Mixed media assemblage on museum board, 2020

10 x 10 inches

Cut signatures: Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Klaus Scholder, Michael Phayer, Dietrich Goldschmidt, Karl R. Stadler, Hermann Bahr, René Marcic, Erik Peterson, Franz Werfel, Anton Pelinka, and Friedrich Heer

“Hitler represented the secularized baroque version of Catholicism as expressed nowhere more clearly than in Austria. Before his family moved to Linz, Hitler spent two years at a monastery school in Lambach, run by Benedictine monks (Heer 1968: 21 f.). He was influenced by his father’s anticlerical attitude as well as by his mother’s traditional piety. Nothing is known about the young Hitler’s church attendance or other religious activities after he left his Upper Austrian home and moved to Vienna, but Hitler never openly broke with the church he was born into. The neo-pagan tendencies others in his party followed were not his own.”

Anton Pelinka, Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 179.

“Im Stile bayerisch-österreichischer Andachtsbilder malt später ein Maler den Knaben Adolf kniend vor dem Stiftsportal. Ansichtskarten zeigen den „Führer“ als Ritter St. Georg, über den Drachen reitend - vom Wappen fließen Strahlen auf seine ausgebreiteten Hände. Der Knabe Adolf als ein kleiner St. Franziskus oder Aloysius, als einer der Knabenheiligen: das ist Kitsch, religiös-politischer Kitsch. Hermann Broch sieht den Kitscherzeuger als Verbredier an, Adolf Loos sieht im Ornament - Hitler liebt das Ornament - ein Verbrechen. Eine gewisse Gefühlslage des Knaben, der sich „oft und oft am feierlichen Prunke der äußerst glanzvollen kirchlichen Feste zu berauschen“ pflegte, wird hier jedoch richtig angetönt. Der Schulbub Adolf fühlt sich im Stifte Lambach wohl, erhält hier „lauter Einser“.”

Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiosität (München: Bechtle Verlag, 1968), 21.

“It was all well and good, of course, that the pope used diplomatic channels to save Jews. In the matter of genocide, however, diplomacy proved more of a weakness than a strength. Diplomacy functions within the boundaries of civilized behavior. The Holocaust ruptured those bounds beyond all measure. Hitler did not know or care to know the language of diplomacy. Pius XII’s greatest failure, both during and after the Holocaust, lay in his attempt to use a diplomatic remedy for a moral outrage.”

Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), xii.

“Because the victory of the ‘Lion of Judah’ transcends all other ‘victories’ in the merely political order, the thinking allied to the ‘victory of the Lamb’ also transcends every type of thinking that emanates from a merely political order.”

Erik Peterson, “Witness to the Truth,” in Theological Tractates, ed. and trans. Michael J. Hollerich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 166.

“‘I don’t know, Father,’ the rabbi had begun, ‘why the Church is so intent on converting the Jews. Can it suffice for her to win over perhaps two genuine believers among a thousand overambitious or feeble renegades? And then, what would happen if all the Jews in the world got baptized? Israel would vanish. And thus the only real witness to the divine revelation would vanish from the face of the earth. The Holy Scriptures would turn from a truth documented by our existence into a limp and empty myth like any Greek myth. Does the Church not see this danger? We belong together, Father, but we are not one. The Epistle to the Romans says, “The community of Christ rests upon Israel.” I am convinced that the Church will survive as long as Israel survives, but that the Church must fall if Israel falls.’”

Franz Werfel, Cella, or, The Survivors, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 165.

Mixed media assemblage on museum board, 2020

12 x 12 inches

Cut signatures: Ernst Karl Winter, August Maria Knoll, Wilfried Daim, and Friedrich Heer

“Christendom today stands close to the abyss of self-destruction through nuclear weapons. This suicide follows in historical terms logically from the practice, stretching over fifteen hundred years, of killing the blood relations of the Jew Jesus, the son of the Jewess Miriam, Mary. It is being prepared at deeply concealed levels of the subconscious. This subconscious is aware that Christendom has failed in its attempts to liquidate the Jews and to conquer the world. The greatest bankruptcy in the history of the world has been revealed in two world wars, for which the whole of Christendom shares the responsibility, and in the extermination of six million Jews.”

Friedrich Heer, God’s First Love: Christians and Jews over two thousand years, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 392.

Mixed Media assemblage on watercolor board, 2019

12 x 20 inches

Cut signatures: Gregory Baum and Léon Bloy

“If a man despises the Jews on principle, he will eventually also despise the Jew Jesus Christ, the Son of the eternal God.”

Gregory Baum, Progress and Perspectives: The Catholic Quest for Christian Unity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), 206.

“‘My dear child,’ he simply told the messenger, ‘in peace and at war, Mass is always said in the presence of the enemy.’”

Léon Bloy, Sweating Blood, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2016), 30. Originally published as Sueur de sang, 1893.

Mixed media assemblage on museum board, 2018

9 x 9 inches

Cut signatures: Josef Cardinal Frings, Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Franz Cardinal König, Gerhard Botz, and Friedrich Heer

“The great potential of inner powers—the real armament which is needed within the Church and throughout Christendom—will be released only when the daily confession of sins is in the best sense of the term politicized, actualized, concretized.”

Friedrich Heer, “The Need for Confession,” in The Storm over The Deputy, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 169.

Mixed media assemblage on museum board, 2019

10 x 10 inches

Cut signatures: Kurt Schubert, Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Franz Cardinal König, and Heinrich Spaemann

“We should be grossly irresponsible—especially we in Germany—if we continued to remember the Jewish children of Bethlehem in our liturgy, our sermons and catechisms, while keeping silent before our altars and obliterating from our memories the extermination, for similar reasons, of the millions in Auschwitz and elsewhere. If we were not to remember these victims, it would make it appallingly clear how liturgy can become an end in itself, a harmless ritual drained of any appeal to the conscience, a mere glorification of its own existence.”

Heinrich Spaemann, Die Christen und das Volk der Juden (Munich, Germany: Kösel-Verlag, 1966), 33, in Friedrich Heer, God’s First Love: Christians and Jews over two thousand years, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 420.

Mixed media with found objects on museum board, 2017

11 x 11 inches

"Eucharistic realism and ecclesial realism: these two realisms support one another, each is the guarantee of the other. Ecclesial realism safeguards Eucharistic realism and the latter confirms the former. The same unity of the Word is reflected in both. Today, it is above all our faith in the 'real presence', made explicit thanks to centuries of controversy and analysis, that introduces us to faith in the ecclesial body: effectively signified by the mystery of the Altar, the mystery of the Church has to share the same nature and the same depth. Among the ancients, the perspective was often inverted. The accent was habitually placed on the effect rather than on the cause. But the ecclesial realism to which they universally offer us the most explicit testimony is at the same time, and when necessary, the guarantee of their Eucharistic realism."

Henri Cardinal de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 251-52.

November–December, 2016

[At the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, NYC]

Praying before the Blessed Sacrament, I have often thought that it is not only humans who seek salvation in the Resurrection. I imagine that the fallibility of matter itself, as it groans in its own decay, also sees fulfillment in Christ—with the Eucharist as a proleptic sign of this Eschatological materiality. My special thanks to Sacred Beauty (Paul Chu and Valerie Tarantino) for ministering Eucharistic Adoration throughout the Advent season in 2016.

UV print and mixed media on museum board, 2016

9.75 x 9.75 inches

Cut signature: Jürgen Moltmann

"Every renewal of the Church is essentially grounded in an increase of fidelity to her own calling. Undoubtedly this is the basis of the movement toward unity. 

Christ summons the Church to continual reformation as she sojourns here on earth. The Church is always in need of this, in so far as she is an institution of men here on earth. Thus if, in various times and circumstances, there have been deficiencies in moral conduct or in church discipline, or even in the way that church teaching has been formulated—to be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itself—these can and should be set right at the opportune moment.

Church renewal has therefore notable ecumenical importance. Already in various spheres of the Church's life, this renewal is taking place. The Biblical and liturgical movements, the preaching of the word of God and catechetics, the apostolate of the laity, new forms of religious life and the spirituality of married life, and the Church's social teaching and activity—all these should be considered as pledges and signs of the future progress of ecumenism."

Vatican Council II - Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, §6.

Mixed media with found objects and LED light on museum board, 2015

12 x 12 inches

The edifice of the Church must be more than a simple shelter or programmatic platform for the performance of the sacraments. The physical church is intimately connected with the mystical body of the ekklesia. The Russian Orthodox term sobor (similar to the western synod) is a double entendre, encapsulating this understanding of "Church" as both the assembly and the architecture. The church-building also forms part of the psychogeographic map of each parishioner's community. By archiving fragments of several existing churches in Manhattan - in various states of disrepair or renovation - this map becomes a constellation of overlapping ecclesial territories we inhabit in the city.

Mixed media with found objects and acrylic on foam board, 2015

60 x 60 x 2 inches

[Half of Diptych in collaboration with Penley Chiang]

A throne is prepared (hetoimasia) for Christ’s return, when His reign at the right hand of the Father will be fully revealed. God’s sacrifical fulfillment through Christ’s Passion and Resurrection is both “already” and “not yet," creating a fundamental paradox. Every parishioner struggles with the imperfect realization of this mystery in our own conduct and even in the caducity of matter itself. The prepared throne is a symbol of this tension, anticipating the fulfillment of our true dignity while acknowledging our need for continual conversion. The throne is not in fact empty however, but rather the epicenter of a revelation that can reorient our cultural discourse. It is precisely in the Eucharist that we finally “receive what we are” and encounter our true selves.

Mixed media assemblage on museum board, 2015

12 x 12 inches

The city fundamentally questions humans and their relation to the earth. As a potential agent of estrangement, the city challenges traditional social arrangements with new spatial juxtapositions, requiring ever-more elaborate inventions to endure the acedia of modern life. Through the sacramentalization of creation, whose reality is celebrated in the Eucharist, it is possible to sublimate the alienating influence of the metropolis. If we see the city instead as an extension of salvation history (a stage of grace and divine participation), then its forms become an invitation for renewal and reconciliation, rather than rupture.

Mixed media architecture model on museum board, 2014 / 2016

10.5 x 14 x 8 inches

"The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 35.

"The denial of a scheme wholesale is not heresy, and has not the creative power of a heresy. It is of the essence of heresy that it leaves standing a great part of the structure it attacks. On this account it can appeal to believers and continues to affect their lives through deflecting them from their original characters. Wherefore, it is said of heresies that 'they survive by the truths they retain.'"

Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Milwaukee, WI: Cavalier Books, 2015), 9.

Mixed media architecture model on museum board, 2013

24 x 21.5 x 6.5 inches

[Presented at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, NYC]

As a transubstantiated urban space in miniature, this architectural model-collage presents the 30ft. wide citystreet as a nave, the sidewalks as aisles with neighborhood buildings acting as chapels, and the cross-street as a transept. The ekklesias could fundamentally alter an existing street in precisely this way, transforming it into a liturgical space through discreet architectural interventions, while leaving its outer form relatively unchanged, such as when temporary street fairs are held around the city. Each building type also formally registers the successive concentric scales of possible worship, from the single-family home's front lawn icon of private contemplation to the ritualized sacramental spaces of the parish church and rectory.

2011–Present

From jacket buttons and brooches to bookmarks and ephemera, modern society propagates values through consumer culture. These same articles can also become sites for evangelization, using the contemporary equivalent of Gothic Microarchitecture to introduce the theological back into our visual culture.

2002–Present

"The development and questioning of the fundamental 'krisis' between knowledge and theorein (contemplation) constitutes the most proper object of angelology: its annunciation does not concern the becoming visible of the invisible, the translating-betraying of the invisible in and for the visually perceptible, but the possibility for human beings to correspond to the invisible as such, to that Invisible which the Angel safeguards precisely in the instant in which it is communicated through its forms."

Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 3.