Where History Never Ends

We all know that you can read history off the walls of a cathedral, but you have to know what your looking for, and that is the hard part.  Happily, many churches provide you with a brochure, and they, too, help you read the history out of the church.

One wonders who writes these little brochures?  When you hold one in your hand, you see that they are obviously produced locally within the parish.  While they have an assortment of learned and curious facts about the church, they are definitely not written by either a tour guide or an academic, because they reveal a point of view that is neither scholarly nor customer-oriented friendly. 

Read one after the other as you wander from church to church in some ancient city, such as Antwerp, where I am walking my flat feet into the pavement, you can piece together a fascinating ecclesiastical history, one in which old grudges live on.

For example, one Catholic brochure cannot resist hitting back at the Reformation, and tries to do so by pulling the wandering tourist over to its side with the following warning: "Don't look for the original Gothic and early Renaissance pieces of art here; they were destroyed in the two iconoclasms of 1566 and 1581."

That's almost 500 years of carrying a resentment.  But if you wander into a Dutch cathedral further north (where the Calvinists ruled), you are confronted with an empty nave where the remnants of smashed saints and disciples still hang on the wall.  The marks of Calvinist assaults have been left unrepaired in Holland, a point of pride in the north but a deep injury in Catholic Antwerp.  

Today, somewhere in the folds of Antwerp's parishes (where the Jesuits drove out Calvinism 450 years ago), there are volunteers writing brochures for English-speaking tourists who are happy to throw a few elbows at Protestantism.

And really, it is quite wonderful to see that these ancient battles still bother and offend believers, that somewhere in Antwerp there are people who still resent the Reformation--as if it weren't really over.

In many churches, the Enlightenment is seen as an even bigger threat.  The French Revolution is mentioned with a shudder, because it meant that churches were shut down and stripped of all their valuables, while the monks were chased away.  The end of monastic orders meant the decline of all churches-- a barbarism so tremendous that the brochures' authors seem to struggle to hold back their outrage by confining themselves to a few shocked sentences.  The Calvinists were vanquished here in Antwerp, but no one believes that the French Revolution does not continue to hold sway over the political system.  And of course, the tourist holding the brochure may harbor some sympathies for the Revolution, thus "the less said, the better."

A simple question to a friendly guard at a small baroque museum showed me that locals still remember the churches that were secularized: After admiring a portrait by van Dyck of an intense-looking Italian diplomat, I pulled out my city map and asked "where is the church where this painting originally hung?" "It is no more," came the answer.  "Gone?" I asked slicing my hand across horizontally.  "No, it is now a school," was the final resigned word.

Then there is the occasional dead Emperor who gets a punch.  In one church (which shall remain nameless but is easy to surmise), Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg monarch of Austria, is repeatedly criticized for having covetously removed a beautiful Caravaggio painting of the Virgin.  In its place stands a copy of the same painting, made centuries after the mad genius Caravaggio had passed on to his reward, and underneath a placard denouncing the Imperial theft.

Museums in Turkey and India have such signs, objecting to colonial appropriations of their own antiquities, but to see a Catholic church rebuke (a not so pious) Catholic monarch is definitely an ecclesiastical form of inside baseball.

And it is really great reading!  What is not to like about such religious shots.  It shows that the church continues to have its defenders, that the centuries do not wash away the hurt.  So long as the fighting is confined to passing remarks in a church brochure, it only heightens the architectural experience.