St. Gorboduc's went unfinished until the 1950s when Catholic school children collected pennies to fund its completion. Whority and Sons, the famous Catholic architects of Babylon, Missouri, undertook the task to do what previous centuries could not [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 36].
Later, Arthur E. Whoirty issued a statement defending the company's type of architecture by saying, "we take our functionalized shapes from the things around us, like bread loaves, potato chips bags and the like, just as Greek architects used acanthus leaves" [38].
Bellairs was deliberately alluding to the Whore of Babylon with this 'Whority and Sons' business. The Whore of Babylon is an allegorical Christian figure representing evil, mentioned in the Book of Revelation: "the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication." (Rev. 17:1-2)
Myers says the Whore of Babylon is a puritan epithet for the Roman Catholic Church. "Babylon stands for Rome, the embodiment of luxury, vice, splendor, tyranny and all that the early church held was against the spirit of Christ." Bowen says the Puritan epithet is quite familiar to him from readings in his youth. "Although the Puritans are long gone, I believe the phrase is still popular among Christian fundamentalists who are obsessed with Catholicism, though there are probably less of these than there were a few decades ago. The mention of the Whore of Babylon underlying a sentence about 'famous Catholic architects' is a reference many educated Catholics would have picked up on, and these were after all the intended audience for the book."
"Educated Catholics and other people relatively sophisticated about and interested in church matters," adds Myers.
Acanthus is common name for a family of chiefly perennial herbs and shrubs, mostly native to the tropics. Some have decorative spiny leaves and were cultivated as ornamentals, whose ornate leaves were used in the Greek and Roman Corinthian order. This is, then, an architectural reference.
