Dennis McNally S J

Sacred Spaces Dennis McNally S J

An aesthetic is a way of perceiving reality with a certain preference for order. A church is a particular product of a way of preferential perception of reality. The two "ways" may have nothing in common. In fact, the church might be built according to a preferential perception considered by very few to be aesthetic. What is a church? How does church architecture incorporate an aesthetic which makes a church both a work of architecture (and therefore, a work of art) and an authentic product of a Church's way of perceiving reality?How, indeed, can the cardinals and ordinals of religion and architecture intersect?These are the essential questions which underlie the search for an aesthetic for sacred space. This piece of research is an attempt to clarify the questions for a particular community, the twentieth-century Roman Catholic Church, but the questions have vast implications for all religious communities which must seek the cooperation of the sometimes-overlapping artistic community.