Death to the Cathedral

Cathedrals (which take their name from cathedra, a bishop's chair or throne) must go, said a bishop last week. Reno's Roman Catholic Bishop Robert J. Dwyer, who blasted Nevada's nightclub nudity last fortnight (TIME, Aug. 18), told a study group in Cincinnati that the concept underlying the cathedral has "lost its reference and validity for the age we live in."

In other centuries the cathedral was a proper symbol. "It was needed to dominate, even in the physical sense, by the employment of the mass and bulk and the arrogance of towers commanding the landscape—less to spy out the political enemy than to cow the underlings. The lacy frivolity of St. Patrick's cows nobody on [Manhattan's] Fifth Avenue today, and the view of it from atop Rockefeller Center suggests nothing so much as an outsized Victorian toy anchored in the heart of modern commerce . . .

"The cathedral symbol is dead and should be buried. The sooner we get it out of the system the better it will be for the ultimate development of living art and architecture in the service of religion."