At First Things today, Fr. Neuhaus has commentary on a new book on St. Peter’s Basilica (a book which Michael reportedly has somewhere and is reading) and some reflections of his own:

On my first viewing of St. Peter’s many years ago, a Catholic friend said, “Isn’t it magnificent.” To which I responded, “Was it worth the division of the Church?” Of course, that was in my Lutheran days, but it’s still a good question. To be sure, there were many other causes of the Reformation, but the abuse of indulgence peddling to build St. Peter’s played a large part. In the Rome of the time, a quarrelsome monk in Germany did not rank as an issue of major concern. Scotti reports that Leo took a few moments out from an afternoon of hunting to sign some routine papers, including the excommunication of Luther. I don’t know her source for that, but it is quite believable.

I used to have something of an aversion to the Baroque art that dominates the churches and monuments of Rome. The innumerable putti, those cherubic babies flying about or lolling on pillars, are at best cute, and saints sticking their legs through ceilings are more than a bit much. The clutter of the Baroque leaves no room for the imagination, I thought. It is pushy, competitive, and demanding of attention it frequently does not deserve. I have over the years become somewhat more appreciative of the style, however, and was struck by this reflection by Scotti:

Go to read Scotti’s reflection, and I’ll just say that what I found unappealing about the baroque was not the clutter of it, but the particular theme of some of it – the reflection of that counter-Reformation moment in which we were going to show the Protestants that Peter and his successors were the real, and only deal, and we’re going to plaster them all over the place in between our angels and curlicues. (Because, of course, the culminating point  of St. Peter’s is not a crucifix or even an image of Jesus, but…the Chair of Peter.)  I seem to recall this hitting me with a great deal of force in Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola a Campo Marzio in which there is a whole wall covered with an extremely baroque tomb of some pope, I believe. At that point Michael murmured, "How they thought this was going to win the Protestants back is anyone’s guess."

But in the context in which the issue was power (and I don’t mean that necessarily in a negative way) and that was the push and the pull between all sorts of forces claiming authority, I suppose it was an inevitable reaction and response. And it embodied the truth, albeit in an exaggerated way, as is the case with every era, which then is balanced out in the next.

So, yes, I’m more of a Romanesque fan myself, but even though, I will say that one of the times we went to Mass in St. Peter’s, I had a span during the liturgy where I got sucked into the vortex of the mass of angels above the Chair of Peter, around the Holy Spirit, that flowing, wriggling, almost orgiastic mass of little angels drawn in by the light, drawing us into it as well, and I thought I understood – to depict the glory of God, the express the fullness, the pure energy of it, the life the vigor – is this what Bernini was trying to do? If so, it worked.

ew