Second Vatican Council

Our Lady’s Church was created in response to liturgical changes from the Second Vatican Council. This is reflected in the interior with a highly modernist aesthetic, with a central plan and extensive embellishment in the Clerestory and Ground-Floor Chapels. The Church was commissioned after a time of strictly rationed builds from the government which eased in the mid-1950s, a popular Church building period. Our Lady’s was designed with consideration to contemporaneous Church building concepts and those of the Second Vatican Council - who held gatherings in Rome in response to new theological ideas and the development of liturgical practises, where bishops from around the world revised and approved documents that had been prepared by a committee of theologians.^[i] The documents discussed Church doctrine in a way designed to be relevant to the modern world. The radical reform predominantly concerned the Catholic Mass, which before the mid-1960s was said in Latin by a priest who stood with his back to the congregation. The priest in Lillington continued to celebrate mass in this way for many years, meaning that he would have viewed the massive alpha and omega mosaic. Perhaps the mosaic was made in accordance to the Second Vatican Council and their calling for Church buildings, liturgical furnishings, and sacred art to be “signs and symbols of heavenly things”. This announcement resulted in Church architects focusing upon the ‘transcendental’ meaning in Church architecture,^[ii] and is visible in Lillington with its glowing glass. Our Lady’s can be viewed as representing a response to contemporaneous changes from the Second Vatican Council with the Church’s central plan and elevated sanctuary under the crossing.^[iii]

^[i] Robert Proctor, Building the Modern Church: Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain, 1955 To 1975 (Surrey: Ashgate 2014), 3.

^[ii] Steven J. Schloeder, Catholic Architecture (London: The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 2013), 6.

^[iii] J.J. Scarisbrick, History of the Diocese of Birmingham (Editions du Signe, 2008), 145.