Topic:  Through history, why have Catholics built elaborate churches instead of using their money for service to the poor?

Source of this posting: Moderator response

Date originally posted: May 30, 2003

Moderator who originally posted this source: Father Phillip

Question:  Through history, why have Catholics built elaborate churches instead of using their money for service to the poor?

Answer: 

Thank you, Joy, for your question. I see from your profile that you're an adult woman working as a Director of Relgious Education in a Catholic parish and that you're asking this question for the benefit of Confirmation students. It's a good question. Let me suggest some avenues of reflection which might be fruitful for you and your Confirmation students...

1. Surely as Catholic Christians we are to serve the poor -- about that there can be no doubt. However, our FIRST responsibilty is to worship and serve our God. We should never denigrate the poor or ignore them, but we must put worshipping our good and gracious God above all things, people, relationships, institutions, or oligations.

In that context, then, many of the great and "elaborate" Church buildings which have risen under the aegis of the Catholic communities throughout the world and throughout history have been precisely in response to their and our obligation to worship God before all other things. These great 'houses of worship' were built many times as "statements" about the grandeur and majesty of the God Who creates the heavens and the earth. So, I would suggest that these church buildings are testimonies to the profound love and devotion of generations of people who saw building them as their personal and communal response to the goodness which God had lavished upon them in the form of life and salvation, family and friends, food and work -- and so many other evidences of God's love.

2. Sometimes church buildings have been in whole or in part the result of a desire to be remembered by some patron or Church official, or out of a misguided sense of competition ("they have a big church, so we must have a bigger one"), or some other not-so-noble rationalization. No truthful Catholic should ever deny those unfortunate realities in our history.

But the Gospel -- remember: the word "Gospel" means 'good news' -- about those kinds of unfortunate motivations and situations is that God can and does bring glorious things out of even the worst circumstances. The aphorism is: "God writes straight with crooked lines!" The greatest example in the whole history of the world of that fact is the Crucifixion of our dear Lord. Surely the hideous passion and death of this gentle, innocent, and loving man was a profoundly "wrong" thing to happen; it the result of lies and treachery and jealousy and fear and many other very wrong motives. But God took this horrible wrong and made something wonderful and glorious and salvific for all humankind: the Resurrection brings salvation to us!

So, were lots of churches built for "the wrong reasons"? Sure. But God has taken those "wrong reasons" and turned the results into edifying testimonies to the faith of the builders and artisans and to the glory of God.

3. Does this fact relieve us -- today -- from an obligation to help the poor? NO WAY! We are fully obligated to build new systems and cultures that do not exploit the poor, that do not advance what the Holy Father calls the "culture of death," that we NOT repeat the mistakes of the past.

Your Confirmation students are right to ask this question. But in doing so they are acknowledging that they recognize that things have changed and that things have to keep changing! They are also acknowledging some sense that THEY are responsible to help make those changes! By asking the question, they are saying, "We are not free just to sit around and do nothing for the poor and marginalized."

They have to listen to God's call for their lives. They have to say "YES!" to God's invitation to become priests and religious women so that they can change what is not fully according to God's will in the decisions of the Church. They have to say "YES!" to God's call to become doctors who are healers and lawyers who work to care for the poor. They have to say "YES!" to God's invitation to stop wasting the earth's resources by driving SUVs and being indifferent to the ecological disaster that is ruining the Lord's world. They have to say "YES!" to God's call to give THEIR money to charitable causes -- at least 10% of everything they have now and everything they will make! They have to say "YES!" to God's challenge to change our society so that we do not revert to war and violence when we don't get our way.

By asking this very legitimate question about why the Catholic Church built elaborate churches through history, these students are saying that they recognize that in today's world those kinds of options are probably not the best. They are saying that they want to change their own behaviours so that the poor in our country and throughout the world will have all the rights which human life should afford them. They are saying that they are not content with the "status quo" which exploits workers, which relies on racism, sexism, homophobia, and class-ism for humor and to maintain the privilege of the "few" while the "many" are hungry and homeless.

4. Another aspect of the way we might understand these "elaborate churches" is that they provided work for laborers and artists in those past generations throughout history. The cultural milieu in which those churches were built was profoundly different from ours. The over-all standard of living was significantly lower than and different from ours. So, the fact that the Catholic Church would provide projects in which common people could labor with some kind of remuneration was itself a way that the poor received some help or benefit.

Today we have -- in many countries -- a kind of "social welfare net" which provides help to many (though not all) of the poor. In ancient and medieval societies no such "net" existed. So, simply having a place to live, some kind of work to do, and the "gruel" of food to eat were "service to the poor."

While I do not think that too much should be made of this part of my response to you, what I am saying is a fact. Specifically, for your students, it suggests that they must be careful of what is sometimes rather grandly call "anachronistic predication." That means that we have to be wary of the tendency to take our experience in the 21st century and make criticisms of people, institutions, or circumstances long ago in which OUR experiences and assumptions are just totally foreign.

5. Finally, I would suggest that you remind your students that ART is a gift from God. God has created humanity with many talents and endowments: intellectual, spiritual, physical, etc. One of those talents which inheres in the human person is the ability to co-create with God and express that creativity in artistic ways. Whether it's rap, poetry, music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, or any other kind of artistry, the resulting "art" is a gift from God.

Throughout the history of at least western Europe and America, one of the primary "enablers" of art has been the Catholic Church. By commissioning architects and engineers, painters and sculptors, stained-glass-workers and musicians, stone masons and carvers -- and so many others -- the Church preserved for the ages many of the gifts which God wanted to give humankind.

As even contemporary experience bears out: Artists are very often poor. So, I would suggest that by building these "elaborate churches" we were serving at least one constituency of the poor.

So, reflect, think, pray, study about some of these comments. I think you and your students will see that while we certainly do have a solemn obligation to serve the poor in concrete, specific ways, the building of those elaborate churches in years past was not simply a way to avoid service to the poor.

Be well!
Father Phillip