architecture – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

St. George in legend and in architecture

April 23 is the feast day of St. George, a saint whose popularity — as well as just about everything we know about him — is legendary. The saint hailed from the Christian east — possibly from Cappadocia in present-day Turkey — but seems to have been martyred in the late third century in what is today Israel. George was a soldier who converted to Christianity. He was put to death after refusing to sacrifice to Rome’s pagan gods and undergoing excruciating tortures.

This defiant courage when standing up to a more powerful foe is perhaps what has made the figure of St. George resonate with so many throughout history. Perhaps it also contributed to the legendary stories of St. George slaying a dragon who was oppressing a Christian population. The saint is particularly popular among Arab Christians, who have long lived under the yoke of Muslim rule, and across the eastern Mediterranean — in Greece and Malta, for example, communities menaced for centuries by invasion from various Islamic empires pushing westward.

St. George, in fact, has found popularity wherever an underdog has felt the need for a champion. He is the patron, along with St. Sebastian, of one of Rome’s station churches. This year when I traveled to Barcelona (which I mentioned here and here), I learned that George is the patron of that city as well. The legend of St. George fits, in an unexpected way, into one of the city’s best known architectural monuments, Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló.

The Passion Facade of the Sagrada Família

Recently, I was fortunate to be able to take a brief trip to Barcelona for a research project (more on that to come). I spent as much time as I could at Antoni Gaudí’s marvel, La Sagrada Família (more on that, as well).

The entire basilica is a marvel, a deeply spiritual and prophetic building. This Holy Week, I thought it would be appropriate to share some photos of the Façana de la Passió, the Passion Facade. The sculptures broadly follow Gaudí’s instructions, though they are the work of Josep Maria Subirachs. If anything, the sculptures are even more harsh and austere than Gaudí’s original sketches. The hardness of the work is actually in keeping with Gaudí’s instructions.

Screens & Sacraments: a response

Last week I was pleased to take part in a conference organized by at the Gregorian University’s Faculty of History and Culture and the Institute of Liturgy at the University of Santa Croce entitled L’edificio di culto e gli artisti: A 25 anni dal primo Giubileo degli Artisti (2000-2025). The theme was church architecture and art over the past 25 years. The conference brought together an impressive group of international architects, artists, and theologians.

My own rather modest contribution was to extend the reflection I began in November’s issue of First Things on “Screens and Sacraments.” The talk seemed to produce a good deal of agreement that we need to be more discerning in how we allow technology to intrude on our sacred spaces.

On a related note, I was also happy to read a quite generous response to my article from Kevin Martin of Raleigh, North Carolina in the January 2025 issue of First Things. He reports being “strong-armed against [his] better judgement into Zooming the liturgy during the first year of the pandemic,” but eventually abandoning the practice because it felt wrong for many of the reasons I discussed in my article. He wonders, however, if I do not concede too much by suggesting that it might be OK to continue to broadcast the Liturgy of the Word, while stopping at the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

It’s a thoughtful question. I’d begin by saying that I am by no means arguing that one must broadcast any form of worship, and I have no quarrel with the decision of Rev. Martin’s church to give up streaming altogether. At the same time, I’m not an absolutist when it comes to technology, and some of the goods that people claim from broadcast Masses are real. Sick parishioners in particular can be helped to pray by seeing images of the liturgy online and comforted by the sight of their home church and familiar faces. These might supplement pastoral outreach to the homebound, without replacing it. I’m a little more skeptical about the evangelical or formative value of e-liturgy, since I think its appeal is mainly to those who have already been sufficiently formed by real liturgy.

Gargoyles, east and west

One of the highlights of my recent travels through Asia was visiting a number of quite impressive Buddhist temples and shrines. This was particularly the case in Thailand, though Chinese temples in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong were also filled with rich carvings, colorful statues, and piles of offerings including fruit, flowers, and burning incense. The warm red–the color of prosperity–of the Chinese temples reminded me of the red color with which the ancient Romans frescoed the inside of their homes. The desire for a warm hearth is written deeply in the human psyche.

A place of worship that makes an absorbing appeal to the senses is of course nothing new to me. I live in Rome, city of the baroque, where tales of religious ecstasy are told and retold in marble, mosaic, and fresco. The impulse of Christianity to express itself in art goes back to the Incarnation itself, to God revealing himself by entering into the world of the flesh, expressing his divinity in the matter of creation. We Catholics believe that he continues to communicate his grace to us through the sacraments. Artistic expressions using color, smell, and sound to amplify this divine work come naturally enough to a sacramental faith.

But what about Buddhism? Such expressions would seem to me, an outsider, to fit less naturally within Buddhist philosophy, with its distrust of all desire and negation of the world of pleasure and pain. Incarnation and Nirvana are two radically different beliefs. Yet how else to describe the gilded wats of Thailand, the cascades of angels and demons in glittering ceramic, than Buddhist baroque?

Of course, Thailand’s wats are not the architectural expression of pure Buddhist philosophy but a kind of non-culinary Asian fusion–Buddhism grafted into a still older mix of traditional folk beliefs, legends, and superstitions. How cogent such a mix is, I can’t evaluate. But there’s something human about that folk mix that I find more compelling than Buddhism in its purity, which I’ve always thought a little chilly.