A Jesuit community chapel in the news.

Before.

After.

It's rare enough for the architecture of a Jesuit house to get noticed, but it's rarer still for one of the most intimate spaces in a Jesuit community - the domestic chapel - to draw attention outside of Jesuit circles. This is is what has happened with the Jesuit community chapel at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida, which has received the notice of the New Liturgical Movement for the rather remarkable renovation captured in the 'before' and 'after' photos seen above. This impressive renovation was the work of Joel Pidel, a graduate of Notre Dame's School of Architecture and - though the NLM report doesn't mention this - the brother of a New Orleans Province Jesuit. Joel Pidel explains what he did and why - and provides many more beautiful photos - in a post about the project on his blog Seeing the Form. I'm pleased that Pidel drew inspiration from a classically Jesuit source, Bernini's Church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale in Rome, but I'm even more impressed with his success in turning what had been a bland and barren 1960s worship space into a chapel that helps "to manifest God’s ever-greater Glory and facilitate our encounter with the same Living God; or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar would say, an example of theological aesthetics." AMDG.