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The Church Building as Sacramental Sign and Neighborhood Center A Lecture By: Philip Bess The lengthy title of my talk this afternoon is a tribute to both the complexity of my topic and the audacity of my thesis---a thesis which is no less audacious for not being originally mine. The existential distance between the City of God and a post-conciliar parish church today is on the one hand so vast for most of us that we can barely see a relationship, if indeed we can see any relationship at all. On the other hand, the City of God and the parish church are also very close: they are as distant from and close to one another as the Body and Blood of Christ are from and to ordinary bread and wine. So my talk today is not about the sacred and the profane; rather my talk today is about the sacred and the mundane---which is to say, my entire talk presumes the Catholic sacramental sensibility that matter matters: which in good Aristotelian / Thomist thought also means that form matters. What is of the world (mundus) is of value by virtue of both its original created goodness and its sacramental potential, its ability to both signal to us and manifest among us that sacred order that is otherwise other, but that is also our Origin, our Destiny, and our Companion along the journey. Thus I am asking you to think with me this afternoon about the Church building in the City and the Church building as a City; about the inside significance of the Church building and the outside significance of the Church building; and above all of the Church building as a sacrament of and visible witness to the Christian Paschal Mystery of the ongoing Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. In noting the dichotomies (however relational) not only between the sacred and the mundane but also between the church building and the neighborhood, I have left myself the difficult choice of where actually to begin. G.K. Chesterton wrote of the philosophical writings of St. Thomas Aquinas that beginning on the lowest rungs of the ladder of logic, “St. Thomas besieged and mounted the House of Man;” and “by arguments as honest and laborious, he climbed up to the turrets and talked with angels on the roofs of gold.” Given my own temperamental affinities to this bottom-to-top inductive approach to things, I would like to begin with a consideration of “Cities and the Good Life,” a short introduction to and apologia on behalf of urbanism that includes consideration of the traditional Christian understanding of the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the earthly city and the heavenly city. I will then proceed to a consideration of the formal order of traditional cities---a kind of “Urban Form 101” that focuses upon the neighborhood as the basic unit of urban form---and ask you here to note along the way the prominence of church buildings in that traditional urban formal order. I will then turn my attention to the church building itself, not only as a neighborhood center---the “lowest rung of the ladder” as it were---but as a sacrament of the City of God, higher than which we do not rise. This portion of my talk will briefly consider not only a typology of historic church form, but also some arguments for legitimate diversity in church form and its limits; as well as a pragmatic argument for self-limitation in church form today. I will conclude with a practical suggestion about how parishes and dioceses might go about promoting a better relationship between churches and their neighborhood context---indeed, how parishes better might go about promoting neighborhoods.
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