Criticism By Other Religious Groups
These stylistically exaggerated churches were criticized by many of Chicago's Protestant elites as "ostentatious" in comparison with the "plainer" style in vogue for Protestant houses of worship. Catholic Church authorities such as John Lancaster Spalding, the first Bishop of Peoria, responded by comparing the churches financed by the immigrants to the pyramids of Egypt built by slaves.
The need for identity was evident in the unique architecture of the Polish Cathedral Style. It was often associated with the religious order of the Congregation of the Resurrection, in addition to the architectural stylings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Both in scale and scope, these edifices were attempts to contradict the marginal status in which the Polish immigrants found themselves. As a stateless people whose culture was systematically attacked in its homeland during the years of partition, they also had a low position on the economic ladder in the turn of the century industrial centers to which they had immigrated. The construction of these churches greatly influenced the development of neighborhoods that surrounded them. World views brought by the Polish immigrants from the Old World, as well as their creative adaptation into the New World, shaped the landscape of the rapidly growing industrial regions to which they came.
Read more about this topic: Polish Cathedral Style
Famous quotes containing the words criticism, religious and/or groups:
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)