Corpus Christi Church, New York

VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK JOSEPH MASHECK Corpus Christi Church, New York Its Architecture and Art he treasured church of Corpus Christi on Morningside Heights in T Manhattan (“Corpus”), is known for liturgy and music—including com- missioned Mass music and congregational singing in Gregorian chant and English—rather than as a work of architecture or a site for art. Yet in the mid- and later-twentieth century the parish that worshipped in this, its second church built on West 121st Street in Manhattan, was no stranger to contemporary culture. In 1938, two years after the church opened, Thomas Merton was conditionally baptized here.1 Three years later, the bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred during Advent; the next day, December 8, 1941, the US declared war on Japan; a few days later, children of the parish school, directed by one of their Dominican teaching sisters, found themselves painting a nativity mural with Japanese figures in a Japanese landscape.2 During the war, the French Jewish philoso- pher Simone Weil, who lived on Riverside Drive in 1942, often visited Corpus Christi for Mass, sitting, legend has it, in the back row. Corpus was in the forefront of the liturgical movement: I remember being taken here as a boy in the 1950s to participate in a “Dialogue Mass”—then considered extraordinary. (In the ’60s, Worship was sold in the vestibule.) When Nadia Boulanger, a Catholic and the great composition teacher of many modernist composers, 1 At a font from the first church, where the Servant of God Terence Cardinal Cooke had been baptized in 1921. 2 Leo J. O’Donovan, SJ, President of Georgetown University, letter, dated Advent 1997, to parishioners for the 90th anniversary of the parish. Fr. O’Donovan participated in the mural painting as a second grader, under the direction of a Sister Bernadelle. 154 FIGURE 1. Façade. Photo: Michael Holman. died in 1979, we had a memorial service at which her student Aaron Copland gave a eulogy. Twice in the 1980s, the distinguished Oratorian liturgist Louis Bouyer participated in our regular 11:15 Sunday service and spoke at some length to the congregation of his admiration for this Novus Ordo choir Mass, which continues to this day. Here we will consider historical aspects of Corpus Christi as a church building and note some of the artwork it houses. THE BASIC BUILDING Wilfred Edwards Anthony (1878–1948) designed this fairly small Roman Catholic city church for its pastor Father George B. Ford in 1935; it was finished and dedicated in the following year (fig. 1). While not a textbook architectural masterpiece, it does offer an inventive solution to the problem of a church as one component of a vertical, multipurpose urban structure. 155 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK FIGURE 2. Birdseye view from the east. Antique postcard. Photo: Ann Plogsterth. Its classical style is interestingly problematic, in relation not only to the Renais- sance, but also to early modernity’s first experience of “two cultures,” in the seventeenth century, and later alternatives to orthodox classicism as well. The present steel-framed building with red-brick exterior is the second church built for the parish on this site. The earlier, built in 1906–7, also combined church and school in one structure, but it just looked like a school. The new program finds precedent in churches built in Ireland from around the time of Catholic Emancipation (1829), combining church atop a parish school, typically with an awkwardly high basement for the school. Wilfred Anthony’s cab-over-engine approach is not unique, even in Manhattan. Examples include the Gothic Revival Calvary Baptist Church on West 57th Street, of 1931, with a hotel on top, and Hugh Stubbins and Associates’ stylistically modern St. Peter’s Lutheran Church of 1977—a major venture of its day in American 156 religious architecture and art, freestanding underneath one corner of the Citi- corp Center, on Lexington Avenue. Combinations of this kind are hardly ever perfect marriages. St. Peter’s, despite an interior that proves a semi-precious gem of modern church design, looks to be under the wing, if not the heel, of capital. As a façade, the Corpus Christi street front, tight up against the building line, is more graphic than sculpturesque. But Anthony’s handling of it is clever, using a tall, wide limestone “frontispiece”—here a temple front with two pairs of Doric pilasters—punctuated by a rose window and a modified classical “thermal window” in a pediment. By interrupting the brick wall, the “frontispiece” disguises an incompatibility of functions, from a basement auditorium/ gymnasium, then the church proper, and the school, up to a convent, even as windows at front-and-center of the upper stories point up to a belfry above— as if a bell-tower had been flattened into the façade. On the east flank of the building one can see the various stories by the windows puncturing a con- tinuous brick facing—behind and above the frontispiece, where the convent disappears behind a steep Mansard roof (fig. 2). As for the plain brick flank -it self, however much it was a matter of economy, I believe that the very fact that this was visibly permissible in an otherwise proper bourgeois building already raises the question of the Baroque versus the Renaissance, as consonant with Heinrich Wölfflin’s earliest affirmation of the Baroque as a reputable style. For in Renaissance and Baroque (1888) Wölfflin first pointed up how Baroque emphasis on the façade was so extreme as to justify neglecting the sides alto- gether, even of monumental buildings. One enters the church through a vestibule or narthex dominated by a staircase leading up to the church’s high “ground floor.” This disposition is used when a sanctuary must be higher than the entrance: a previous local example is Our Lady of Esperanza, on West 156th Street, as altered in 1924 (if truth be told, more elegantly than here). The lower level of the Corpus vestibule contains an architectural relic: set into the wall is a brick from Santa Maria Maggiore, an important early Christian basilica in Rome. Relics of this kind are something like relics of saints’ bodies, reminiscent of the far-flung presence of the “Corpus Christi” (a building metaphor as well as an anatomical and ecclesial 157 VOLUME 94 | APRIL 2020 | MASHECK one) in respect to its “members.” Other Christians on Morningside Heights harbor similar relics: a stone block from the agora at Corinth, “Where Many Hearing Paul Believed,” set as a cornerstone in the Interchurch Center at Riverside Drive and West 120th Street (Reinhold Niebuhr Place); and a little chunk of St. Hilda’s abbey at Whitby in Yorkshire, “Where This Abbess Presided and Taught in the Seventh Century A.D.,” set into the side of St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s Episcopal School on West 114th Street. At the top of the vestibule stairs, behind a pair of white-painted doors, is the church interior, also largely white. When people refer to the architecture of Corpus Christi (fig. 3), they ordinarily mean this, the church’s principal space. Since its dedication the interior has seen little material change, the most con- spicuous exceptions being installations of stained glass and other commis- sioned paintings and, later, after Vatican II, the moving of the tabernacle to the Blessed Sacrament chapel (former Lady chapel), and the removal of a com- munion rail that, before Vatican II, marked a frontier between the space of the clergy and that of the people.3 Otherwise, what we see is as Anthony originally designed it, including fittings such as altar furniture and a polychrome wooden processional cross also designed by the architect. A PROBLEM OF MODERNITY One might have thought that in 1935 an up-to-date Catholic parish would want something conspicuously modern in style. The usual American church patronage, however, along with an academic clientele that no doubt wanted to hold historical ornamentation to a Brooks-Brothers restraint, probably accounts for the blandness of the façade. While one can rationalize the result as allowing the façade to be a stepping stone to a more vigorously classical interior, questions of historicism (in the sense of a recourse to history that forsakes the present) do here become surprisingly acute. 3 For early views of the Corpus Christi interior, see Desider Holisher, The House of God (New York: Crown, 1946), 68–71. For the original disposition of the Lady Chapel, see also Liturgical Arts 8 (January 1940): 32. Old-timers remember that an initially white interior was succeeded by polychrome (red, blue, gold) especially up front, in the time of the 50th anniversary of the actual parish in 1956, and that this was restored to uni- form white ca. 1968–69, when the church was also air conditioned. 158 FIGURE 3. Interior. Photo: Fr. Daniel O’Reilly. It deserves to be asked why Father Ford in particular, famous for progressivism in other respects, did not embrace the orthodox architectural modernism that just around this time was attaining wide repute. At the same time, moderns can applaud his not going along with the semi-modern (like semi-classical music) Art Déco luxuriousness popular before the stock market crash, even in the outer boroughs of New York.4 Whatever the politics of the situation, Father Ford must have known the problem, sometimes exaggerated by those hostile to contemporary culture within the Catholic Church (Evelyn Waugh is a notorious example), of the ideological status of modernist architecture, especially 1930s Functionalism, in religious circumstances. Little talk about a Thomistic beauty of sheer reason in that quarter! 4 Symptoms of the contemporaneous Art Déco are normally merely ornamental, such as the only one I have detected in this building: a then-fashionable reverse-fluting on the engaged proscenium columns either side of the stage in the basement auditorium/ gymnasium.

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