My trip to Sacred Heart Cathedral

"You've got to be kidding me!?"

I write this post from Rochester, N.Y., where I was born and raised. Bishop Matthew Clark took over my home diocese when I was about ten years old, so I barely remember his predecessor, Bishop Hogan. In fact, during the liturgy of the Eucharist, I half expect the priest to say "Matthew our bishop" no matter where I assist at Mass even though I haven't lived here in going-on twenty years.

The controversy surrounding the renovation of Sacred Heart Cathedral is something I've followed off and on since the bishop announced his plans four or five years ago. Sacred Heart is around the corner from my high school, Aquinas Institute, and several of my A.Q. friends attended the parish and its school.

My father, my seven-year-old son and I decided to duck into the Cathedral yesterday afternoon to see what the fuss was about. I tried to keep an open mind before walking in, but it wasn't much use. As someone who travels throughout the country and has witnessed my fair share of "wreck-o-vations", what Clark has done to Sacred Heart is the worst I've seen.

The first thing you notice are the chairs. There are no pews in Clark's self-described "Mother Church". Instead there are padded, movable, light brown chairs accompanied by flimsy retractable kneelers. Don't bump one of them, because you're likely to shift noisily the entire row.

Then your eyes are drawn to the plain, box-like structure in the middle of the church. Elevated on a slate and marble riser, it looks like one of those kitchen islands that people place in their homes after a remodeling project. You wouldn't be surprised to find a cast iron range or indoor grill underneath the linen. If you haven't figured it out, this is what the good bishop thinks an altar, the place where heaven and earth meet, should look like. Where the old altar was are rows of even more chairs, presumably there for the choir to entertain the assembly.

You then notice the bishop's chair -- the "cathedra" of the cathedral. It looks like they borrowed it from one of the JetBlue planes that shuttle passengers to and from NYC. Like the chairs mentioned above, it too is padded and, like everything else in the place, desacralized. As I explained to my son, the chair represents the seat of a bishop's authority in his diocese. That Clark's chair is padded, cheap-looking and easily replaceable is fitting.

The cathedral project was overseen by Richard Vosko, a man one observer called a "cathedral rapist". He and Clark claim the renovation was to bring Sacred Heart into conformity with "the current norms of the Roman Catholic Church". I presume they're talking about the "norms" set out in Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, a nonbinding pamphlet published by the Bishops' Committee on Liturgy in 1977 and never voted on by the bishops themselves.

The real norms are contained in the documents of Vatican II, specifically Sacrosanctum Concilium which states that "there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them, and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing."

My father, a "live and let live" kind of man who has developed a survivor's mentality after 25 years of this episcopate, looked around and said, "You've got to be kidding me!?" and requested that we leave. He got no argument from me.