7
Liturgical Change
CHURCH ARCHITECTURE BEFORE LITURGICAL REFORM
The previous chapter aimed to give a brief narrative of the liturgical movement in British Roman Catholic church architecture through a small number of protagonists, examining people and buildings that were unusually advanced in their thinking and influential on later developments. This chapter considers the more typical experiences of church architects and clergy in Britain during this time of change, looking at the transformations that took place in the liturgy from the 1950s until the 1970s, the influence of NCRG debates on architects, and their effects on parish church architecture.
I begin by looking at the architectural aspects of liturgy before reform. Liturgical movement writing viewed contemporary liturgy as the culmination of a long deterioration characterised by clericalisation, the liturgy becoming distant from the people, performed in splendidly decorated chancels divided from the laity and viewed from afar, with the congregation reduced to mere spectators. Such accounts, however, were motivated by a reforming agenda. While there is evidence for passive congregations, the basilican form itself did not preclude participation and could be designed with participation in mind: practices were more complex than the theory suggests.
Most large churches of the 1950s and early 1960s had long rectangular naves, but it had been an important principle since the Counter Reformation, accepted with renewed interest in Britain in the late-nineteenth century, that everybody should see the sanctuary and follow the Mass. Seeing was the key, yet visibility was a principle that the liturgical movement questioned, since vision implied spectatorship whereas ‘active participation’ demanded action. The NCRG and others therefore criticised churches that appeared to limit lay involvement in liturgy. The separation of sanctuary and nave with solid altar rails, high contrasts of light between nave and sanctuary, and a monumental distant altar implied a supposedly faulty conception of liturgy as a spectacle.
Britain was relatively late in adopting European styles of liturgical innovation and participation. While the dialogue Mass was common across France and Germany by the 1940s, as late as 1958 at least six British dioceses still prohibited it.1 In 1958, the Vatican allowed parishes to say the dialogue Mass without diocesan permission, and only then did it become common in Britain.2 Yet even in the 1960s, the dialogue Mass was often rare enough to be remarkable.3 Dioceses varied widely: ‘In Edinburgh, dialogue Mass is widespread and congregational participation is often excellent’, wrote one observer in 1962. ‘To go to Glasgow to Mass is to pass into a different world, mute and frustrating.’4 The Latin Mass without congregational participation remained normal in many places until relatively late. Mass facing the people was rarer still. Even when a priest followed the liturgical movement, he would not necessarily face the congregation. At Desmond Williams’s circular church of St Mary in Dunstable, certainly influenced by liturgical movement notions when it was designed around 1960, the altar was placed against a reredos at one side of the seating (Figure 7.1). Early designs for the circular church of St Catherine of Siena at Birmingham similarly placed the altar against a reredos at the rear of its platform, and though it was built with a central altar, the opening Mass of 1964 was said facing away from the congregation (Figure 7.2).5
The faithful did not always apparently want to participate in the liturgy. The liturgical movement aimed to direct the congregation’s attention to the liturgy because many worshippers indulged in unrelated devotions during the Mass. These included public recitation of the rosary, advocated during Mass throughout October by Leo XIII in 1884 and sometimes maintained in Britain until the Vatican discouraged ‘pious exercises’ during the liturgy when promoting the dialogue Mass in 1958.6 A common objection to the dialogue Mass, meanwhile, was that it disturbed the worshipper’s meditation and the church’s feeling of sanctity.7 There were further ways in which congregation and liturgy could be divided, as sociologists John Rex and Robert Moore studying Irish immigrants at a temporary church in Birmingham found:
The … Mass Centre is filled at each Mass with men, women, children, and babies; these latter two groups maintain continuous diversions and a level of noise that makes it difficult to follow the service. Sermons are short and the setting of the liturgy on a stage under stage lights with the congregation below and occasionally engulfed by noise and disturbances, separates the people from the ritual and heightens the observer’s sense of ‘us down here’ watching something going on ‘up there’.8
Before Vatican II, the normal experience of liturgy for most Catholics was of a Latin rite performed by the priest, often with psychological or social barriers to participation.
Architects could therefore endorse modern architecture without engaging with the liturgical movement. Long, narrow churches with splendid sanctuaries were built for clergy without a culture of liturgical innovation. Sanctuaries were often framed as separate spaces, as seen at Reynolds & Scott’s Sacred Heart, Gorton, Manchester (Figure 7.3); or more subtly with wider structural supports and a richer ceiling decoration, as at the same architects’ church at Hackenthorpe in Sheffield. St Stephen, Droylsden, in Manchester by Greenhalgh & Williams, though it was modern in style and its architects were aware of the liturgical movement, employed a conventional basilican plan: prominent brick walls flanked the sanctuary and splayed out towards the nave, the altar rail extending across them, while the altar was typically monumental in form and set against a reredos (Figure 7.4). Greenhalgh & Williams conceived of congregational participation primarily as a visual emphasis on the sanctuary achieved by making it the dominating feature of the building, visible to all and attracting attention through scale, richness, light and framing devices.
7.1 St Mary, Dunstable, by Desmond Williams, 1961–64. The altar position has not changed since completion, but it was originally furnished with the tabernacle and six candlesticks along its rear edge. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2013
7.2 St Catherine of Siena, Horsefair, Birmingham, by Harrison & Cox, 1961–65. Undated photograph of Mass shortly after completion of the church. Photographer unknown. Source: parish archive. Courtesy of the Birmingham Roman Catholic Diocesan Trustees
Liturgical movement writers criticised churches with proscenium arches, where the sanctuary seemed like a stage and the liturgy appeared theatrical. By 1950s churches were only occasionally built with such a feature: the Immaculate Conception in Leeds by R. A. Ronchetti, for example, was a simple brick church with passage aisles, where deep brick chancel arches framed the altar and yellow glass transmitted an otherworldly glow to the sanctuary. The most theatrical new churches were, however, those that were intended for temporary use. Early church buildings in the life of a parish were often dual-purpose halls, serving as churches on Sundays and ceremonial occasions and otherwise as social halls, intended for purely secular use once a church was built. Their secular uses often included theatre or music, so a stage would occupy one end opposite the sanctuary or double as a sanctuary on Sundays, as Rex and Moore described. Separate sanctuaries would be closed off by folding partitions. When opened and folded up at the sides, these partitions visually defined the sanctuary like curtains, while screens above closed off the openings in these portal-framed interiors. Such theatrical elements could be interpreted as liturgically desirable. When the parish of St Mary at Levenshulme in Manchester bought a cinema for conversion to a temporary church, their architects Mather & Nutter explained its liturgical advantages. The sanctuary occupied the raised stage and the congregation the auditorium, whose raked floor gave worshippers ‘an excellent view of the Altar from all parts of the Church’. Concealed lighting illuminated the proscenium strip, painted red, ‘which gives richness to the decoration and focuses attention on the Sanctuary’.9
7.3 Sacred Heart, Gorton, Manchester, by Reynolds & Scott, 1958–62. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2013
7.4 St Stephen, Droylsdon, Manchester, by Greenhalgh & Williams, 1958–59. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2012
7.5 St Paul, Glenrothes, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1956–58. Photo: William Toomey, c.1958. Courtesy of Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Source: Glasgow School of Art
Despite receiving much praise from NCRG members, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s church of St Paul, Glenrothes was criticised for a theatrical sanctuary.10 Its altar was placed in a taller space than the nave, illuminated from a concealed lantern (Figure 7.5, Plan 2b). ‘The recess in which the altar is placed tends to form a proscenium arch, and to produce a slightly stagey effect’, wrote Edward Mills, an effect he thought was increased by the use of natural light. William Lockett added that this aspect of the design would detract ‘from the congregation/priest relationship’.11 Though they were building for the relatively progressive diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were based in liturgically conservative Glasgow without the benefit of a clerical culture of interest in the liturgical movement. Their church of St Bride at East Kilbride, for example, may have been avant-garde in style but was liturgically conventional, with a large altar and tabernacle in a raised sanctuary at one end of a long nave. It was opened in 1964 by the bishop of Glasgow, James Scanlan, with a pontifical high Mass in Latin making no concessions to the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ of the year before.12
Patrick Nuttgens gave a talk about St Bride the following year in London, followed by a discussion attended by Coia, Metzstein and MacMillan. Nuttgens praised the church’s architecture, but admitted that the reinforced concrete gallery along one side of the nave created an awkward space underneath it: ‘during Mass’, he noted, ‘the whole area of the church under the side gallery was crowded with people not paying attention’. Its design was also considered too inflexible for the liturgical changes that were now expected. Winkley, then beginning work on St Margaret, Twickenham, ‘suspected that the building was more obsolete than people seemed to realize’. The acoustics were also criticised: electrical amplification was thought to create a distancing effect between clergy and congregation and should have been unnecessary. The architects admitted that their client’s brief had been incomplete and that they had been concerned less with liturgical function than with the creation of a numinous space. Coia concluded that ‘at the end of the day, the church was a place for religious worship and had to feel right for that purpose’.13
By then, however, Metzstein and MacMillan had begun to embrace the liturgical functionalism of the NCRG with more centralised church designs. St Bride had been designed in 1958, before the liturgical movement discourse in architecture had become widespread. When the Architectural Review asked the architects for material for an article on St Bride after its opening, the architects requested publication of another church instead, St Joseph at Faifley in Glasgow, since it was ‘of a more advanced liturgical form’.14 St Joseph, designed in 1960 and opened in 1963, was the firm’s first church to depart from a linear plan, with seating on three sides of the sanctuary, all contained in a single pitched-roofed volume (Plan 2c). Even this building was designed for the old liturgy, however; its altar platform at the far side of the sanctuary platform, and the altar on the far side of its platform, designed for a priest to stand in front of it facing away from the people, gave the church a directional quality (Figure 7.6). The tabernacle was originally on the altar and a conventional heavy pulpit was constructed outside the sanctuary.15 Faifley drew on an awareness of liturgical movement principles, yet without anticipating the new liturgical practices that were soon to become the norm.
At Glenrothes, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia incorporated a liturgical arrangement common in many other churches across Britain of this period and before, but which would soon be regarded as a solecism: a devotional side altar behind the altar rails and within the space of the sanctuary. Liturgical movement writers, evoking the convention of the altar as a symbol of Christ, advocated only one altar in the sanctuary. Secondary shrines were thought to distract the congregation from the liturgy, and so, as the Second Vatican Council confirmed, they were to be few in number and visually discrete. Yet before the council many new churches were built with side altars inside the sanctuary, even by architects who knew of the liturgical movement in the 1950s, including Greenhalgh & Williams at St Columba and Our Lady of Lourdes in Bolton. Side altars had a necessary function in busy parishes and wherever there were several priests. Until the mid-1960s, priests had to say Mass every day. The result was a great many ‘private Masses’, as they were called, invariably said at side altars with little ceremony. Sandy & Norris’s chapel at Ratcliffe College in Leicester, for example, was dotted with side chapels in niches around the nave to cater for its ordained teaching staff. Even as late as 1967, the chapel by Greenhalgh & Williams at the Salesian school at Thornleigh in Bolton had only one side altar in the body of the chapel in response to the Second Vatican Council, yet a separate priests’ chapel was built behind it with ten small altars where staff could say their private Masses.16 Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, similarly, incorporated rows of silo-like side chapels at their seminary, St Peter’s College at Cardross (Figure 7.7).17
7.6 St Joseph, Faifley, Glasgow, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1960–63. View after early reordering, c.1965, when the tabernacle was moved to an altar behind the sanctuary. Photographer unknown. Source: Glasgow School of Art
In 1964, the first Vatican-approved experiments with concelebration took place, and the rite was soon approved for gatherings of clergy, replacing individual Masses with a liturgy celebrated by several priests around a single altar. Cardross was therefore outdated when it opened. So, too, was Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, its ring of side chapels largely redundant by 1967: the cathedral was opened with a concelebrated Mass, to which its sanctuary was considered perfectly suited. Ample sanctuaries with broad altars were now desired, such as that at Clifton Cathedral, where only one secondary altar was included.
7.7 St Peter’s College, Cardross, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1959–67. The ground-floor chapel was located at the end of the left-hand block, embraced by side chapels in towers. Photo: Thomson of Uddingston, c.1967. Source: Glasgow School of Art
While centralised plan types were being explored in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the prevailing type remained the big basilica with passage aisles or the single-volume rectangular box. Many such churches were built in the Archdiocese of Westminster, where Archbishop Godfrey espoused traditional forms in church architecture even while acknowledging the need for lay participation.18 John Newton of Burles, Newton & Partners built several such churches for Westminster with plain and open sanctuaries for liturgical visibility. Newton’s basilican church of St Aidan at East Acton opened the same year as his church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hayes, an even larger and more impressive modern basilica seating up to a thousand (Figure 7.8). Constructed in steel, it had a wide nave with sail-like vaults, its aisles filled with seating to maximise capacity. Even as he began exploring liturgically innovative plans, joining the NCRG, Newton continued to design longitudinal churches. Our Lady, Queen of Apostles at Heston, opened in 1964 but designed in 1961, retained seated aisles and framed the sanctuary with paired columns, though its broad interior was stark to focus attention on the liturgy (Figure 7.9).
St Francis de Sales at Hampton Hill was designed before the ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ had been promulgated, but despite its longitudinal plan it could still be interpreted according to the constitution’s principles (Figure 7.10). It had a single nave and wide sanctuary, and only one side chapel, set back and partly screened from the pews. Newton wrote about his design using liturgical movement ideas, saying that he had excluded stylistic mannerisms so that ‘the fabric of the church as an enclosing envelope does not exert itself but only contributes to the worship of the faithful’. One important function was that ‘the Priest is to be seen in the central position in the place of Christ with the people around him and united with him in what is being done by him’. Sanctuary and nave had to remain distinct but yet unified enough to express the unity of priest and people in the Mass.19 A group of parishioners wrote a further interpretation of the church’s architecture in terms close to those of Hammond and Maguire: ‘the important consideration is that the Liturgy can function in dignified surroundings where the people of God form one worshipping community’, they wrote. However, ‘one of the more recent problems of modern church architecture is that the round and D-shaped churches, which were regarded by many people to be the answer to the present demands of the Liturgy, are not fulfilling that function’. Noting that the church had been planned several years before, they nevertheless thought it
7.8 Immaculate Heart of Mary, Hayes, London, by Burles, Newton & Partners, 1958–62. View towards choir gallery over entrance: Stations of the Cross by Arthur Fleischmann. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
7.9 Our Lady, Queen of the Apostles, Heston, London, by Burles, Newton & Partners, 1961–64. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
7.10 St Francis de Sales, Hampton Hill, London, by Burles, Newton & Partners, 1964–67. Nave windows by Jerzy Faczynski and J. O’Neill & Sons; chapel on the right with stained glass by Gilbert Sheedy. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
admirably suited to the new Liturgy. The people of God are gathered in one group and speak with one voice; the free-standing Altar at low level, with the priest on one side and the people on the other … lends itself to the familiar pattern of the Last Supper. Together, very much together, we offer the Holy Sacrifice of worship.
More allegorically still, they thought that the ‘frieze’ – simple timber panels containing the Stations of the Cross – could be considered ‘an extension of the priest’s arms … [seeming] to enfold the whole congregation in the arms of Christ’.20 Though the longitudinal church often did result from liturgical conservatism, therefore, it did not necessarily equate to a passive or devotionally minded laity but could be rich in its meanings and open to liturgical emphasis.21
CANON LAW AND LITURGICAL FURNISHINGS
A perennial obstacle to reform in the Roman Catholic Church in Britain was a legalistic mentality. Every aspect of the liturgy and many aspects of church design were governed by canon law and the rubrics of the Roman Missal. These constraining texts made it hard for those who wished to introduce change to do so; yet the rules themselves could also stimulate creativity, and reading them with liturgical movement principles in mind was one method of reform. The Second Vatican Council cut across this approach by interrupting the continuity of canon law, leaving creativity suddenly unconfined. Before that moment of interruption, architects exercised their ingenuity within and through these strictly held parameters.
The rule-bound attitude in British Catholicism differed from the more contingent approach to canon law that was often seen on the continent. Joseph Rykwert, writing for a French audience, saw the British approach as a barrier to the development of a modern church art and architecture: ‘In England more than elsewhere … Catholics are obsessed by a meticulous liturgical observance’, he wrote. He explained that at an exhibition in London of modern French church architecture ‘even the most receptive critics fixated on one thing: that the candles on the altar are rather low, and that there are too often only two instead of six’.22 Rykwert believed the development of modern church architecture in France had been possible because of a freedom from rigidly applied rules. Such restrictions as the number, style and position of the candlesticks were viewed as formal conventions that architects who took a traditional approach accepted; modern architecture, in contrast, was defined by its desire to transgress past conventions to envision new forms. Architects, however, generally prohibited from making such transgressions, probed the interstices of the text-bound rubrics to exploit their ambiguities and, in the process, revealed their contingency.
O’Connell’s Church Building and Furnishing and articles in the Clergy Review explained and clarified the rules on liturgy and church architecture. His book could be read in different ways. Because it explained the laws in detail, with diagrams and photographs to show the correct forms of liturgical furnishings, it could lead architects and clergy to an especially rule-based attitude, and indeed the book was widely consulted for this purpose. On the other hand it also explained the historical development of liturgical furnishings and the origins of the rules, suggesting their contingent status and arming architects with knowledge that could unlock possibilities for new forms, especially through an understanding of historical precedents that might seem more ‘authentic’ expressions of purpose than the current forms of furnishings. O’Connell accepted the liturgical movement and in setting out the forms and histories of liturgical elements wanted to make them better understood. Canon law did not stipulate general forms for churches other than a vague condition of adherence to tradition, giving wide potential for innovation in church design, but when it came to smaller liturgical components the Church gave detailed prescriptions, mostly derived from liturgical texts. In diagrams and photographs O’Connell showed the acceptable forms for the altar: a stone table top (the mensa) with stone supports that could have an infill to give a solid form and a recess (the sepulchre) to contain relics, all aspects implied by the consecration rite, which required the anointing of the joints between altar and supports and the insertion of relics. Six candlesticks had to be set on the altar and a tabernacle fixed to it in the centre; a stepped platform raised it up and a ciborium or baldachino sheltered it. The altar also had to be covered with prescribed cloths including a frontal and the tabernacle had to be veiled. Finally, there had to be a crucifix, ‘not an accessory, but the principal thing on the altar’.23
The element that would become most passionately debated after the Second Vatican Council was the tabernacle. O’Connell explained how the Blessed Sacrament had originally not been the subject of private devotions and that at first it had been reserved away from the high altar, only becoming associated with the altar in the Middle Ages and fixed upon it from the seventeenth century (except in cathedrals and monasteries where the high altar was used for choral services). Twentieth-century canon law prescribed this arrangement and the Assisi Congress temporarily reinforced it: after delegates had discussed the desirability of alternative locations for the tabernacle, Pius XII’s speech denounced attempts to separate tabernacle and high altar, and the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of Rites issued a ruling in 1957 restating the existing law and rejecting innovation.24 In Britain such regulations were accepted literally, as the argument between priest and bishop at Our Lady of Fatima in Harlow shows.
Dioceses would often take an interest in liturgical furnishings, censoring anything that seemed incorrect or unprecedented. Archbishop Gray of St Andrews and Edinburgh, for example, visited Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s church of St Mary and the Angels at Camelon in Falkirk on its completion in 1960 and gave a list of alterations to the parish priest Anthony Flynn. The candlesticks, he insisted, had to be separate, suggesting that the architects had designed a combined version that did not comply with the rules. The side altars also had to be repositioned to be centred within their spaces and the baptistery was to be provided with railings according to canon law.25 At St Paul, Glenrothes, a few years earlier the architects had proposed an altar in the form of a single large block, to be told by Gray that, according to O’Connell, the supports and table top had to be distinguished and their joints visible.26 As a result they designed an altar more table-like in form, though usually invisible beneath its frontal. Similarly Archbishop Godfrey of Westminster demanded that architects submit detailed drawings of liturgical furnishings, especially if the design was likely to be unusual. David Stokes, for example, was quizzed over Greenford, asked for a detailed drawing of the altar and baldachino and told to show the parish priest a similar built example.27 In Liverpool, the Sites and Buildings Commission checked liturgical furnishings and scrutinised plans. Not only did the diocese prevent Weightman & Bullen from placing the tabernacle in a separate chapel at St Ambrose, Speke, they also made small modifications to their other designs. At St Catherine, Lowton, the altar platform had to be raised from one step to three in line with convention; at St Ambrose, an initial proposal for a tabernacle raised on legs was swiftly rejected; and at Leyland, the ceramic suspended crucifix by Adam Kossowski was approved but was interpreted as ‘an ornament or decoration’ and a liturgical altar cross was also required.28 In all these cases the architects were attempting to change the normal formulae for liturgical elements, even if only in subtle ways. When architects repeated designs from one church to another, they often did not need to submit drawings for special approval but could simply indicate a precedent that had already been approved. Diocesan scrutiny was therefore a powerful incentive against innovation.
Sanctuaries generally had a familiar appearance, a recognisable Catholic form that varied little from one church to another. Nevertheless there was room for creativity within the rules and a variety of treatments of liturgical objects in modern churches. For example some form of canopy over the altar was a canonical requirement. In traditional guise it might follow the early Christian or Romanesque ciborium. One striking example was that of Hector Corfiato’s St William of York at Stanmore, where art deco style columns in black and gold supported a hat-like confection over the high altar, in a church that the parish priest had asked to be ‘in the style of the Romanesque’ (Figure 7.11).29 The more usual treatment of this feature was an ornamented suspended baldachino such as those at St Stephen, Droylsden, and St Boniface, Salford, elegantly designed to complement the modern architecture of their churches. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was often reinterpreted as a corona. At Massey & Massey’s St Raphael, Stalybridge, for example, a square rig of lights hung from the centre of the dome over the freestanding altar; and at St Teresa of Avila in St Helens by William & J. B. Ellis, opened in 1965 but designed before the Second Vatican Council, a cylindrical crown of timber slats was suspended over the imposing marble altar (Figure 7.12). Gillespie, Kidd & Coia experimented with different approaches: at St Charles in Glasgow and St Bride at East Kilbride, concrete cantilevered projections constituted baldachinos; at their church of the Sacred Heart, Cumbernauld, open coffers in the timber ceiling suggested this form (Figure 7.13). The canonically required feature became a pretext for expressive architectural experiment, in some cases integrated into the structure of the building.
The design of the altar was especially carefully considered. The rule that the front should be covered was often ignored, however, in favour of a permanent decorative treatment of the altar face. Altars were generally made to resemble single heavy blocks, concealing their internal structures with facings of stone, and designed to complement other furnishings. At St Nicholas at Gipton in Leeds by Patricia Brown and David Brown of Weightman & Bullen, for example, liturgical movement aims were clearly stated by the architects, yet the treatment of the altar remained conventional, if stylistically modern: it was broad and deep and placed close to the rear wall of the sanctuary, which was described as a ‘reredos’ and ornamented with pieces of gold mosaic (Figure 7.14).30 The altar had a heavy overhanging mensa, and its base was clad in white marble, its front decorated with slate panels containing gilded crosses. Its scale and richness made the altar a strong visual feature complementing the dramatic modern interior. At the Holy Apostles, Pimlico, London, a modern basilican church by Hadfield, Cawkwell & Davidson, the altar was set against the rear wall. A sandstone mensa rested on a rectangular base with slate panels engraved with gilded symbols, the alpha and omega and a central image of the lamb symbolising the sacrifice of Christ. At both Gipton and Pimlico the treatment of the altar extended to the communion rails: brass and white marble in Leeds, slate with gilded figures of the Apostles in London.
7.11 St William of York, Stanmore, London, by Hector O. Corfiato & Partners, 1960–61. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
7.12 St Teresa, Newtown, St Helens, by William & J. B. Ellis, 1964–65. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2008
7.13 Sacred Heart, Cumbernauld, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1961–64. Stations of the Cross in dalle de verre by Sadie McLellan. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2011
