Domestic Liturgy: St Paul’s in Waterloo by Jean Cosse (1968)

Up until the 19th century, local parish churches signified the spatial and social nucleus of Belgian communities. Processes of industrialization, suburbanization and secularization, however, disrupted this pattern in the 20th century, forcing religion to (re)claim its place. This led to massive church building campaigns in the sprawling suburbs of post-war Western Europe. Even so, the idea of the Catholic Church as a monumental beacon of tradition and stability became increasingly subject to criticism – not in the least amongst progressive religious movements, such as the Nouvelle Théologie and Left Catholicism. Both advocated for a Church truly receptive to modernization – and not only in appearance. This paper examines if there was still a place for church building in such a view, and to what extent churches still had a role to play as a symbol and instrument of community. As a case in point, we discuss the foundation process of the St Paul’s parish in Waterloo, a wealthy suburb south of Brussels. From the outset, it was a bottom-up experiment that deviated from accepted practice: the parish was to have no territorial boundaries, welcome all interested Christian worshippers and ignore the infamous language border that ran across Belgium since 1962. Its church building challenged the norm too: conceived by local architect Jean Cosse (1931-2016) as an informal meeting place, it resembled the neighbouring dwellings in style and scale. Precisely for this reason, the influential periodical Art d’Eglise heavily promoted St Paul’s as a model that embodied the then popular post-conciliar idea of the liturgy as a gathering of like-minded people, embedded in their daily routines and environment. Fifty years later, we ask if this was indeed the case, and to what extend St Paul’s was able to fulfil its ambition as a new type of church for a new type of community.status: publishe