What is the best reason to build beautiful churches? Beauty saves souls. Beauty draws us to itself and points us beyond to God who is the incarnation of beauty. Seeing a beautiful church can lead people to want to know more about the God that inspired such beauty.
There is a story over at the Catholic News Agency about a Chinese artist who came to the faith through the beauty of the cathedral.
Yan Xu had just resigned from a job in 2003 and was feeling lost as to where to go next. As an artist, she always carries a sketchbook and so one day she sat down across from Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in the central China city of Wuhan, and just started sketching. She found the church to be magnificent, beautiful, and returned to turn her sketch into a painting.
On the third day a priest from the cathedral came over to talk to her, by that time she was hungry to learn more about the faith.
Yan Xu was received into the church at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral on the Easter Vigil of 2011. You can read more about her story and the difficulty of being a religious minority over at CNA’s website.
Too often it seems that, today, our churches are noteworthy because they were designed by a world famous architect rather than for their stunning beauty. And the architects themselves seem more interested in creating a unique, groundbreaking design, than they are in drawing upon the rich visual vocabulary and history of church architecture.
There is evidence that this attitude is changing. There are a number of architects who draw upon tradition and design churches that are modern but still evoke the beauty and grandeur that has inspired the church for thousands of years. Unfortunately it seems that these talented designers are commissioned for relatively small projects while the high profile jobs, cathedrals for instance, still go to high profile architects who design monstrosities that are anything but beautiful.
Who would be drawn to a faith that worships in a building that looks like nothing more than a jumble of oversized children’s building blocks?
To paraphrase a comment from my recent article in Crisis magazine, if we want beautiful churches that draw people to God, then we need to hire architects that design beautiful churches.