Building the Modern Church

It is not every day that you discover a monograph that juxtaposes, within its opening pages, the Dominican ressourcement theologian Yves Congar and the Marxist sociologist of the everyday, Henri Lefebvre. Situated at the intersection between architectural history, urban history and the history of modern Catholicism before and after Vatican II, this extraordinarily accomplished yet eminently readable study elegantly makes the case that the profound post-war changes in ‘Roman Catholic church building [were inextricably]... tied to the development of a modern Britain’ (p. 3). Proctor’s fascinating (and beautifully illustrated) case studies of experimental and prolific church building across England and Scotland after the Second World War fill an astonishing gap in the scholarship by providing the first comprehensive survey of twentieth-century Roman Catholic architecture and its relationship to broader modernist architectural movements. It also makes an imperative contribution to the burgeoning ‘lived histories’ of the Second Vatican Council by exploring the way that shifts in theology and styles of worship changed ‘what the Church required from its buildings’ and therefore also ‘transform[ed] the daily practices of the faithful’ (p. 4) New spatial forms were required to accommodate audible liturgies in English, the increasingly active participation of the congregation with a forward-facing celebrant, and an overriding emphasis on the Eucharist (and central altar table). Throughout his thematic chapters exploring tradition, modernism, modern church art, the liturgical movement, and ritual and devotional cultures, Proctor holds in dialogue three primary agents in the production of over 1,000 new churches in this period: the architect as designer (and often Catholic layman), the Church as both institutional framework and discursive field, and the city as a social and spatial influence (p. 8). His superb history makes highly important and innovative interventions into each of these subfields

Altar · Archaeology · Art history · Eucharist · History of architecture · Holy See · Modernism (music · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Worship · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Architecture · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy