Church Review: The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle

Part 1 of an adventure begun today, backdated from Monday.

The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle
1725 Rhode Island Ave., NW
Website

I have finally made it to the Cathedral, thanks to the federal government, which gave me (and you, if you're one of my readers living in the United States) an extra hour of sleep this morning.  Normally, I don't want to sacrifice my precious sleeping-time to trek all the way up here, but with an extra hour under my belt, I felt energetic enough to do it.  And am I glad I did!

To get here I took the Green line up to Chinatown and then transferred to the Red, since the Blue and Orange lines are on crack (read "being maintained") this weekend.  I got very lucky with both trains - a three minute wait at Waterfront and four minutes at Chinatown.  Interestingly enough, today I decided not to worry about making the trains; I just went.  Perhaps this means I should stop worrying about trains altogether?  Still, had the trains not cooperated I would have missed Mass; 4 on location for the days when Metro is feeling benevolent, and 3 on those days it isn't.

After a short walk up Connecticut Avenue and a right turn on Rhode Island (which, interestingly enough, is something one could actually do in Connecticut - make a right turn at Rhode Island), the first thing I saw was the hulking pile of red brick pictured above.  The only real clue that it's a church and not a fancifully-done gymnasium is the dome, and the single ornamentation on the facade - this mosaic (visible in the lower right of the picture above).  Upon arriving in front of the church the primary impression is one of tallness, not of beauty.  In fact, I remembering musing that it looked more like a church with its skin taken off - or unfinished - than what one would expect a cathedral to look like.  There is precedent for churches with unfinished facades - it happened a lot in Italy, where city-states or wealthy families would bite off more than they could chew and be unable to finish their cathedral/church (an example: this picture of San Lorenzo, the Medici family church in Florence, whose facade has never been completed).  But this doesn't usually happen in the United States - if a church project runs low on funds, you strip back the design rather than continue on the originally planned path until the money runs out.  This generally means lopping off towers...which was also the case in Strasbourg back in the Middle Ages.  The mosaic, however, is a hint: whatever the plainness of the cathedral's exterior may tell you, ignore it - when people starting dealing in mosaics, it means they aren't messing around.

See?

Inside the architects have made up for their outer frugality several times over.  Every single surface is decorated in some way, be it with marble, mosaic, glass, fine metalwork, painting (fresco?), carpet (yes, alas), or sculpture.  It is so much to take in that I scarcely know where to start.  Fortunately for you, I took lots of pictures, so I'll let them do most of the talking.

The Cathedral is actually relatively small - it is no longer than the Cathedral in Green Bay, where I once was an acolyte (but it is wider).  Like most cathedrals, it is cruciform (shaped like a cross - a Latin cross in this case), with the two transepts forming the shorter bar of the cross and the nave the longer bar.  This is the left transept:

Opposite it, in the right transept, is the organ (about which more will be said later):

(If you find the ceiling decorations reminding you of something, well done - it's mimicking the ceiling in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.)

Where the transepts cross the nave (the technical word is "crossing" - not joking) is indisputably the best place to put a dome...

...and so the celebrant has something pretty to look at while he says Mass, the back of the church is also decorated sumptuously:

(Do you see that crimson blob on the left, in between the two hanging lanterns?  It's a cardinal's hat - the old-style one, called a galero - which I presume has been strung up from the cathedral ceiling in celebration of Archbishop Wuerl's impending reception of his own, about which I have already expressed my feelings.)

I have lots more picture but, at risk of extending this post to an absurd length, I'll save them for a rainy day.  Suffice it to say that this place is absolutely gorgeous, and fully deserves a 5 for Aesthetics.

You will doubtless have noted the presence of an organ, in the right transept (not in the choir loft, where it ought to be, but this is most likely because there isn't a choir loft, so I suppose I'll forgive the powers that be their less-than-ideal placement of the organ).  What this means, however, is that the sound is projected across the transepts, not down the nave to the altar, so if you're not in the transepts or the crossing, the sound is muddy and unclear (it's probably pretty bad on the altar, too - sometimes even if the sound is good in the rest of the church it's bad near the altar).  The organist seemed moderately skilled, although he left the cantor (who didn't enunciate enough) and the congregation (which was timid) behind on a few occasions.  I was beginning to contemplate awarding a 3 for music, but then the organist had the last laugh: the postlude was Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," which sounds surprisingly good on an organ.  Well played, sir - have a 4.

The most unique part of this experience, of course, was the liturgy, since this was a Latin Mass (the sermon was safe and forgettable).  Not a Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) Mass, mind, but the Latin language version (technically the original, rather than a version) of the Mass, commonly referred to as the Novus Ordo (New Order, but you knew that).  Very kindly, the Cathedral provided handbooks for the Ordo Missae (Order of the Mass, which you also knew, surely) alongside the hymnals, for which I was grateful, since I don't know the Novus Ordo anywhere near the level I would need to to sing it unaided.

That's right, sing it.  The Missa Novus Ordo is primarily sung, both by the celebrant and the congregation, so the youngest of the three (!) celebrants, who cannot have been older than 30, got to do the singing bit (you can hear the pope do it whenever Masses are broadcast from the Vatican - Christmas Eve Mass, for example, is usually carried on EWTN live, so when it's midnight in Rome you can sit down after dinner in the Midwest and listen to the pope's quavering voice sing the celebrant's parts of the Missa Novus Ordo - add that to your calendar).  It is chant, much of it centuries old, and written in Gregorian notation (see the picture).  I have only passing familiarity with Gregorian notation, since the only place it's used any longer is churches where Masses are sung in Latin, which are not commonplace in the Midwest (this sort of thing gets more play on the East Coast, where the Catholics are generally more conservative than those in the Midwest).  Of course, I'm also not used to singing some of the longer prayers in Latin (Agnus Dei is one thing, and it's only three lines, but the Confiteor takes up two and a half pages!).  It's entirely possible to get distracted by the unfamiliar text and mess up the chant, or focus on the chant so intently that you end up neglecting the text, producing beautifully-chanted schwas.  There is no denying that chanting the Mass in Latin feels more mystic and formal, but it's disjointing if you aren't used to it.  3 because I keep tripping up - 4 once I've learned it.

Summary
Location: 3 / 4 (3.5)
Aesthetics: 5
Music: 4
Liturgy: 3 / 4 (3.5)
16/20 (4)

A good rating, an average of 4 (though, depending on other factors, it could slip to 3.75 or rise to 4.25), bit there are signs here of some of the less pleasant aspects of the Church's doings.  For example, the homilist (the eldest of the three celebrants) felt compelled to mention, although it was by no means integral to his homily, that when God created marriage (ahem), he created it between a man and a woman (I have plenty of counterarguments to both points of this statement, but I'll refrain from haranguing and merely note that I disagree), which is quite in line with Cardinal-designate Wuerl's stance on the matter.  Furthermore, at the end of the Mass the baby-faced celebrant introduced the middle-aged celebrant as a deacon from San Antonio, who was there with students from his school.  An Anglican school, because (as Babyface explained), Cardinal-designate Wuerl is the pope's liaison with those American Anglicans who wish to come more fully into communion with the church.  In other words, not only is the not-yet-cardinal one of Washington's biggest homophobes, but he's also His Holiness's hatchet-man vis a vis the Anglican community.  I don't even know the guy and I detest him.

What I'm trying to say in a roundabout and highly sarcastic way is that although I liked Mass at the Cathedral - liked, not loved - I'm not exactly comfortable with one of the celebrants who may turn up (I'm glad I didn't end up going to the Red Mass, as I read later that it was something of a pro-life tirade, which is why Justice Ginsburg no longer attends the Red Mass).  While I may return to familiarize myself with the Latin and hear the choir, which was off this week, I'm pretty sure - no, certain - that St. Matthew the Apostle is not my religious home.