Costruito da dio

Contemporary churches often resemble industrial warehouses, swimming pools, bars or garages. They almost never have a façade, and bell towers are a distant memory. Inside, they are disorienting and sterile, like waiting rooms, and instead of a dome there is a ceiling that brings to mind not God but the tenant upstairs. The rose windows have been replaced by skylights, and the sacred images by bland works of abstract art that evoke a vague spirituality devoid of transcendence; in homage to minimalism, the altars look as though they have come straight out of an Ikea catalogue. The horror of these new places of worship is the price the Church pays for modernity: after the Second Vatican Council, it abandoned traditional forms, preferring the most daring architectural extravagances or, worse still, eagerly submitting to the bureaucracy of planning committees.
And yet, new, grandiose cathedrals are springing up everywhere: these are the museums, designed by celebrated starchitects, driving forces of tourism and billion-pound investments, places no longer intended to preserve memories but to serve as luxurious packaging for contemporary art, themselves works of art, icons, places where culture becomes religion. Hordes of the faithful set off on pilgrimage: just as they once went to Chartres, they now head to the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Tate Modern in London to worship the idols and relics of the contemporary age.
In an amusing and amused manner, Angelo Crespi surveys these ugly churches, relating them to the guidelines of the Italian Episcopal Conference, which offers architects a comical little handbook born not of faith but of a sort of post-conciliar pauperistic moralism; on the other hand, he rails against the designs of deconstructivist museums—enormous alien spaceships made of glass, iron and concrete—which increasingly dominate the urban landscape, serving as entertainment factories and mills of meaning and consensus.