The Ambrosian Monastery project

We receive and publish a letter from architect Pio Daniele Mizzau regarding the future Ambrosian Monastery that was presented in recent days and which will rise on the former Expo area in Milan. 

Dear Director, the future «Ambrosian Monastery» that is to be built on Milan's former Expo site was presented at the Chiaravalle Abbey. Signed by architect Stefano Boeri, the complex unfortunately continues the increasingly common « departures from architectural design » that break with Catholic tradition: the abandonment of the millennia-old Latin cross floor plan and the wise management of light – in which the very arrangement of walls visually conveyed faith and the mystery of Salvation – once again gives way to a futuristic modern form (triangular). Beneath the weight of such geometries collapses that spatial and spiritual hierarchy which has always defined and safeguarded the sacrality of the liturgical space, which here would seem degraded to a mere secular multifunctional container: we await with trepidation and fear to see what hierarchical internal arrangement the starchitect will have proposed. It is also noted how Boeri – presumed to be non-Catholic, following the long and unfortunate custom of religious clients enamored with atheist professionals – continues his deeply personal « crusade-against ». After having challenged the Milan skyline that wants the city to grow and develop « under the little Madonna », surpassing by almost three meters the height of our Heavenly Mother (108.5 m) with his famous « vegetable tower » (110 m), he now constructs the dissolution of the sacred. Faced with such formal loss of direction, one would be tempted to suggest engaging a liturgical consultant, if nothing else, one who believes. But the most dramatic aspect is not only tied to the project, but to the manifest betrayal of the Church's very mission. What is presented as a beacon of modernity reveals itself in fact to be a « polytheistic temple ». Among « Libraries », « Cloisters » and « Gardens of Religions » – where every monotheism will be « represented » by a plant in full green trend – it seems that the first commandment, perhaps under a certain ecumenical aura, is deliberately set aside. Respect for other faiths, which is our duty on the civil plane, can never transform itself into forgetfulness of the mandate of evangelical apostolate that Jesus transmitted first to His apostles and, through Tradition, to us today. Do we perhaps forget the lesson of Saint Francis of Assisi, who met the Sultan Malik al-Kamil driven by the fire of mission to announce Christ to him and attempt his conversion, certainly not to reassure him about the goodness of his faith or to theorize a syncretic union. Today, instead, a certain ecumenism with a modernist flavor aims to build « the artificial universal religion », pleasing to the barren globalist élites, where dogmatic differences are leveled. We witness daily the absolute loss of direction experienced by poor practicing Catholics, now already orphaned of the certain reference of the tabernacle, relegated to small, aniconic and cold secondary spaces (cf. Pastoral Note of 1996). Pope Leo XIII, in his famous exorcism, recalled with absolute certainty that only Catholic Doctrine represents the sole Truth. In this scheme of surrender, the Cross itself, emptied of its salvific meaning, ceases to be the incarnate Logos to reduce itself to a mere benevolent brand. The Ambrosian Monastery thus positions itself as a place where the Church, rather than evangelizing the distant, ends up abdicating Truth to conform itself to political correctness. Faced with this alarming wavering, there rises high a respectful and yearning request for intervention to our pontiff Leo XIV. May His Holiness remind all of the centrality of Grace and Truth following the example of Saint Augustine: the great convert who, abandoning the error of Manichaeism, never sought a syncretic compromise with his past, but submitted entirely, with pure heart and steadfast intellect, to the immutable and salvific Truth of Christ. 
Pio D. Mizzau