We Built Ugly Churches and Still Do Not Attract Young People

If the aesthetic and the emotional were not important, they would not have been a priority target of the enemies of God in postmodern times. From within the Catholic Church itself, hundreds of people have sought to destroy the beauty of the rite, art, and religious architecture for the sake of a supposed renewal: They tried to do away with the liturgy for being too old fashioned and to attract young people (who never came); they strove to change the classical religious architecture for the architectural ugliness of the 20th century (and were surprised that this did nothing to fill the churches either); it is as stupid as if, to fill a church with atheists, some priest chooses to innovate and preach in his homilies that God does not exist. Those who defended the building of new churches in industrial-style architecture — we should really call it “Soviet architecture” — used the same failed reasoning as those enlightened adepts of liberation theology.