art that we could move to places, that’s very nice. And Rome and other cities are full of these side altars where you have like a little Madonna painting and then surrounded by other images. And a little Madonna is like a medieval icon. And then you surround it by other images or sculptures. [inaudible 00:05:52] has one, the St. Mary Major, the famous chapel of [foreign language 00:05:56] is a medieval icon of Our Lady, and then surrounded by other artwork to make it bigger you could say.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Duncan Stroik:
So we’re good at that.
Cy Kellett:
So it does seem though that St. Peter’s is the end product almost of centuries of building up to be able to do something like that. And if you think of that as a kind of crescendo, there’s a kind of decrescendo after. Is that right to think about that? We always think of the modern period as this great period of advancement, but it seems that it also includes a great period of decline.
Duncan Stroik:
I say the 20th century, we’ve seen great decline clearly in sacred art and architecture. We have nothing that compares to other centuries in the late 20th century, 21st century. And we don’t really have sacred art that compares. Now, people throw things like Sagrada Familia. There’s a couple of special, unique buildings, but in general, the quality has gone down. I think it also carries through to other kinds of civic architecture, museums, city halls, state capitals. I think it’s consistent, but for us, as Catholics, we certainly appreciate the sacred place and we’re very aware that the churches our parents built and our grandparents built are nothing compared to what our great grandparents built, much less 500 years ago.
Cy Kellett:
When I walk into St. Peter’s, I don’t feel quite the same as I felt outside of St. Peter’s or before I had ever walked into it. And so I wonder if there’s something that’s inspiring or formative about a building like St. Peter’s that I wonder if we can even do that. As you said, it’s funny, athletic stadiums, but there’s all these new football stadium is opening up now, like here up the road in LA.
Duncan Stroik:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a magnificent building. I would like to go in there. I’d like to go see it.
Duncan Stroik:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
But it’s a football stadium.
Duncan Stroik:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
This awe that is aroused by a great building is being put to a poor use there in a certain sense.
Duncan Stroik:
It is. And its, I would say it’s ersatz, it’s like an imitation of the liturgy. It’s an imitation of Christianity. It has some good things. Like we all gather together. We are doing something, we’re going forward, we’re watching a liturgy happen. But there’s also this antagonism and this, we’re beating. There is a spiritual warfare that we’re interested in. So it has some analogies, but ultimately, it’s entertainment only and not some of the other things that the mass should be, can be.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So we wanted to reach back into history to this high point that is the building of St. Peter’s.
Duncan Stroik:
It’s a high point, no question about it.
Cy Kellett:
How do we bring some of that into our moment?
Duncan Stroik:
Yeah. Well, there’s different ways to do that. And I think we’re finding people do that, architects and clients trying to do that today. I find it interesting because a lot of clients come to the architect and say, I want this, or I want this style. And we were just talking to Father Hugh Barbour about the new, beautiful priori of the [inaudible 00:09:10] in Orange County, magnificent work by a French architect and was not cheap and beautifully done. And they consciously, and the donor really wanted a Romanesque building, which is fine. And a lot of people come to me and they want this. They want Romanesque or they want Gothic room and this … I don’t think that’s really the question for the donor, for the owner. I think really it should be, we want something magnificent. These are some buildings we love and then give it to the architect and force them, encourage them to do something worthy of that quality.
Duncan Stroik:
And it may be more like what you love or could be a little bit different, or it might be something slightly new, but it’s working within the tradition. It’s composing something new, it’s fully traditional, but it’s composing something new and gives the talented artists the ability to create a new St. Peter’s. Not really, there’s, that’s not going to happen, but a new great building. And that’s my idea. So there is a neat, they like to say replica of St. Peter’s in Canada and it’s like a two-thirds version, it’s really well done. I like it a lot, but I’m not really that interested in it. I’m very interested in taking elements from St. Peter’s and learning from it, which all the great architects did in Italy, France, Spain, even England, even St. Paul’s in London, very influenced by St. Peter’s, no question. But then also let you do something that’s not so much for the architect’s ego, but for the uniqueness of the place that.
Duncan Stroik:
We do something for San Diego, that’s a little different than Los Angeles. Not that we’re better or worse or anything like that, but we have our own. It’s like my house can look like your house, but it should also have its own qualities about my family. And so I believe in that for the parishes or the cathedrals or whatever. But I think we can do amazing things. And I’m happy to see the things that we have been doing in the last 20 years, much better than the 20 years before that.
Cy Kellett:
Just a quick clarification, San Diego is better than LA.
Duncan Stroik:
Okay, okay. That’s fine.
Cy Kellett:
So just want to make sure we’re clear on that, but yeah. Okay. I suppose there’s a kind of traditionalist in me and maybe in other people, maybe this is part of being Catholic because we have these wonderful traditions that says, build a great building like that. Why don’t our churches look like churches anymore? We have these certain kind of phrases that we say, but it’s not enough. And it really wouldn’t be Catholic to say, just do that again. Replication is not necessarily beauty, it’s not finding the beauty for this place in this moment.
Duncan Stroik:
And maybe if we, as an artist or an architect are immature, maybe that’s what we should do. Maybe we should just imitate as close as we can a nice church of that size. Like if you asked me to do a cathedral for San Diego, I wouldn’t do St. Peter’s because it’s 20 times bigger than what you need. But maybe we look at some other great cathedrals and we can look at St Peter’s, but we can also look at some smaller things that are more in scale in dimension. That’s very helpful because dimension really matters. And that’s how we experience it. And what I like to say is there is a cathedral that’s taller than St. Peter’s on the inside, but it’s not really bigger, and that is Beauvais in France. It’s actually taller, I think it’s about five feet taller in the nave, but St. Peter’s is bigger. And Beauvais is more vertical, but it’s not anywhere near the length or the breadth of St. Peter’s. And it’s a very nice cathedral that fell down two or three times because they built too tall for their technology at the time.
Duncan Stroik:
St. Peter’s, they were able to build the same time, but there’s certain breadth, a certain magnificence about it. And I like people to think about this. If you’re building a new church, don’t go beyond St. Peter’s. 85 feet wide in the nave, 150 feet tall. Nobody ever goes beyond the 150 feet. I think the LA cathedral is like a hundred and something hundred, 120 feet wide, and then less than a hundred tall. So they kind of took the St. Peter’s proportion and laid it on its side. It was very horizontal, which is not our tradition. It should be vertical, but there’s dimensional stuff that we have to respect that, to do a great building, you really don’t want to do something bigger than St. Peter’s unless you think you are bigger than St. Peter’s, you’re not.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Duncan Stroik:
That’s the burial place of the first Bishop of Rome, I forget his name. And it’s been the dwelling place of the Pope since they took a vacation in Avignon. Catholicism has a respect. We have respect for elders and respect for the church, respect for the teaching, respect for the saints. And we can also respect other architecture of note like St. Peter’s or Beauvais, or Amiah, or Notre Dome, we can respect them at the same time until we can do something else.
Cy Kellett:
The parish committee then that’s working on the, we’re finally going to build the church building, or we’ve got to move out of the old church. We’re going to build a new church.
Duncan Stroik:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Your advice to them would not be to say, we need this, as you said, Romanesque, or we got to have a Gothic, but to say, to allow a qualified good architect to consider the space, to consider the community, to consider the history of the place, all that, and draw on all those things, but make something new.
Duncan Stroik:
It may be in drawing on all those things, they ended up doing that Gothic church that you want, or that Romanesque church that you want, maybe they do, but give them that freedom. The other thing that I really love to do is, is to try to respect the titular, the dedication. So when we did the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Lacrosse, I certainly looked at things in Mexico. I certainly looked at things in Spain.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Duncan Stroik:
Now, what we ended up with is probably more Roman, more Italian, but we were looking at that. And what was wild was that when we did make a pilgrimage down to Guadalupe with, at that time, Bishop Burke, it was amazing how many things did relate to his new shrine, to the original shrine, to the original shrine, not what they have now. It’s just more like a very fancy basketball arena. But the original shrine, it actually has a lot of commonalities.
Duncan Stroik:
It’s not the same. It’s not a copy, but I believe in that. So the titular, in doing a church to, my own opinion is doing something in honor of say a Jesuit saint like Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits built a lot of buildings at that time. It’s worth looking at the stuff they were building at the time in the places they built it, all over Europe, of course. Now, that doesn’t limit you, it’s just giving you a freedom to look at that. Or I love this idea of [foreign language 00:16:06] which is the church that St. Philip Neri started in Rome, the new church in Rome, dedicated to Mary and the side altars are in a sequence, the life of the Virgin. So each altar, you actually walk around the church counter-clockwise like with the stations of the cross, but each altar starts with, I believe it starts with her birth and then presentation the temple and her whole life. And so each altar was done that way.
Duncan Stroik:
Jesuits did that as well. They would require the different altars were dedicated to different saints as part of an iconographic program. So I think there’s a lot that goes into it. If I’m working in San Diego, unless you tell me no way, I’m going to look at lots of great things in California.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Duncan Stroik:
And I’m also going to look at the missions and that might get me to go to Mexico and it might get me to go to Spain and looking. I don’t have to. Now, if you end up in Spain, you might still go back to Italy, but that’s the fun of architecture. It’s all connected in Catholicism. And I do think there’s a real benefit to giving a little freedom to the artists, if you like their work. We’re talking about an artist. You’ve seen this architect and he did a couple of buildings and you like those, and you hire them to do your church. That’s what we’re talking about. Not somebody out of the blue, somebody out of the blue, you may have to say, we want this. We want that. Don’t do this. Don’t do that because they don’t know. But it’s better to hire somebody, you see their work. You say, that’s really good. I like that. We might want something a little different, but we like what he’s done. He’s going to give you, he wants to give you something like that. If you don’t like what he’s done, hire somebody else.
Cy Kellett:
I wonder how important experiences, because I remember as a child near where I grew up, they built a church and it was designed by an architect who had never designed a Catholic church before. And when it was done and when you went in, you thought to yourself, yeah, this guy’s never designed a Catholic church before.
Duncan Stroik:
It shows.
Cy Kellett:
It’s obvious.
Duncan Stroik:
He had no clue. And he probably wasn’t even Catholic.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know. So is there a, I don’t know a society of Catholic architects or is there a group of like, these are qualified to make a church?
Duncan Stroik:
No, no, there aren’t, but there are some nice websites, like the new liturgical movement and the other liturgical website that have some very nice articles and things on new buildings. And I do think that building a church for a parish or renovating a church is it’s a big outlay of money. And so the pastor, and maybe some of his assistants in the parish, it takes some research. You should do a little homework. You shouldn’t enter into it easily. You should look around. It used to be when I started this 30 years ago, people thought they need to hire a local architect. That’s fine. If you find a good local architect, great. I love it. But in America today, we’re a very global country. We’re a very global world. It’s no problem to hire somebody from anywhere else in the country, if you like their work and you like to work and you like them and you talk to them and you understand that. But I do believe that especially today, designing a church is a work of faith. It’s a work of hope. It’s a work of charity. And so you do want people that understand that they really should be people of faith.
Cy Kellett:
Is it possible to build a truly Catholic, modern church in the modern style, modern architecture?
Duncan Stroik:
The modern style, my problem with the modern style is that there probably are a couple of buildings here and there that are okay. Are any of them great? Catholicism is all about excellence. Now my budget may be low, but I’m still going to try to give you excellence. That might mean that we have less paintings and less sculpture and we do it well. I don’t think we’re about just getting by because it’s for us. No, it’s because it’s for God and he deserves the best. So that’s one of the problems with modernism is it hasn’t really produced great stuff. The other problem with it is that if you look at its roots, it is, the roots of modernism are inimical to Catholicism. It’s essentially a machine aesthetic and it’s anti, it’s not body. It’s anti-figural in its art and its architecture.
Duncan Stroik:
So the human body is not the high point of God’s creation, it’s the machine, what man makes. And so we have these more abstract machine-like buildings and so that’s a problem. And I would say it’s anti-incarnational because it doesn’t respect you and me as being the bodies in this building, but ultimately the body that we really want to portray is the body of Christ. So it’s anti-incarnational. So it’s really a very strange idea for Catholics to embrace an aesthetic that’s anti-incarnational and iconoclastic. It’s iconoclastic. It rejects images. It rejects figures.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Duncan Stroik:
And that’s not what we do. We believe in the figure. We believe that Christ became a man and lived in this earth and had a mother and a father and had friends and real apostles and people lived and died and had children and so on. And so our architecture should respect that. And that’s what we’ve had for 2000 years until the early, mid-20th century, when mainly Protestant and agnostic architects, we hired them and they rejected all that. And then we said, okay, we got to go with the Joneses.
Cy Kellett:
Yep. So now is the modern architecture is just something we look at and go, we’ll recover from that. Or is it something we go, there’s a few things we might learn and take from that. We’ll incorporate those into the wider tradition, but we’re not going to privilege them, certainly over the great architecture that Catholics produced in a Catholic culture for Catholic people.
Duncan Stroik:
That’s very nice. We’re not going to privilege them. Yeah. I think there are some very important things in modern architecture that I would assume a hundred percent of our listeners will agree with, air conditioning.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Yeah.
Duncan Stroik:
Heating, good electricity and lighting and lots of plumbing fixtures. I’m all for that. And that’s something we’ve gotten in the 20th century. And I don’t think there’s a whole lot of debate on that. Other things, we can debate.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Fair enough. It was like the Italian, when you’re in Rome and you go to the church, you say, is there a restroom and they go, all right, go head out of the street, go down that alley. Okay. All right. Maybe this could be a little more modern.
Duncan Stroik:
We’re not used to that. We’re pretty cushy in America.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right, right. Okay. So just to conclude then, to go back to St. Peter’s, there are things in this life that you hear about forever, and then you see them and you go, ah, that disappointed. That’s not quite what I thought that was going to be. St. Peter’s is not one of them.
Duncan Stroik:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
You walk into St. Peter’s and you think every superlative that has been used about this building is true. This is a magnificent, You almost feel like if this is what we were like as human beings all the time, we’d be a beautiful race of people.
Duncan Stroik:
Yeah. Yeah. I love the way you said that. And I think one of the great things about modern St. Peter’s that we didn’t have probably a couple hundred years ago is these great gatherings that happened in the Piatsa. It’s big enough for big gatherings. And I think you can get actually standing from the door to all the way down [foreign language 00:23:34], maybe even close to a million people, if they’re all kind of crowded around and everything, [crosstalk 00:23:39] and what an amazing thing that you can get. And a lot of these are Catholics from around the world. And you see people from around the world that these beatifications, or canonization, it’s a wonderful thing. And that’s what that outdoor space is made for. And then the indoor space, which is the temple, which is the holy place that is also, is the culmination of all of that. So thank God for St. Peter’s. It’s the standard, it’s the standard that we want to shoot for. It’s the standard that probably can’t be beat. And that’s okay, because it’s a house of God in the city of the Apostle Peter and Paul, Apostles Peter and Paul.
Cy Kellett:
I hate this because I told you that was the last question, but now you raised something in my mind that I want to ask you about as an architect. Can I give you one more? So how much then should the modern parish, the contemporary parish be thinking about its outside space, because often it’s this huge paved area that’s just a jumble of parking spaces. And then there’s the church. Even if the church is beautiful, the place itself is not beautiful.
Duncan Stroik:
Yes. And that’s what we certainly in the last, 50, 80 years are not very good at because suburbia makes it hard to put a church there on a highway or on a strip, it makes it hard to do that. So I’ve been working very hard over for myself in these last 25, 30 years is to try to create a semblance of a Piatsa, semblance of a green, a semblance of a courtyard for our churches. But the other point is, how do you see the building from afar? You gather people, but also what does it look like from the outside and that, speaking of Catholic Answers, that’s one of the ways that we speak to the broader community.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Duncan Stroik:
What does it look like? What does it tell people? Does it say transcendence? Does it say God’s house or does it say something else?
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Duncan Stroik, thank you very, very much [crosstalk 00:25:32].
Duncan Stroik:
What an honor.
Cy Kellett:
I think in every area of church life, the dawning realization is that things done with genuine faith are different than things done even with fine professional competence. You can have a professionally competent director of religious education, but if that person lacks faith, then the religious education department isn’t going to work. And you can have all kinds of professional competence, but the faith element is really, really important to actually doing the work that the church does, living the mission and the church lives her mission in many ways in her churches. And when the churches are designed with great technical and professional competence, but without faith, that this is a building that is meant to be worthy of the worship of God, then all kinds of bad things happen. We’re really grateful for Professor Duncan Stroik stopping by and having this conversation with us. You can find out more about him at the sacred architecture journal. I hope you’ll look into it.
Cy Kellett:
Also, you can support us. You can give money to keep this podcast going, just go to givecatholic.com, givecatholic.com. You can send us an email, let us know what you like, what you didn’t like. Maybe you got an idea for the future. focus@catholic.com is our email address. focus@catholic.com. If you’re listening now, don’t forget to subscribe, that way you’ll be updated when new episodes are available. And if you give us that five star review and maybe a few nice words that will also help to grow the podcast. And come on, if you’re watching on YouTube, you should know what to do by now. Like and subscribe, it’s down here somewhere. Like and subscribe. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you again next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.