Italy When Alessia Urso, an architecture student, came to attend Mass at the spectacular new sanctuary in this pilgrimage town in southern Italy, she made sure to bring her camcorder.
Even as the priest began his benediction, she stood outside the Padre Pio Church, designed by Renzo Piano, sweeping the camera over white stone arches. She pointed at the cartoonish depictions of religious figures printed on a screen behind the windows. Inside, she aimed at an altar that looked more like a spaceship's console than anything she had ever seen in an ancient cathedral.
"We're in 2004," Urso said. "You have to look ahead."
Italians devoted to design and to the divine have been in high spirits since Piano's sanctuary, dedicated to the monk and mystic Padre Pio, was inaugurated in June, less than a year after a small but stunning church designed by Richard Meier opened in Rome.
The forays into church design by architects with the stature of Piano and Meier have attracted attention in this country of cathedrals and basilicas.
Bishop Ernesto Mandara, who runs the office that commissioned 50 churches for the new millennium, culminating in Meier's $25 million Mercy of God Church, said, "These are signs that point to a certain direction. That direction is the church paying more attention to architecture."
It is premature to say that Piano's spidery dome or Meier's three sweeping concrete sails and glass facade will push Roman Catholic architecture into a period comparable to the glory days when churches were showcases. But some church officials are hoping that a return to architectural splendor will help put people in the pews.
"We turned to these big names for the same reason that when one has a sickness he goes to the best doctors," Mandara said.
In recent decades the "if you build it they will come" approach has done well. Piano's Pompidou Center is often cited as a catalyst for improving a bad Paris neighborhood, while Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao made that Spanish city a tourist destination.
Leaders in religion and art are eager to see if the same holds true for a church.
The Padre Pio Church resembles a sleek airport terminal, and visiting it has become a rite of passage for pilgrims.
That thriving flock is, however, an exception for Roman Catholicism in Europe, where, according to a Vatican report, there has been a downward trend of baptized adults, from 35 percent of all people in 1978 to 26.5 percent in 2001.
Meier, speaking of his Rome project, said, "I think that's the whole purpose of this church, to counteract some of the unfortunate things that have been happening. I think that architecture can play a role in bringing people to the church. Whether it will have any major effect, I couldn't say. I think it will bring tourists, but to say it will bring converts, I don't know."
A major challenge confronting a renewal of religious architecture, experts say, is that there are so many forms of expression vying for attention. Centuries ago church-commissioned domes towered above secular buildings in prestige. That is no longer the case.
Rita Capezzuto, an editor at the Milan-based design magazine Domus, said, "Religious architecture is less important today than for the architects of the past. To do a museum, a library, I think that is more fundamental."
Major Italian churches to a large extent have become museums, filled with paintings and sculptures, but with a dearth of believers at Mass.
But some experts say that architecturally important modern churches do exist in Italy. Finding them is just a matter of knowing where to look.
"People have been ignoring religious architecture and its achievements in Italy," said Francesco Dal Co, editor of Casabella, the architecture review. "So when Meier builds his church, we think it's an epiphany, but it isn't."
Dal Co cited the works of Giovanni Michelucci, considered the father of modern Italian architecture, who built several churches, the best known being the Motorway Church overlooking a highway leading to Florence.
"You don't see new churches because you are walking around the nice part of town, and not the ugly parts," Dal Co said.
Meier's church is in a dismal neighborhood. Piano's sanctuary, which accommodates 36,000 people indoors and on surrounding grounds, sits atop this hill town in the badlands of Apulia, where papier-mâché statues, T-shirts, key chains and magnets depicting Padre Pio, the bearded monk with bleeding palms, have created a souvenir circus.
For years that commercialism caused Piano to balk at the invitation to build the church, which cost $36 million, but, to the delight of the monks in the modest brown robes, he finally came around.
"I think there will be people who come here to see the architecture, just as in Assisi people go to see the paintings of Giotto," said the Reverend Aldo Broccato of the Padre Pio Church. "If more people come to see the church and then they stay in it, I'm even happier."