Famous Communist and atheist architect to design new Catholic Cathedral

Oscar Neimeyer is a famous Brazilian Communist, atheist and architect.  He was also a past President of the Brazilian Communist Party.

He is well known for his depressive Communist looking buildings, although he is still much applauded by enthusiasts of ultra modern architecture. 

Some of the most famous of his works are the sinister headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris and the entire city planning of Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia.

(Egalitarian Brasilia, where everything looks the same.)

Not to mention the most ugly and modern Catholic Cathedral of Brasilia. 

(Interior of the Niemeyer’s Catholic Cathedral of Brasilia.)

Oscar Neimeyer is also 103 years old. 

He has received the commission to design a new Catholic Cathedral in the city of Belo Horizonte, a city of about 5 million souls, which is also the capitol city of the state of Minas Gerais.

The new project will cost about 65 million dollars and has room for 5,000 people inside.  20,000 people can fit in the immediate exterior surroundings. 

See his design here:

http://www.blogdacomunicacao.com.br/belo-horizonte-tera-catedral-projetada-por-niemeyer/

What do you think?

My first impression was “this looks like a giant laptop with some odd off-center spire on it.”

I then thought to compare it to a Catholic Church built by my favorite architect, Mr. Augustus Pugin, the famous and brilliant English convert who championed the Gothic Revival in the 19th century.

But I could not find a copyright free picture of Mr. Pugin’s work at his masterpiece church called Saint Giles in Cheadle, England.

In it’s place, I will post a picture that will serve just as well to contrast with the above work of Oscar Niemeyer.  It is from the Church of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada.  Look at this:

Which do you prefer?

Finally, after comparing the two pictures, I thought:

“Wait a minute.  A church is a ‘sermon in stone.’  It is a place where we come to adore Our Lord and to become closer to Him, and to Heaven.  We try to bring as many people to God as we can.

“This Oscar Niemeyer is a Communist, an atheist, a man who has officially and publicly chosen to hate God and who tries to influence as many souls as he can against God -- what in the world is he doing designing a Catholic Cathedral?”

Then I remembered Our Lady’s words at Fatima, that Russia would spread its errors throughout the world.  And by Russia, She obviously was referring to Communism.  When Our Lady made this prediction in 1917, it would have been hard to image just how far these errors of Russia would spread, and to what extent they would influence souls and our society at large.

Today, we have Communists designing our churches.  Yet some people still insist that Communism is dead…

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Photo credit: Inside Notre Dame Basilica Montreal, Canada. Photo by chensiyuan.  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.