Our Lady's Maronite Church
If you want to see what a church in the Holy Land looks like, you don't have to travel to the Mideast. Just come to Austin, Texas. We got it!" said Rev. Don Sawyer, pastor of Our Lady's Maronite Church, an Eastern Rite Catholic parish.
"The term Maronite comes from St. Maron who lived in the fourth century," Sawyer explained. "Maronites came from the Christological debate of the early church after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, so our tradition is from the church of Antioch. Our Liturgy (Mass) was composed by St. James the apostle. There's a lot of Jewish influence in our Liturgy, our service, our worship-and our style of architecture," he added.
Concentrating on these traditions, Our Lady's Maronite 200-family parish constructed a new, 8500-square-foot church in January 1999. William Scarmardo, its architect, said, "The church is Byzantine in style with characteristics of the Eastern Roman Empire; but the sanctuary itself is square."
A Monolithic Dome-its exterior painted a deep maroon and its center holding a cross-caps that sanctuary. Rev. Sawyer said, "The Monolithic Dome atop the sanctuary helped us create a church that reflects 2000 years of Christianity. And it's not your typical Western church. It is Eastern in design and it is unique."
Scarmardo said that when he learned Our Lady's Maronite wanted a dome over their sanctuary he began searching the Internet for possibilities, discovered MDI and called. Price estimates he received immediately convinced him that a Monolithic Dome would cost the church about half of what they thought they would have to pay for a steel dome.
Scarmardo has been in private practice since 1982 doing mostly liturgical design; he had not worked on a Monolithic Dome project prior to Our Lady's Maronite. Neither had Collier Perry, president of Perry and Perry Building, a general contractor with twenty-five years of church-building experience, who was chosen to do the church construction. Asked how it all went Scarmardo and Perry echoed each other, "It went great."
But Gary Clark, who oversaw the construction of the dome for Monolithic Constructors, Inc. of Italy, Texas, recalls the experience a bit differently. "It was a tough project," Clark said, "because it was building a dome that was not very large, just 48 feet in diameter, but was high-some 30 feet in the air. So everything had to be done out of a man-basket, and it was very, very hot in Austin then. It went a little slower than expected because of that."
Clark explained that when the crew from Monolithic Constructors arrived at the site, the sanctuary was in the process of construction. "A steel frame with four huge columns coming up to a platform was in place," Clark said. "Four more columns extended up from the platform; the circle for the Airform was welded on top of that. Actually, it was like three floors with metal bracing and cables holding everything together, so if the wind blew the dome wouldn't shift or fall."
At this point, the walls of the sanctuary were not yet in place, so Monolithic Constructors enclosed the structure's steel frame with a skirt, made of the same material as the Airform. They attached the skirt to the inside of the dome so that it hanged like a huge curtain over the sanctuary's skeleton. Six feet of skirt reached the ground where it got folded under and secured with plywood and cement bags. This skirting process made the inflation of the Airform possible. Clark said, "The walls of the sanctuary actually got blocked in after the Monolithic Dome was completed."
"We wanted a dome, and fortunately the Monolithic Dome was found for us," said Rev. Sawyer. "Some people think the dome is Moslem; no-it's very much Christian," he continued. "The dome signifies God's presence among his people. Gothic architecture, a much later development, stressed God's greatness to the newly converted Western barbarians. But the dome signifies that God is here-right in our midst and in our lives. And so it's our tradition to have domes."
But following tradition at Our Lady's Maronite goes beyond having a dome. Significant other areas within the church were modeled after St. Simeon the Stylite's Basilica, now a popular, much photographed, treasured-by-archeologists ruin in Syria. St. Simeon, a third century aesthetic, earned the title Stylite by spending more than forty years living on top of an ancient Roman column. "He stood atop the column and prayed and the site became a source of prayer," Sawyer said. "After Simeon died, a great basilica, somewhat smaller than St. Peter's, was built there."
According to Sawyer, the arches, an integral part of Byzantine architecture, also developed in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. "Maronite churches are orientated toward the east," he explained. "We have a raised bema or half dome that encircles our altar. The bema existed in Jewish synagogues. Over the altar is an apse (semicircular arched projection). All of that is on the church's east end."
Inside the bema, Our Lady's Maronite commissioned a professional iconographer to paint a mural depicting Mary, Christ's mother, being crowned queen of heaven. Artist James Campbell worked from photographs of an original painting of Mary, painted in the eleventh century, onto the wall of a cave that served as a Maronite church in Lebanon.
Other features at Our Lady's Maronite that reflect early Christian tradition include thirty-two stained glass windows in the church, four windows in the dome depicting the four evangelists, four Corinthian columns handcarved of Madeira stone in Mexico, a baptismal font with running water, and a bell made at the Beit Chebab Foundry in Lebanon. "The name of the foundry means house of the strong men," Sawyer said. "There's nothing mechanical about that bell; it's rung by a rope.
"We strove for an Old World flavor," he added. "And we're very pleased with the result. With the lights on in the dome, it's spectacular-spacious-fifty feet from the floor to the top of the dome. As one of our parishioners said, 'Looking up into that dome, you feel like you are looking up into heaven.'"
Another visitor to Our Lady's Maronite observed, "It just looks like something picked up in the Holy Land and plopped down here in Austin."
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