“A Substitute Sensuality—the Jesuits and Architecture: During no other time in its history has the Catholic Church built so many magnificent Churches as during the Counter-Reformation. This was the Church’s response to the puritanism of the Reformers—architectural richness and emotional fervor rather than austerity and inner light. One of the first buildings to adopt the new style that departed so abruptly from the ideals of the Renaissance and that we call Baroque was the Jesuit Church of Il Gesù in Rome. Construction began in 1568 on a site that had been selected by Ignatius in 1544, near the Church of Santa Maria della Strada. The seventy-nine-year-old Michelangelo had promised Ignatius that he would undertake to design the Church himself ‘for the love of God,’ but he died before the project had even reached the planning stage. Since Il Gesù was the first concerted display of the new Baroque style, interior as well as exterior, and since the ground plan of the Church was forced into an elaborate flower-petal design by the proliferation of smaller Chapels radiating out from the central nave, some art Historians have awarded the Jesuits a kind of patent on the Baroque style. In fact it was decided at the first General Congregation in 1558 that all buildings, including Churches, constructed by the Order should be free from extravagance or pomposity or excessive ornamentation, and toward this end the plans for all future construction would be reviewed by the office of the Superior General. For many years there was still quite a distance between Baroque exuberance and Jesuit severity, at least in principle—during the brief Generalship of the Spaniard Vincenco Carafa (1646-49) all pictures were banished from the General’s private office and a subscription for the purpose of decorating Ignatius’s Chapel was vetoed on the grounds that Carafa thought it better for the money to be given to the poor.
Though the Jesuits may not have discovered the Baroque, they did know how to put it to good use. When the Baroque sensibility, of its own accord, gave in to a kind of ecstatic trance or a ceaseless striving after new effects, then, the Jesuits decided, at least all this could be made to serve the greater glory of God. Like the Jesuit theater, a Jesuit Church was intended first to dazzle, then to instruct—both to delight the eye of the beholder and to proclaim the unity and majesty of the Roman Catholic Church. Certainly this point was not lost on such a sophisticated connoisseur of theatrical effects as Goethe, who describes the interior of a Baroque Jesuit Church in Journey to Italy:
‘The decor is all gold and silver, and precious metals and polished stone, heaped up in such lavish abundance that beggars of every station in society are dazzled by it. A slight touch of vulgarity is present here and there to soothe and to entice the human soul … and never have I seen this carried out so intelligently, so adroitly and consummately, as by the Jesuits. Everything conspires to make it seem that, unlike other religious Orders repeating an old and outworn litany, they could still startle us with their pomp and pageantry, in keeping with the spirit of the age.’
And though the Jesuits were inclined to give free play to the imagination in designing the interiors of their Churches, they also took great pains to design the exteriors to suit the rural landscape or the urban cityscape that would serve as a backdrop to them. Despite a number of standard design prototypes, a certain amount of tinkering was generally in order, depending on the individual requirements of the site; it is to this concern with continuity and adaptability, always a Jesuit strong point, that we owe the Church of St. Michael in Munich, the Michaelskirche in Aachen, and the Collegiate Churches in Innsbruck, Konstanz, and Regensburg; in Belgium and North Germany the Jesuit concern with maintaining a harmonious facade touched off a minor revival of the regional ‘brickyard Gothic’ style in the midst of the Baroque. And it is worth noting that the Jesuits served not only as Architects and Designers for such Projects, but → as Master Masons ← and Bricklayers, Cabinetmakers, and Altar- and Organ-Builders as well; just as a Gothic Cathedral of three hundred years earlier was a representation in stone and glass of the collective pride and piety of an entire city, these Jesuit Churches reflected the collective need of the Jesuit Order to serve God just a little more brilliantly than anyone else. Strangely enough, though, it was not in the Arts but in the Sciences and Humanities that the creative spirit of the Order really came to fruition. No Jesuit Poets or Painters or Composers were really moved by that spirit to achieve great distinction, and it was as Scholars and Researchers, Historians, Astronomers, and Educators that the Jesuits finally excelled.”
—Manfred Barthel; ‘The Jesuits History and Legend of the Society of Jesus,’ p. 133-36, (New York: 1982), [Emphasis Mine]
Jesuit “Old St. Joseph’s Church” Philadelphia, PA—founded by Jesuit Priest, Joseph Greaton, S.J. (1679-1753), built another Jesuit Church under its property down the street, named “St. Mary’s Church),” built in 1763, to replace the original Jesuit “Old St. Joseph’s Church,” and was regularly attended by U.S., Inc. Freemason Presidents, George Washington and John Adams—:
“‘Old St. Mary’s Church’—Was the second Roman Catholic Church in Philadelphia. It was built in 1763 as a Sunday Church to be used by the parishioners of Old St. Joseph Church. It eventually became a parish in its own right. The Church was prominent in the life of Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia.
Old St. Mary’s Church was the site of the first public religious commemoration of the Declaration of Independence [signed on Aug. 8, 1776: the birthday of Jesuit Superior General, Lorenzo “The Professor” Ricci, S.J., with him present at the signing].
Old St. Mary Church became the first Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Philadelphia in 1810. It remained as such until 1838.
Many prominent figures of Colonial Philadelphia and the Revolution frequented this historic Church.
Members of the Continental Congress attended services here on four occasions from 1777 to 1781. George Washington, in an Ecumenical spirit, worshipped here on at least two occasions. Puritan John Adams came here too and wrote to his wife Abigail:
‘the music, consisting of an organ and a choir of singers, went all the afternoon except sermon time, and the assembly chanted most sweetly and exquisitely. Here is everything that can lay hold of eye, ear, and imagination, everywhere which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant, I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.’ —US Library of Congress”
En Goodz
📜 24 / CA | Historical Investigative Journalist
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