William Cecil James Philip John Paul Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow (styled Viscount Clonmore from his birth until succeeding to the earldom in 1946) was received into the Church at the age of thirty in 1932. Having attended Mass with the family’s Catholic servants, he was banished from visiting the family home on Sundays in addition to being disinherited. He later married the architect Eleanor Butler who served in Seanad Éireann from 1948-1951. Above is one of three photographs of Viscount Clonmore in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

[T]here has been a great deal of press conjecture about the reasons behind the rapid growth of Christianity in China – one item in particular in that frivolous girls’ magazine called The Times. Could it be, as the airhead bimbo who wrote the piece opined, a result of the progress of capitalism in China? Or might it have something to do with the Hegelian dialectic? You could be tempted by her baroque phraseology to take her half-seriously: until you realise with a shudder that this is the same Madchen who writes The Times‘ regular columns on knicker elastic and of who’s going up and down in the celebrity ratings.

Perhaps – I don’t know, but perhaps – the rapid rise of Christianity in China has something to do with its appeal to hearts and minds: to the intuition that this thing called the Christian faith has the ring of truth about it? It doesn’t sound, on the face of it, to be an implausible thought with which to start.

It’s in five sections: here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.

On Sunday 21 August 2011, the Church of St Agnes on 43rd Street in Manhattan was host to a group of Catholic ambassadors to the United Nations for the regular 11:00 Extraordinary Form Mass, offered by Fr. Richard Trezza OFM. (Fr. Cid, a recently ordained Franciscan priest was also in choro). The group included representatives from Grenada, Haiti, the Philippines, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the Empire of Japan.

The informal gathering, formed just this year, is open to Catholic Permanent Representatives and Deputy Permanent Representatives — the first- and second-highest ranking diplomats at national missions to the U.N. — and has heard Mass at a number of different parishes around Manhattan.

Fra Fredrik John Patrick Crichton-Stuart was born September 6, 1940 to Lord Rhidian Crichton-Stuart (son of the 4th Marquess of Bute) and his wife Selina van Wijk (daughter of the Ambassador of the Queen of the Netherlands to the French Republic). He was raised in Scotland and North Africa (where his father was British Delegate to the International Legislative Assembly of Tangier) and was educated first at Carlekemp in North Berwick and then at Ampleforth. He joined the Order of Malta in 1962, later being named the Delegate for Scotland & the Northern Marches. In 1993 he was appointed Chancellor of the resurrected Grand Priory of England. Fra Freddy became Grand Prior himself when his cousin, Fra Andrew Bertie, died in 2008 and was succeeded by the then-Grand Prior of England, Fra Matthew Festing.

Fra Freddy was a devoted follower and promoter of the traditional form of the Roman rite. He joined Una Voce Scotland in 1996 and became secretary in 2000. Two years later he was named councillor and senior vice-president of FIUV, the International Federation ‘Una Voce’, and briefly served as its president in 2005.

Over the past year or so Fra Freddy had been varying ill but seemed to recover. I am told he was found dead yesterday morning, still clasping his breviary. He was well-known in Edinburgh and beyond, and he will be missed by his many friends as well as those who worked and volunteered with him or interacted with him in his charitable activities.

Fr Mark over at Vultus Christi posted this prayer to Saint Joseph for priests a few weeks back, and it seems worth reblogging.

O glorious Saint Joseph,
who, on the word of the angel
speaking to you in the night,
put fear aside to take your Virgin Bride into your home,
show yourself today the advocate and protector of priests.
Protector of the Infant Christ,
defend them against every attack of the enemy,
preserve them from the dangers that surround them
on every side.
Remember Herod’s threats against the Child,
the anguish of the flight into Egypt by night,
and the hardships of your exile.
Stand by the accused;
stretch out your hand to those who have fallen;
comfort the fearful;
forsake not the weak;
and visit the lonely.
Let all priests know that in you
God has given them a model
of faith in the night, obedience in adversity,
chastity in tenderness, and hope in uncertainty.
You are the terror of demons
and the healer of those wounded in spiritual combat.
Come to the defence of every priest in need;
overcome evil with good.
Where there are curses, put blessings,
where harm has been done, do good.
Let there be joy for the priests of the Church,
and peace for all under your gracious protection.
Amen.

GOOD ARCHITECTURE requires a combination of willpower, taste, and resources. This nexus used to occur quite often; instances from the Renaissance and the long nineteenth century come most easily to mind. A late twilight of this combination is found in the magnum opus of the Italian architect Armando Brasini: the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Rome’s swish Parioli neighbourhood.

The church, a modern expression of the Baroque, has somewhat curious and disjointed origins. Every age has left its imprint on Rome in one way or another: the Rome of the Republic, the Rome of the Empire, the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of the Liberals, the Rome of the Fascists, the Rome of the Italian Republic. In the 1900s, it was realised that the Church had not made a significant contribution to the great architecture of Rome for some time. Worse: the more significant structures of the past century were mostly built by the government of the Sardinian kingdom that conquered Rome and gave itself the fanciful, if geographically correct, name of ‘Italy’. A new church was needed, on a monumental scale, to be the age’s contribution to the great churches of Rome. Originally, the church was to be dedicated to St. James the Greater, but as preparations increased for the International Marian Year of 1924, it was decided the cult of the Immaculate Heart of Mary would take precedence instead.

The man chosen to design this great church was Armando Brasini. He had studied at the Institute of Fine Arts but his career began to take off during the 1920s. Brasini’s study of the theatrical style of the city of Rome caught the eye of Mussolini, who commissioned architectural and urbanistic work from Brasini for the Italian colonies in North Africa (in Tripoli, a savings bank, a war memorial, and a promenade).

In 1931 he participated in the commission drafting a new master plan for Rome. We can take comfort that some of his more dramatic and radical plans never came to fruition, for example making the Trevi fountain, ideally suited for its crowded piazza, the terminus of a long avenue from the Forum. The Parioli church, however, was undoubtedly his most interesting project.

Brasini’s first design for the International Votive Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was exorbitantly large, and the foundations were laid in the Marian year. The crypt was completed and consecrated in 1934 and the church put into the care of the Claretians. It was then that the first of a number of plan revisions had to be made. The soggy foundations of Parioli would not support Brasini’s massive dome, so it had to be revised downwards (to the version seen atop this article).

The work continued in the 1930s but had to cease during the Spanish Civil War as the Claretians recovered from the martyrdom of 270 of their congregation. The work began again in 1939 but work was stopped again when Italy entered the World War. The redesigns, complications, and interruptions depleted the funds raised, so in the end a simple dome was built to cover the drum completed in 1951, giving the church an incomplete finality.

The American postmodernist architect Robert Venturi offered these words on Brasini’s Parioli creation, as completed:

What you see is a harmonius and dissonant architectural symphony of complexly layered elements — formal and symbolic, masterfully defined by shade and shadow, combining rhetoric and substance, Baroque fanfare in Palladian drag, and whose juxtapositions — or rather, collisions — of curves, rectangles, diagonals — as squat columns, gross piers, useless buttresses, eloquent walls and voids, domeless drum, protruding and receding segmented pediment — must in the end compose in the Fascist era a glorious final gesture of what can be considered Baroque survival.

“Brasini’s work is intriguing as he applies that same vigor, bold massing and sense of experiment to the Roman Baroque.” So writes a much more reliable source of architectural knowledge, Matthew Alderman (c.f. previous mentions).

Brasini’s most interesting and most successful work… was ecclesiastical, though he also engaged in a variety of rather fanciful urban-design projects (including some very grand proposals for Rome itself, as seen above–though it is unclear to me if this predates or postdates the disastrous intervention of Mussolini in the same spot–and some odder outliers like one design for Riyadh in Arabia), public buildings, film sets, monuments (including a lighthouse-shaped monument to Christianity whose purpose still remains rather obscure to me) and even bridges. Sometimes they are more impressive than beautiful, giving a sort of unintentionally Goodhuesque strength to Roman Baroque, and others retain the delicacy of their original models, if perhaps at times developing them in intriguing new directions. While not at the level of the great masters Bernini and Borromini, and by no means a substitute for them, Brasini’s work suggests paths for a future classicism undoubtedly worth exploring.

Will Brasini’s great church at Parioli ever be completed? While it seems to easy to argue against, remember the church is not even a century old. Most of the great churches have taken several lifetimes before being finished, and even then there is a continual work of restoration and renewal. I think we ought to wait and see what the future generations decide.

The other day I stumbled upon this blog post from the Chairman of the LMS which included a segment from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, the hebdomodal programme shown on PBS in the States. The R&E spoke with Dr. John Rao, associate professor of history at St. John’s University in New York and director of the Roman Forum, about the annual Paris-Chartres pilgrimage which unites tradition-minded Catholics from across the globe every Pentecost. You can watch the segment or read the transcript here on the PBS website. It’s also available on gloria.tv here.

I’ve already commended any New York readers of andrewcusack.com to attend the series of historical lectures in Greenwich Village organised by the Roman Forum. It’s time already to consider the annual summer symposium in Gardone on Lake Garda in Italy. This isn’t a boring academic conference where stuffy professors will present papers, this is a symposium in the truest sense. The root of the Greek word means literally “to drink together”, and that more closely reflects the Gardone spirit: a jovial meeting of minds where matters high and low can be discussed in a convivial attitude surrounded by the beauty of the Italian lakes.

Everyone I know who’s attended the Gardone symposium has come back with rave reviews, and many add it to their annual calendar. I’m really, really hoping to make it there this year for the first time, and I hope others will give it a go as well. From June 30th through July 11th, 2011. Click here for more info.