Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Diary of a Newly-Minted Papist: at the Church of Saint Agnes, East 43rd Street

A Requiem Mass for All Souls was celebrated yesterday evening at St. Agnes Church using the Old Rite with chant and early polyphony. The liturgy and music were superb and I was deeply impressed with the expertise of the celebrants, most of whom looked about half my age.

St. Agnes was for many years the home of the silver-tongued orator Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. The original church, a Victorian-Gothic pile of gloomy Catholic bricks, burned sixteen years ago and was rebuilt in classical style. It doesn't work for me. The proportions seem wrong and the place has the look and feel of having been done on the cheap. It is also not helped by a garish mural on the east wall painted by the cartoonist for the New York Post.

The main problem with St. Agnes, fortunately, is an easy fix: the interior is way over lit, far too many glaring fixtures giving the church all the sanctity of a Holiday Inn conference room. If they left some of the fixtures turned off or installed lower-wattage bulbs, St. Agnes would be vastly improved and would have a much lower electric bill as a bonus.

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