“ARANTZAZU. The Competition. The Project”, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza / Luis Laorga

“The relationship with the site […] meant taking on the challenge of either blending into or imposing oneself upon a landscape of great force, laden with memory. The architects opted for a volumetrically imposing solution which, nevertheless, adopted the landscape at a certain level of asymmetry and sought, at the same time, integration through stone and solidity. […]

The new basilica will take on the character of robustness and simplicity of the Basque people. No feminine, academic lines that smack of a romantic drawing room. It will be robust, frankly rugged; the bell tower will be studded with pointed stones, the symbol of the hawthorn. It must be of its time, as much of its time as those churches (Romanesque, Gothic or Renaissance) were when they were built. […] Style must not be sought in a catalogue, in a magazine or in a History of Art; it must arise from the adaptation of logical forms, resolved and treated with clarity and nobility, within the means available and the circumstances of the moment. […]

We have set out to restore the plastic dignity of the Christian Temple. We want to bring closely together the elements that make up religious space: architecture, sculpture and painting. The divorce between these components has been the main cause of the decline of religious architecture over the last two centuries […] We want each fragment to be a plastic preaching of our Faith and the whole to be a poem of Catholic and Marian Theology. […]

This Pontifical Commission, which watches over the decorum of Sacred Art according to the directives of the Holy See, has the sorrow of being unable to approve the projects submitted. […] The good intentions of the designers are not in question, but it is concluded that they have gone astray under the modernist current, which disregards some of the precepts of the Holy Church in matters of Sacred Art.”

[Own translation from Spanish.]