Ugly Buildings, Beautiful Priests, by Austin Ruse

By Austin Ruse, Crisis Magazine, Jan. 3, 2025

Austin Ruse is a contributing editor to Crisis Magazine. He is president of the Center for Family and Human Rights in New York and Washington DC. He is the author of several books including, Under Siege: No Finer Time to be a Faithful Catholic (Crisis Publications). He can be reached at austinruse@c-fam.org.

While our local diocese is full of horrible-looking churches, it is also full of faithful priests.

We have a lot of spaceship churches in these parts, here in Northern Virginia, lots of churches in the round. If they look like churches, which most of them really don’t, they look like they may have been Protestant of a certain vintage.

The three local churches we attend on Sunday or daily are perfect examples. Our parish, St. Catherine of Siena, is set on a marvelous piece of pricey ground in Great Falls. What a wonderful setting for something beautiful. Instead, they put up a low-slung bunker-type thing, no shape to it from the outside, flat roof.

We sometimes attend Christ the Redeemer, which can only be described as a massive barn. From the outside, along Route 7, you see the old portion of the church that looks somewhat monastic. Still, though, it is a barn on the order of 50,000 square feet. …