American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975 by Catherine R. Osborne

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975 by Catherine R. Osborne Jay M. Price American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975. By Catherine R. Osborne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 288 pp. $45.00. There is a growing literature on religious architecture in the twentieth century with scholars such as Gretchen Buggeln and Dale Dowling discussing the intersection between the built environment and theological and social changes taking place at the same time. Catherine Osborne's survey of Catholic modernism is a thoughtful, sophisticated analysis of the Catholic Modernist movement from its development in the 1920s through the 1970s. She shows how Catholic modernist figures challenged a faith tradition that had come to see the architecture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as ideals to maintain. By contrast, the modernists embraced an organic, biological narrative to understand Catholic faith that should adapt to its environment much as an actual organism would. Osborne pays particular attention to how the movement's figures were interested in current building projects with an eye to what the church of the future (both as building and institution) would be like. In many cases, these ideas showed up in plans and models for unbuilt structures that celebrated what could be rather than what would be. By the 1960s, these speculations became especially fanciful, with long conversations about what a chapel on the moon or an undersea chapel/submarine might be like. Osborne focuses especially on the Liturgical Arts Society, whose journal Liturgical Arts was perhaps the most sophisticated platform for Catholic modernism in the United States from the 1930s through the [End Page 73] 1970s. The colorful career of the society's key figure, Maurice Lavanoux, runs like a leitmotif through the story. While influential, Catholic modernist circles consisted of a relatively small cohort of artists, thinkers, consultants, and writers. As in pages of Liturgical Arts itself, the ordinary lay person appears as a side character in this book, the intended audience of all this effort. For all the discussion of greater participation in the service, ordinary people were more built for than brought into the discussions. Osborne does not just limit her discussion to architecture, however. Instead, she skillfully shows how those who commented and guided worship and construction were also part of a milieu that included the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the creative experimentation of university Newman Centers, social justice movements in the 1960s, and the consciousness altering effects of LSD. The story culminates in the 1960s, when the speculations of the future clashed with the social justice realities of the era. Osborne perhaps encapsulates this best when she outlined the distinction of "Catholics who wanted church buildings better suited to the future from those who saw no future for dedicated churches at all." Into this maelstrom of competing issues that included white flight, urban renewal and urban decay, ecumenism, and civil rights came the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II was mentioned through the book but does not appear as a major feature until the last chapter, when its pronouncements gave way to a fervor of experimentation with new architectural forms, new liturgies, house churches, mobile mass celebrations, and remodeling efforts of existing edifices. Rather than providing a renewal, however, Osborne suggests a period of exhaustion by the 1970s. Laced with stories and examples, many of them taken from Minnesota and Oklahoma, the book's chapters can stand alone as their own essays. Yet taken together, the different parts form an engaging and sweeping narrative of religious change. The story ends abruptly, however, with the reader arriving almost breathless to an anticlimactic conclusion that is perhaps the work's least successful section. With little discussion of what became of the movement's figures and vision since the 1980s, readers are left to make sense of it all on their own. That said, the rest of the book is a valuable insight into mid-century Catholicism, one that gets us beyond the simplistic pre and post Vatican II periodization to reveal a more complicated and, yes, holistic understanding. [End Page 74] Jay M. Price Wichita...