New Wine, Old Wineskins?

Contributions to this volume continue this year’s reflections on the sixtieth anniversary of Sacrosanctum concilium. A recent trip home to Tennessee in the US highlighted for me the unusual moment we are occupy. When I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s, many newly constructed churches reflected the signs of those times: contemporary architecture, fan-shaped seating, and a commitment to liturgy that reflected the culture we inhabited—for better and for worse! (I have always been a fan of a good guitar folk Mass though not of homemade felt banners.) Among those newish churches was Sacred Heart Cathedral in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I was baptised in 1973. It was admittedly not the finest example of mid-century attempts at churches, adorned by an unfortunate twenty-foot-tall painting (by a parishioner) of Jesus on the back wall, descending as if from the clouds. But in many respects, it reflected the community that built it, a small suburban Roman Catholic minority deep in the US Bible Belt.

Fast forward to this third decade of the twenty-first century and an entirely different church sits on the same site. Rather than echoing the tentative footsteps of 1960s US Catholic modern architecture, it suggests instead the massive footprint of a Neoclassical European cathedral. Coming in at a cool US$58 million to construct, it dominates its neighborhood, dwarfing the Catholic school on campus and nearly consuming its predecessor—now the parish hall it was probably meant to be in the first place. The parish administrator noted that its grandeur has become the site of weekly ‘destination weddings’. (Have a look: shcathedral.org.) It fairly screams ‘Roman Catholic’ in a place where Southern Baptist and other forms of Protestant evangelicalism remain the majority Christian expression. It does not, however, even whisper ‘East Tennessee’, whether in the famous marble and granite the state is known for or in reflections of our beloved Smoky Mountains. Nor is there reference to the Cherokee First Nation whose members still live in those mountains or space for the settler arts of Appalachia, whether music or textiles. The church is an import through and through, meant to signal a uniquely Catholic way of being, one quite different from the world around it.