He makes some mad, but he gets
hired
Fr. Richard S. Voskos is an unusual trade and track for a
diocesan priest.
He was born into a family of artisans -- one grandfather was a
homebuilder who also constructed the Ukrainian church down the
block in Voskos hometown, Amsterdam, N.Y. His uncles and cousins
were craftsmen, cabinetmakers and the like, and his brother trained with
them.
Vosko himself developed early as an artist and kept drawing
through seminary. After his 1969 ordination he was quickly placed on the
dioceses art and architecture subcommittee as the universal church
grappled with the new liturgical requirements of Vatican II (1962-65).
He has a masters in liturgy from Notre Dame, a master of
divinity from Christ the King Seminary, Olean, N.Y., a master of fine arts and
a doctorate in fine arts from Syracuse University, with a dissertation on how a
worship space will foster or develop patterns of worship. He believes church
space should be flexible, its fittings designed to be rearranged. One mentor,
Lutheran architect Edward Sövik, gave Vosko a favorite saying:
Its kind of strange that a pilgrim people would nail down their
furniture to the floor.
Soon Vosko was consulting on church and synagogue space outside
the diocese and landed his first cathedral renovation contract, for Incarnation
Church in Nashville, in 1987.
Voskos stock-in-trade is helping bishops save and restore
their cathedrals, while realigning their worship space in the light of
post-Vatican II liturgical norms -- for which he is frequently hounded by a
claque of obscurantist critics who dont like his work.
If only theyd first read the footnotes, he says
of his critics, theyd see everything follows the legislation of the
Roman Catholic church.
In Nashville, for instance, he spotted the cathedrals first
need straightaway. It had towering clerestory windows. Theyd been
painted a horrible mustard yellow to keep out the light, he said, with
some amazement. But he began -- as he has ever since -- by meeting with the
parishioners.
He wants to know what they want and only then think about what
hell propose. What is it about his work that makes some people so mad but
makes others want to hire him? I want the architecture to return the
altar table back to the whole assembly.
-- Arthur Jones
National Catholic Reporter, April 19,
2002
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