David Michael Miller
There’s an old joke about bad architecture. If you can’t tear it down you can always plant vines.
It’s impossible for me to separate my opinion of the new St. Paul’s Catholic Center building and its gaudy mosaic (see, right there, gaudy is pejorative term, isn’t it?) with my conflicted views of the church itself.
After coming to the UW in 1979 and being on campus for a few weeks my mother asked me if I had found a church. I answered that I had found the Catholic Center, which was absolutely true. I knew exactly where the building was though I had yet to step foot in it. And except for a friend’s wedding several years later, I never did.
Since leaving the family homestead almost 40 years ago, I have avoided not just Catholicism but all religion and pretty much all spirituality like the plague. Still, I have to acknowledge that there are plenty of people I respect who are devout or at least lightly practicing some faith and I understand the role religion can play in infusing people’s lives with meaning and purpose.
I just haven’t found a need for that sort of thing myself, which probably confirms my shallowness. For myself the best answer I can muster to all ultimate questions is, how the heck should I know? I’m content to leave it at that. I’m more comfortable with an honest uncertainty than with a made up faith. I am not on a journey. I will take what comes.
Anyway, it’s hard for me to tease out my ambivalence toward my Catholic upbringing — I survived 12 years of Catholic education — with my feelings toward the gaudy (see, I did it again) mosaic and the building itself on the UW campus.
But let me try. It seems to me that the diocese went from awful to awful. The St. Paul’s of the late 1960s version captured the stripped down, exposed cement Brutalist phase of campus architecture. You could ask what the church was thinking, but you would also have to ask what others were thinking about the University Bookstore next door or the Mosse Humanities building down the street or a bunch of other bunkers built in the same era. The church just joined with the rest of the culture in going through a bad phase.
So, a new incarnation of St. Paul’s was a welcome idea. How could it be worse? Well, they seem to have found a way. The building itself looms over everything else on that side of the mall (most notably the Presbyterians’ Pres House) and it is modeled on an ancient church in Rome. The mosaic makes a loud statement about the church being the only true path to heaven. There’s little doubt that this is the very intentional statement of the extremely conservative Bishop Robert Morlino of the Madison diocese. He had a chance to build a big, lasting billboard hovering over the center of the famously liberal UW campus and he took every inch of his opportunity.
The building and its mosaic sends a message: “We’re the Catholic Church. We’ve been around for a long time. We have all the answers. You better listen to us, you heathens. Or else.” It’s Big Religion at its pushiest and at its literal and symbolic ugliest.
Since we’re celebrating the anniversary of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and since I married a Norwegian Lutheran, if I were forced into a faith I’d probably take the Lutherans. I favor their understatement and their more democratic approach to salvation, though I do find more to like about the Catholics’ open embrace of beer in contrast to weak church basement coffee. Give me Lutheran doctrine and Catholic cuisine.
If the Lutherans were building their campus center on the Catholics’ real estate I have to believe the building would have been Scandinavian tasteful and respectful to its neighbors. Instead, the Catholics went from a bunker to an over-the-top statement, thumbing their noses at the rest of the campus and what it stands for.
Buildings last a long time, but they’re not forever. Pope Francis is moving my old religion in a positive direction with folks like Bishop Morlino fighting tooth and nail to pull it backwards. I have to hope that Francis is the future and Morlino is the past. Maybe some day the church will plant vines.
