When planners asked St. Paul the Apostle parishioners what they wanted in a new church, their
preference was clear: a return to the traditional.The Romanesque-style Catholic church in Westerville, with its arches and columns, cross-shaped floor plan and Jerusalem stone throughout, filled the bill.
The church received some help achieving the centuries-old look with stained-glass windows, statues and other items harvested from parishes closed by the Cleveland diocese starting in 2009.
The Rev. Charles Klinger, pastor at St. Paul, said he felt like a “kid in a candy shop” when he visited a warehouse where the items were displayed, but he also felt the sadness of the lost churches.
“We feel that it is basically a trust that we have been given to keep these treasures from those churches, which were really beautiful and nurtured people spiritually for a long time,” he said. “ We hope that that nurturing can continue to happen here.”
The church has 164 windows and hopes to fill them all with a combination of glass that’s about 100 years old and new glass designed to complement the pieces, said Helmut Naunheimer, the St. Paul development director. He said he expects about 65 percent of the glass will come from the closed churches.
St. Paul represents a trend: Over the past 10 to 15 years, Catholic-church architecture has returned to the traditional and conservative, said David Meleca, president of the Downtown-based Meleca Architecture. Churches also are getting bigger, typically seating about 1,000 people, as congregations close and consolidate and a declining number of priests offer fewer Masses.
The average Catholic wants a church with marble, mosaics, stained glass, saints and symbols, a desire in contrast to the high-modernism of the 1960s and ’70s, said Denis McNamara of the Liturgical Institute of the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Illinois.
In the late 1980s and ’90s, people started asking why churches looked like “an airplane hangar or a Pizza Hut,” leading to a return to the classical, McNamara said.
“A church building is not just an auditorium or a meetinghouse, but it is the combination of art and architecture to render present to the congregation what their heavenly future will look like,” he said. “Intuitively, we know church is supposed to be this foretaste of heaven.”
In recent years, Meleca has worked on a number of religious buildings in Ohio, all in traditional styles. Among them are St. Paul, St. Joseph Monastery in Portsmouth, the Church of the Resurrection in New Albany, the Church of St. Edward the Confessor in Granville and the Catholic Foundation Downtown.
St. Paul is one of four new churches built in the Columbus diocese in the past 10 years, spokesman George Jones said. The new building, which opened in 2011, is the third in the 100-year-old congregation’s history. The parish has about 4,500 families.
The final price of the 1,500-seat church was $12 million, about $2.5 million under budget, thanks in part to competitive pricing during the recession. The congregation’s first church was a wood-frame building built in 1931 and the second a contemporary building that opened in 1969.
Windows ranging in price from $1,800 to $50,000 are being added as donors step forward and pieces are laid inside the clear glass panels that are already installed. Naunheimer said about 90 windows have been installed, and he expects the project to be complete in 2015.
Among other items contributed by closed churches are a 60-year-old tabernacle to hold the Eucharist, 70-year-old water fonts and 100-year-old mosaics of the Stations of the Cross.
Catholic parishes building and renovating must consider ceremonial aspects of the liturgy as well as church design, Meleca said. At St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church in Pickerington, for example, the main aisle is off-center, and renovations will create symmetry to enforce the importance of the altar, he said.
Some guidelines are laid out by U.S. bishops, but much of the design is dictated by local priests and parishioners. Costs, Meleca said, generally run about $1 million per 100 seats.
McNamara said church officials are sometimes asked why so much money is spent on a building when it could be used instead to help the poor. He said it all goes back to the desire to make a heaven on Earth.
“Churches are public places and one of the only places where someone who lives under a bridge can walk in and sit next to a millionaire and look at the beauty of heaven,” he said.