A Pilgrimage to Pittsburgh

...Above the arches in the nave are carved stone panels, depicting in vigorous and decorative style the leaders of the liberal and fine arts, showing that many of the greatest names in every department of human activity have been Catholics...

...and in a very large number of instances the two interests are united...

...Moreover, long ago I was fortunate enough to find out a way in which a visit to almost any place can be made interesting and valuable quite apart from whatever object, whether of business or pleasure, may cause one to visit it...

...it operates in the present day, in the things of today, linked to the things of the past, but not confined by or to the past: the road of tradition is the surest and safest highway to the future...

...he is an agent of law and order and beauty...

...But there is a very deep and vital Catholic spirit represented in the spiritual patriotism of a parish which fosters and sustains the rich and varied life of the Church as no other form of religious force can do...

...The nave, the sanctuary and the choir are now open...

...This was particularly impressive...

...so it is today, and so it will be until the end of time...

...it will weather better under the trying conditions of the atmosphere of Pittsburgh than any other material considered by the architect and the pastor in the many years of research which they devoted to all the problems connected with their task...

...For true imagination here has dealt with the realities of the Faith, and through utmost faithfulness to the laws of the liturgy there has issued a work of art sealed with distinction, stamped with integral personality...

...That visit was a source of profound consolation, for it presented luminous and enduring proof of how the Catholic faith, rooted so deeply in historic American soil, and playing so vital a part in contemporary American life, can manifest itself in forms of beauty, strength and spiritual power amid the congested industrial city of today as superbly as it did in the more leisurely and more congenial conditions of the middleages...

...Volumes would be needed adequately to describe the compIeteness with which the dogmas and the world history of the Catholic religion are expressed both structurally and decoratively in this parish church-and yet there is no overcrowding of images, no sense of redundance or of confusion, so beautifully is all this complex symbology harmonized and held together in the clarity and peaceful repose of the dominant motive, which was very simple, and so idealistic in that simplicity: namely, to build a true parish church, practically adequate for its practical service of the religious needs of its people, and yet through its high beauty and its uncompromising honesty of workmanship to be a masterpiece of creative art...

...Pittsburgh is such a place...

...It is like the rebirth of a guild...

...That we should build magnificent cathedrals, uniting in the effort all the resources of a diocese, or that a great religious order should build greatly, we take for granted...

...It imitates nothing...

...It appears that in choosing the Gothic style for the Sacred Heart Church, the pastor and architect were guided by such facts as that the people of the parish are descendants of northern races, principally those who issued from Ireland and England, and that Gothic is the style in which the northern races have given expression to their culture in the field of architecture...

...Franz Aretz, a Pittsburgh sculptor...

...Speaking of the part that the laity should take in the expansion of the influence of the Church, and pointing to the rock-like rows containing the theology and canon law and history of the Catholic religion, the bishop said: What we need today are artists, to shape this mass of truth into living beauty and usefulness in life...

...The fort was later on built by the Ohio Company, then lost to the French and then retaken...

...For there is hardly a place anywhere in this country that cannot be made the object of a pilgrimage to a shrine, or to a spot that should be a shrine, connected with the history either of the nation or of the Catholic Church...

...But the vitality of the Catholic faith does not depend merely upon sentimental shrines of the past...

...And it is in some essential manner which would be difficult to define, but which is unmistakably evident, perfectly and completely an American thing...

...The laymen of Pittsburgh seem to understand their bishop, and he too understands what great desires are today moving the minds and the hearts of the laity...

...I found that site swallowed up in the vast ramifications of a railroad station...

...It expresses the same faith as any Catholic church in Rome, or Palestine, or Japan, or Australia...

...And again, he says: The church reflects the character of the people of this parish...

...In the library of the bishop of the diocese this truth was illuminated vividly...

...As such men throughout the country are more and more beginning to do, these Pittsburgh leaders had met to discuss ways and means by which they might take part in and assist that vigorous intellectual movement of the Catholic faith which is one of the main features of our times, through which the age-old doctrines and principles of the Catholic religion are reasserting their power more vigorously and effectively than they have done for centuries...

...The Sacred Heart Church of that diocese is the concrete example of a splendid unity of people and pastor and the Shepherd of the flock...

...So it has been through the centuries of the Christian era...

...The first place of public worship within this territory was the chapel erected by the French in the stockade of Fort Duquesne, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet to form the Ohio, and the chapel was dedicated under the title of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin of the Beautiful River...

...the plan and its embodiment grew out of our own parish problem, and the church in its outward aspect is the direct result of 352 THE COMMONWEAL August 7, t929 closely adhering to the laws of Catholic liturgy, from which no one may deviate without sin...

...The wooden statues at the bases of the trusses supporting the nave were carved on the church premises by Xavier Hochenleitner, one of the most celebrated of the wood-carvers of Oberammergau...

...My purpose in going there was to meet a group of men representing the industrial, financial and professional leadership and interests which have made that city's name synonymous with the achievements and tremendous problems of our industrial age...

...It was my visit to the new Sacred Heart Church at Shady Avenue and Walnut Street, which Carlton Strong is building for the pastor, Reverend Thomas F. Coakley, D.D...

...For generations they have been conspicuous for their great honesty and integrity, their lack of sham and pretense, their self-restraint and repose, their lack of indulging in the spectacular and the bizarre, their candor and simplicity, and their lofty aims and aspirations...

...It will take many years to complete the church and the group of schools and parish buildings that will surround it...

...Even, however, if these two interests had not been present, the application of the special method alluded to above for making one's travels interesting would have made such a pilgrimage well worth while...

...For in this church it is impossible not to be permeated with influences of dignity, rising even to majesty, and of enduring, massive strength, force and firmness, commingled with a tranquil peace, illumined with a lucid gracefulness...

...and the parish is the thing he always has in mind as the norm of unified and orderly human existence...

...The walls were cut out of quarries near New Castle, Pennsylvania...

...These are the work of Mr...

...The word "pilgrimage" reveals the secret of this method...

...That proposition was definite and concrete...

...I came across the pastor's words after I had written what is said above about the parish, and it was good to know that my intuition was justified by one who had authority to say whether it was right or wrong...

...In other than a mystical sense, too, the Sacred Heart Church is a thing native to the city of which it is such a beautiful part, and to the parish of which it is the centre...

...he is an apostle of civilization as well as of the Gospels...

...So far as possiblem and the limits of the possibility are very wide --everything that can be done in Pittsburgh itself, or in the state, or at least in America, is being done, so that the completed work will be local and native in its material, its workmanship and its own individual spirit or genius, so to speak, while at the same time it is as universal in its meaning as is the worldwide Catholic Church itself...

...Mingling with such men at any time possesses a special interest because of the fact that they are the real fountain-head of the social power of our modern society...

...which might have been depressing, except that New York happens to be a place where even the municipal buildings violate the soft coal ordinance, and is not precisely to be recommended as a health resort to those whose nerves are affected by the clamor and crush of our industrial civilization...

...The early records of the Pittsburgh diocese are starred with names that are great in the later history of the Church in the United States--like Father Gallitzin, and "Priest Maguire," as the August 7, I9z9 THE COMMONWEAL 351 Reverend Charles B. Maguire, the great pioneer pastor of the first church in Pittsburgh, was called, and Dr...

...I am told that this new church is unlike any other church erection of Europe or America...

...Perhaps it is because its builders have paid the sincerest artistic tribute to the Faith that it is possible to pay it by resolving not to give it the poor compliment of copying some foreign masterpiece, and still less the very dubious service of cheap and tawdry imitation, but by resolving to use only the best and staunchest materials, and to put them together in the most honest and enduring fashion, according to the doctrine of the Church as laid down to guide such matters, and by striving to achieve the highest ideals of beauty and true serviceableness, for August 7, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 353 a particular people in a particular place, namely, this parish of the diocese of Pittsburgh...

...But it was not the historic interest of Pittsburgh, in connection with the story either of the nation or of the Catholic Church in America, nor was it the contemporary industrial greatness of the city, which made this recent pilgrimage so notable...

...It is true that my effort to revisit the site where Father Neuman's life of sanctity was developed to such heights that some day his name may be on the calendar of the saints was defeated...

...It exists for the same purposes that lead to any Catholic church being built anywhere else in the world, yet America is stamped upon this church...

...Also, that visit proved that it can manifest itself so within the limits of a parish, and thus splendidly illustrate the capacity of a parish to rise to great heights of expression of the Faith...

...it was as realistic as a well-considered dogma...

...The chapel of the Blessed Sacrament on one side and the Lady Chapel on the other side, will follow, together with a tower, and, finally, the baptistry, to flank the main entrance...

...They were all Catholic laymen...

...While the fundamental work of our theologians and ecclesiastical writers and directors must always continue, their work is like a quarry from which the makers and shapers of the life of today should draw their material, and reexpress it in forms that can be utilized by the world which so greatly needs the Catholic guidance...

...It is a proof of Catholicism, not a mere assertion, but a demonstration...

...The wars of the French and the British in their great struggle for the new world swirled about this region, which in the long ago was the centre of the rich fur trade with the Indians, and which George Washington surveyed and considered to be a good site for a fort...

...For the parish may be termed the norm, or model, of Christian society...

...all steeped in an atmosphere breathing forth from a splendid yet austere background profound as the mystery of Love that is symbolized by the Sacred Heart, and that pulses in all Its rich reality from the Tabernacle to which all the lines of vision and aspiration converge...

...Yet that which did make it notable in a certain sense combined all these other interests...

...Many other instances of this local collaboration might be given...

...the parish uniting with other parishes to form the diocese under the bishop...

...This church is---as all churches ought to be--at once as orthodox and traditional as the Creed itself, and yet original in the highest sense...

...the bishops and their dioceses, under the Supreme Pastor and Bishop, the Pope, who is the direct representative of Jesus Christ, forming the Universal Church...

...Michael O'Connor, the first bishop, and Father Neuman, afterward a bishop, whose name some day may be placed on the altars of the Universal Church...

...And I for one believe that in doing so they have by their very loyalty to their parish contributed a very rare, memorable, and permanent thing of beauty--of that beauty which indeed is truth--to the civilization of the United States...

...Happy is the parish which can thus express its delicate inner life as well as its strong and sturdy outward following of its faith...

...They were bankers, contractors, industrialists, judges, lawyers, doctors and editors...

...Coakley, its pastor, says: The architect has copied nothing...

...Very well: but how were those high moral and spiritual characteristics of the people of the parish, described by their pastor as quoted above, to be expressed in the church that now shelters their souls ? Well, I am no architect nor am I qualified as a critic of architecture, but one does not need to be either in order to recognize certain qualities that are expressed by the Sacred Heart Church in Pittsburgh as clearly and as lucidly as the music of Palestrina or Gregorian Chant expresses at once the technical perfection of ordered sound and the mystical desires qf the soul, or as high poetry recites through the laws of rhythm the most intimate emotions of the heart...

...it was as solid and substantial as the massive foundations of the church itself...

...The stone has a subdued yet rich autumnal color...

...For example--and the example brings us back to what we began with, namely, Pittsburgh...

...35o THE COMMONWEAL August 7, x929 A PILGRIMAGE TO PITTSBURGH By MICHAEL WILLIAMS W HEN I said that I was going to Pittsburgh, some of my New York associates were ribald, and quoted some sort of Mother Goose rhyme about Mary's little lamb and what happened to the poor thing when it went to that city of mills and mines, and smoke and soot and clamor...

...And on this particular occasion there was another high interest attached to meeting such a group, due to the fact that they had assembled to devote a part of their time and thought to problems connected with their religious faith...

...My trip to Pittsburgh, then, as I intimated above, did indeed become a pilgrimage...

...but neither does it introduce any innovation that in the slightest way departs from liturgical obedience...

...Therefore, the building of one more strikingly beautiful parish church is (it seems to me) a stronger and more desirable proof of the renaissance of beauty in American Catholic architecture than the creation of a cathedral, or the college or monastery of a great order...

...The glorious glass is being made by George Sotter, at Holicong, Pennsylvania...

...and also with gratitude, when the results are commensurate with the opportunities such enterprises afford...

...Every Catholic priest--even the most adventurous explorer-missionary who ever thrust his canoe into the unknown tributaries of the Mississippi or trod barefooted over the Arizona desert-was in the old days and is today a natural (or, if you like, a supernatural) social service organizer--he is a builder of human society...

...First the mission--then, as soon as possible, and as the realization of the purpose of the mission, the parish, a permanent group of Christian people, under the spiritual authority of their pastor...