The Pros & Cons of Cathedrals

In San Francisco recently, Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph McGucken signed the final contracts to build an $8,000,000 replacement for the old, Gothic St. Mary's Cathedral, which burned to the ground in 1962. Much to his surprise, a group of priests and laymen objected to his plans for the cathedral, on the grounds that the money should be used instead for humanitarian projects such as low-cost housing for the poor. The protesters cited Pope Paul's encyclical Populorum Progressio and the Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church in the Modern World in arguing against any ostentatious display of churchly wealth so long as men are starving. McGucken retorted that his archdiocese already spends $4,000,000 a year in combating poverty--and that a cathedral was a necessary means of inspiring men to prayer.

As it happens, some other Christians are concerned about the money that U.S. churches are putting into imposing temples of worship. Last month a group of seminarians from the Jesuits' Woodstock College in Maryland demonstrated in front of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, protesting the $25 million that has been earmarked to com plete the huge basilica. Some Episcopalians have publicly questioned whether their church ought to spend any more money on the impressive Washington Cathedral, which has cost $30 million since it was started 60 years ago, and will need at least $20 million more to finish. Sensitive to this kind of com plaint, New York's Bishop Horace Donegan last year announced that construction on his massive Cathedral of St. John the Divine would be indefinitely suspended.

A main argument against building big churches is that the money spent buying stone might better be used buying bread for the poor. "For every dollar that goes into a church building, a dollar should go to feed starving children," says Presbyterian Minister Robert Hudnut of Wayzata, a Minneapolis suburb, who believes that all new churches should reflect "humility and economy." Rochester's innovation-minded Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (see PEOPLE) feels much the same way; up to 3% of the value of every parish construction project must be paid to Sheen's office in the form of a levy, which is then channeled to the poor in the district.

Tents & Churchlets. Some theologians believe that cathedrals, and all large churches, are obsolete, at least as far as the city is concerned. San Francisco's Grace Episcopal Cathedral, with a capacity of 2,392, averages only 500 to 600 worshipers on a typical Sunday; except at services celebrating Christmas and Easter, St. John the Divine is rarely filled.

Looking far ahead, some church visionaries see a trend toward more worship in small, homogeneous groups--either at home, at work, or in chapel-size churchlets. Presbyterian Theologian Robert McAfee Brown of Stanford, who believes that the traditional parish structure will eventually be an anachronism, suggests that the church should be prepared to quarter itself "in campaign tents rather than cathedrals. That would reflect the mobility of the modern church and allow it to go where the people are." Otherwise, Brown predicts, "we'll have a lot more buildings than we know what to do with."

Moral Crises. The majority of U.S. Christians are not yet prepared to worship in tents, and many American churches, in city as well as suburb, are hardly big enough to accommodate their regular crowds of Sunday worshipers. Moreover, plenty of churchmen see no conflict between service to man and obeisance to God. "I do not believe that not building a cathedral is going to solve the problems of the ghettos," says Georgia Baptist Layman C. H. Lampin. "On that philosophy nothing beautiful would ever be created at any cost." Even Urbanologist Daniel Moynihan deplored Bishop Donegan's decision to stop work on St. John's. "Three summers of rioting and out goes 50 years of zoning," he said. "Twenty centuries of Christianity and we conclude that in a time of moral crisis we will cease work on the most splendid place of worship ever conceived in the city. The retreat from magnificence has gone on long enough."

Moynihan also argues that "an era of great public works is as much needed in America as any other single element in our public life." If that is true, there is certainly no reason why the churches should not contribute their share--and Archbishop McGucken wisely notes that San Francisco "would become terribly secular without some skyline recognition of God."

Nonetheless, there is a widespread consensus that new cathedrals and churches ought to be significantly different from the old. First, they should be much more adaptable--designed not just as places of worship but as buildings that could house a variety of Christian activities, from study centers to theaters. Secondly, they ought to be ecumenical in sponsorship.

In the future, some churchmen be lieve, cathedrals will be built not under the auspices of one faith but through the cooperation of many.

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