The Chapel on the Moon

At the 2010 Spring Meeting in Princeton, in a session on “American Catholics and Ecumenism,” I presented a paper on “The Chapel on the Moon: Maurice Lavanoux, Imaginary Architecture, and the Ecumenical Future.” This work is an early version of what will become the last chapter of my dissertation in the theology department at Fordham University, “American Catholics and the Art of the Future, 1930-1975.”

In my paper, I examined two imaginary buildings that demonstrate what I take to be a significant aspect of American Catholic approaches to ecumenism in the 1960s: a passion for thinking about what the future will be like, and planning how it would be best for the church to approach that future. The plans for these unbuilt chapels were both commissioned by the longtime secretary of the New York-based Liturgical Arts Society, Maurice Lavanoux, and created by the California architect Mark Mills (a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the son-in-law of the noted artist Louisa Jenkins, who introduced him to Lavanoux.) One, published in Liturgical Arts magazine in 1967, was a chapel intended for a permanent moon base to be established by the year 2000. The second, published in 1971, was a manta-ray-shaped submarine built around an ecumenical chapel, and intended to travel around the world promoting peace and interfaith understanding. It was to be christened the “Cardinal Bea,” in honor of the great ecumenist and head of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Alongside Mills’ plans, Lavanoux published extensive notes and commentary, including articles on space-age theology and worship by priests, laypeople, and a female Lutheran minister.

I argued that, alongside Vatican II and the theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an important context in which to view this work is American science fiction culture, which, by the 1960s, was influential far beyond the small number of fans who actually read sci-fi stories and novels. Lavanoux used two classic sci-fi techniques in his publication. First, he attempted what the sci-fi theorist Thomas Disch calls a “realism of the future”—that is, he insisted that these visions were not utopian or fantastical, but rather a realistic extrapolation from current trends, presented with the purpose of using a fictional vision to inspire the actual realization of one’s preferred future. Second, he and his collaborators appropriated the sci-fi strategy of using fictional creations to get a grip on the unknown future—they explicitly framed the chapels as beacons of hope in the frightening nuclear darkness, lighting the way into the future for the Christian pilgrim of tomorrow, “who has exchanged staff for space-helmet.”

Using science fiction theory as a hermeneutical key to these projects led me to argue that their ecumenical nature is not only due to their later-1960s religious context—that is, to their obvious debts to the documents of Vatican II and the cosmic theology of Teilhard de Chardin—but also to the attempts of a particular group of American Catholics to develop a realistic response to, on the one hand, the promise of technology, and, on the other, the nuclear threat of the Cold War era. In this context, the moon and submarine chapels are not only goofy fantasies, but serious attempts to grapple with the big issues of the day and of what these writers and artists thought the future was bringing. At the conclusion of my paper, I pointed to a number of ecumenical architectural buildings which were actually being built during this time frame, and suggested that Lavanoux’s staking of a claim on the future through imaginary architecture helped him to authorize real ecumenical architectural activity at a time when it was still quite controversial.

Catherine Osborne
Fordham University