Put Them (Churches) Back the Way They Were, by Randall Smith

By Randall Smith, The Catholic Thing, Sept. 21, 2021

Randall B. Smith is a Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas. …

*Images: These before-and-after photos are of St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Peoria, IL, the result of a renovation undertaken by Murals by Jerico. It can be done!

I am an adult convert to Catholicism, so I didn’t live through the iconoclastic destruction of beautiful churches that happened in the 1960s and 1970s. But the damage was obvious even to a secularist convert.  When I entered a Catholic church for the first time in the early 1980s after some friends invited me to go to Mass, I don’t know exactly what I was expecting – incense, I suppose, rows of priests in cassocks with funny hats, solemn gestures, statues of the saints, altars to Mary.  What I found was orange carpet in a building that looked like a tacky 1970s living room of the nouveau riche, except in place of a hot tub there was a baptismal font and instead of a centralized kitchen, there was something resembling an altar.  But the wooden beams were there and the peaked roof and the cushioned furniture.

And the music!  Dear Lord.  I had grown up as what we might call a “distant Methodist.”  Never comfortable in “church,” one of the things I disliked most was waiting for the congregation to get through all eight or ten verses of those long Methodist hymns.  It was absolutely excruciating to me as a child. But after my first visit to the local Catholic church, I turned to a friend and said, “Well, that was interesting.  But you guys need a decent Methodist hymnal.”  And this from a guy who had something like musical PTSD from my childhood experiences with the Methodist hymnal.  But there’s torment from boredom, and then there’s torture. …

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