In Uncertain Times, House Chapels Proliferate

In Western history, house chapels are a phenomenon associated mostly with aristocrats who lived on large estates and could afford to employ a resident chaplain. In times of persecution, these chapels often became important places of refuge, since their remoteness, together with the status of the family owners, introduced a kind of safety buffer between the outside world and the services that took place within. This safety was not always enough, alas, to prevent priests from being surprised and captured by hostile state forces.

While some house chapels of the aforementioned sort are still in existence and functional, it is becoming more common to see modest chapels being built in the homes of ordinary Catholic laity. A basement renovation, a small spare room, an attic, all offer possibilities for building an altar and setting up a space that is appropriate for the Mass and other devotions in a time of necessity. Some families simply wish to create a prayerful space where they can gather for individual or group prayer, in an environment that reminds them of and connects them with the parish or chapel where they usually go for Mass. Others, keenly aware of the grave and deteriorating situation in which the Church finds itself in the West, have decided to “plan ahead” by making a suitable space for eventual underground or “canceled” priests. One diocese has already outlawed private traditional Masses altogether, and there may be more that follow suit. Priests in such dioceses will benefit from having places of refuge where they can bypass the unjust restrictions and offer Mass to God, in the presence of grateful laity.

In January, I published an article at NLM called “Building a Home Altar,” which offered practical advice about specs that could be used for an altar, as well as some other desiderata. Afterwards I received some interesting photographs, a selection of which I wish to share for the edification and inspiration of readers who may be thinking along similar lines.

The first set of photos is of a lovely chapel in a basement. The family has plans for further decoration.

The second set of photos shows another basement chapel. The owner is friends with a woodworker who built for her, out of spare parts, a shrine to the Sacred Heart, located in the same room. One notes the Stations of the Cross as well: it seems that this space is well appointed for personal and family prayer. We all know of families who have to drive long distances to get to a traditional Mass. For such families, having the Stations at home, set up along the perimeter of a sufficiently large room, would be a boon, especially during the season of Lent.
 

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Building a Home Altar

In the past year, I’ve heard more frequently than ever before from people who are interested in building an altar for their home, or who have already done so.

Their reasons for doing it vary to some extent. Some would like to have a formal prayer corner with icons or statues and they wish to give it still more dignity by the installation of an altar beneath the holy images. Others have a spare room in the house that is well suited to become a chapel where people can go to pray the Divine Office, the Rosary, or read Scripture, and surely no chapel is complete without an altar to remind us of Christ the Rock, the supreme Sacrifice, and of our duty to make our hearts His altar. Still others have priest friends who stay with them when traveling through town or who might wish to have a quiet place to say Mass when they are not otherwise obliged to offer it, or who are looking ahead to darker and more difficult times, when good priests may be forced to make rounds from house to house, or go into hiding.

Whatever the reasons may be, we need to understand a few things before we go about setting up such an altar.

First, while the family is indeed a domestic church, and the home is a sanctified place once it has been formally blessed using the Rituale Romanum, nevertheless an altar of this kind has not received a solemn dedication, nor has a home chapel been consecrated for divine worship, and so their use should be seen as something of an exception, or at least, something that should have a reasonable justification. Certainly, an emergency situation, such as the State’s unjust suppression of worship in churches, or a bishop’s cancellation of such worship, would easily qualify.

Second, the altar, if possible, should have a first-class relic in it or at least placed on it for the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Some priests of my acquaintance travel with a Byzantine antimension. The very prayer said by the priest in the traditional Roman rite when he reaches the altar to kiss it before saying the Introit makes reference to relics in and near the altar: Oramus te, Domine, per merita Sanctorum tuorum [he kisses the sacred stone] quorum reliquiae hic sunt, et omnium Sanctorum: ut indulgere digneris omnia peccata mea. Amen (We beseech Thee, O Lord, by the merits of Thy Saints whose relics are here, and of all the Saints, that Thou wouldst vouchsafe to forgive me all my sins. Amen). A traditional priest should be able to assist you in sourcing relics.

Third, if you custom-build an altar, it would be improper to use it for any other purpose, especially once Mass has been offered on it. It should not double as a dining room table or a television stand or a surface for cleaning rifles. Let the altar be an altar and nothing more.

Fourth, make sure that the altar is built according to correct specifications. Most regular tables are too low to be suitable for Mass, since they are made for sitting, not for standing. Although dimensions can vary considerably and still be acceptable, the following dimensions work admirably for a home altar and have been found by priests of my acquaintance to be suitable: 39 inches in height; 59 inches wide; 20 inches deep. This height, depth, and breadth allows room for everything needed for the traditional Latin Mass.[1]

When space and resources allow, it is optimal to place an altar atop three steps, but this is not always practicable in a home setting. While the steps are a beautiful symbol, clergy are accustomed to “making do” with whatever situation they have  (e.g., many priests when traveling offer Mass in hotel rooms). I have also seen home altars fully dressed with an altar frontal in the appropriate liturgical color of the season or feast; this may be considered a refinement when everything else is in place.

A home altar with frontals (antependia)

My view is that we should be building altars in our homes. My wife and I commissioned a friend to build one, which we had the privilege to see “inaugurated” by Holy Mass three days in a row when a priest friend was passing through town. Built of sturdy wood and stained a dark brown, it was set up in our living room against the eastern wall, with an icon hung above it, and two first-class relics on top of it.

A last point. There is absolutely no need for a home altar to be a “Cranmer table,” that is, situated so that a priest can offer Mass versus populum or toward the congregation. Historically and theologically, this is an incorrect way to say Mass; it is not even what the Novus Ordo assumes by its own rubrics; and it is useless in the intimate situation of a liturgy done only a few feet away from the faithful. Any priest of the Roman rite should be able and willing to offer the sacrifice ad orientem (eastward). This, moreover, is usually necessary in a house because of the small space available, where an altar up against the wall is of much practical advantage.

Priests who offer the traditional Latin Mass are usually well-equipped to offer it anywhere, carrying with them reversible chasubles and the other garments, as well as candles, altar cards, and a missal. However, it is a good idea for those who have a home altar to keep a supply of candlesticks (preferable at least 51% beeswax), cruets for the water and wine, three layers of linens to dress the altar, and a small bell. It can’t hurt to have the other items, too, in case one ends up giving shelter to a fugitive who has lost his belongings or who never owned them to begin with.

How ironic it would be if the “Christian house church” — that concept so dear to the antiquarianizing liturgical revolutionaries who took it as a pretext for their streamlined modern prayer-service — turned out to be the place where the Tridentine Mass in all its medieval and Baroque density, albeit in temporarily humble circumstances, survived the coming persecution of Catholics.

Perhaps a time is coming when the words of St. John Chrysostom will be once again as accurate as they were in the fourth century:

As those who bring comedians, dancers, and harlots into their feasts call in demons and Satan himself and fill their homes with innumerable contentions (among them jealousy, adultery, debauchery, and countless evils); so those who invoke David with his lyre call inwardly on Christ. Where Christ is, let no demon enter; let him not even dare to look in in passing. Peace, delight, and all good things flow here as from fountains. Those [pagans] make their home a theatre; make yours a church. For where there are psalms, and prayers, and the dance of the prophets, and singers with pious intentions, no one will err if he call the assembly a church. [2]

 

NOTES

[1] Those who are interested in further detail can read Matthew Alderman on the proper shape, dimension, and placement of altars.

[2] St. John Chrysostom, from the Exposition of Psalm XLI, in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History from Classical Antiquity through the Romantic Era (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1950), 69.

“For I Will Not Give You a Kiss as Did Judas”: On Sacred and Profane Kissing

The Roman liturgy was once filled with chaste kisses and embraces — gestures of a love that clings to the Lord with purity and reverence. “It is good for me to cleave to my God” (Ps 72:28). As Michael Fiedrowicz writes in his book The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite (forthcoming from Angelico):

An exchange of greetings (Dominus vobiscum — Et cum spiritu tuo), followed by Oremus, introduces the conclusion to the prayers at the foot of the altar, which the priest speaks silently as he climbs the steps to the altar and kisses it. Here in the first prayer (Aufer a nobis) the priest prays once again to be allowed to approach the holy altar with a pure heart (ut ad Sancta sanctorum puris mereamur mentibus introire). Having reached the altar, the priest speaks a final prayer for forgiveness, while he lays his hands on the altar and invokes the intercession of the saints (Oramus te, Domine, per merita sanctorum tuorum ... ut indulgere digneris omnia peccata mea). The simultaneous kiss of the altar honors this place as a symbol of Christ, and assures the priest and also the community of the assistance of those saints especially whose relics are enshrined in the altar (quorum reliquiae hic sunt). During the course of the celebration of the Mass, the priest kisses the altar a total of eight times.

Eight times, an echo of the eight Beatitudes by which we mount up to heaven, the eight notes of the octave by which we ascend to unity, the eighth day of eternal glory.

In the book In Sinu Jesu: When Heart Speaks to Heart — The Journal of a Priest at Prayer, the Lord speaks these words, concerning the priest at Mass:

By kissing the altar, he makes himself vulnerable to My piercing love. By kissing the altar he opens himself unreservedly to all that I would give him and to all that I hold in the designs of My Heart for his life. The kiss to the altar signifies total abandonment to the priestly holiness that I desire and to the fulfilment of My desires in the soul of My priest. The holiness to which I call My priests, the holiness to which I am calling you, consists in a total configuration to Me as I stand before My Father in the heavenly sanctuary, beyond the veil. Every priest of Mine is to be with Me both priest and victim in the presence of My Father. Every priest is called to stand before the altar with pierced hands and feet, with his side wounded, and with his head crowned as My head was crowned in My passion. You need not fear this configuration to Me; it will bring you only peace of heart, joy in the presence of My Father, and that unique intimacy with Me that I have, from the night before I suffered, reserved for My priests, My chosen ones, the friends of My Heart.

In the hyperrationalistic liturgical reform, nearly all of these kisses were abolished. Only the kiss at the start and the kiss at the end were left in place.

In Henri de Lubac’s Vatican Council Notebooks, we read that Bishop Jenny of Cambrai, who had been a member of the preparatory liturgical commission and would later be an important member of the Consilium, gave a speech in the aula in which he advocated for shortening the prayers at the foot of the altar (too long; gotta getta move on, enough of this prepwork and penance and stuff), “fewer oscula altaris, signa crucis, etc.” [kisses of the altar, signs of the cross], the audible recitation of the secret and the Canon, the abbreviation of the formula for giving communion, the ending of the Mass with the dismissal (i.e., the abolition of the Last Gospel), and for an overall simplification of pontifical Mass. [1] Here was a bishop who evidently felt the wedding feast needed to be wrapped up promptly so that one could move on to more important things, like paying utility bills.

Bishop Zauner of Linz gave a speech at the Council in which he glosses Exodus 3:5, “remove your sandals,” to mean “cast off the fetters,” and then applies it to the customs and practices of the liturgy. [2] So that is how tradition looked to them... In another speech, a bishop from Vietnam said: “let us eliminate the maniple and the amice: useless.” [3] As I have shown in another article, there were many bishops who vigorously opposed such recommendations and offered powerful defenses of the tradition and of liturgical stability. But their voices were drowned out by the innovators, who had driven the preparatory commission and who ended up driving the Consilium’s work.

One cannot help being reminded of the remarks of Alice von Hildebrand, when asked how it could be that clergy who themselves offered the traditional Mass were the ones who threw it aside:

The problem that ushered in the present crisis was not the traditional Mass. The problem was that priests who offered it had already lost the sense of the supernatural and the transcendent. They rushed through the prayers, they mumbled and didn’t enunciate them. That is a sign that they had brought to the Mass their growing secularism. The ancient Mass does not abide irreverence, and that was why so many priests were just as happy to see it go.

Could we not translate this into the language of love? Only if such men no longer loved the Lord in His liturgical manifestation could they have allowed themselves to dismantle and reconstruct the rites by which we so intimately show our love and reverence for Him. They must have been going through the motions without a deep interior life nourished on the liturgy and lectio divina. The Lord’s own ultimatum shines forth: you cannot serve two masters. Choose the Mass or the world; choose an ever-deeper fidelity or the impossible project of aggiornamento. [4]

Like nature, supernature abhors a vacuum. If we remove sacred love, profane or perverted love will rush in to fill the void. In the minds of the reformers, the great room of the Church was swept clear of the “debris” of the centuries; into this empty room rushed seven demons worse than any evil that might have been there before (cf. Lk 11:26, Mt 12:45). The seven deadly sins took up residence: the pride of authorities wielding an absolute sway over tradition; the vanity of clergy who lord it over their Cranmer tables; the envying of the secular world and the effort to dress and talk like it; greed for worldly goods, and gluttony in their overindulgence; lust for acts of porneia, including those contrary to nature, crying out to God for vengeance; wrath for any believers who would dare question the forced march of Progress.

A disciple of Dom Marmion, Dom Pius de Hemptinne, wrote in his journal on February 23, 1902:

A pure kiss is the great mark of love. A kiss may be given from different motives, as there are many kinds of love — but it is always the sign of a perfect union, of mutual and entire complaisance.... A true, sincere and faithful kiss is a noble act; but a false kiss is an infidelity, and almost always a betrayal. This mark of affection should only be given between persons united by blood or marriage. Between friends it should have only the meaning of union of souls; sensual motives should have no part there. The kiss of friendship is so great and noble a sign that it is given around the Altar. Here it is the Christian kiss, and under these conditions remains pure and sublime as love itself. But who knows the worth of a kiss? On all sides, this sign — like love itself — is profaned. [5] 

There is no neutral ground in the Church: all in this world are either becoming sheep or becoming goats, turning out as wheat or turning out as tares, so that their final destiny may be realized. There is the kingdom of Christ, whom we kiss at the altar, and whom we greet in the stylized embrace of the Pax. And there is the kingdom of Judas who betrays with a kiss, mimicked by every subsequent Judas, whether papal, episcopal, clerical, religious, or lay.

I do not say, of course, that there were no immoral clergy before the liturgical reform; for otherwise St Peter Damian would never have written his treatise The Book of Gomorrah [6]; nor that holy and mortified clergy may not be found in the ranks of those who support and carry on the postconciliar liturgical project. But the acts by which Paul VI recklessly wasted the tradition of the Church, approved and enforced the removal of hundreds of gestures of faith, devotion, adoration, and chaste love from the liturgy — including three-quarters of the sacred kisses of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — were and are bound to produce the rotten fruits on which we are choking. “By the multitude of thine iniquities, in the unrighteousness of thy traffic, thou hast profaned thy sanctuaries; therefore have I brought forth a fire from the midst of thee; it hath devoured thee, and I have turned thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee” (Ezek 28:18).

“I have turned thee to ashes upon the earth.” This week we remember the innocent Lamb who bore the multitude of our iniquities, the unrighteousness of our traffic, the profanations of our sanctuaries, upon His shoulders. He has kindled a fire in our midst that will either destroy us or destroy our sins, depending on whether we adhere to our evil or cast it aside in repentance. Which kiss will we offer — the eightfold kiss of the chaste friend, or the treacherous kiss of the vile merchant?

NOTES

[1] Henri De Lubac, Vatican Council Notebooks, trans. Andrew Stefanelli and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 1:236.

[2] Ibid., 242.

[3] Ibid., 277.

[4] It is impossible because, as Newman points out, there is no natural end to it, or any way of knowing whether one has gone in the right direction, or has gone too far. It is like

Attempts are making to get the Liturgy altered. My dear Brethren, I beseech you, consider with me, whether you ought not to resist the alteration of even one jot or tittle of it. … Once begin altering, and there will be no reason or justice in stopping, till the criticisms of all parties are satisfied. Thus, will not the Liturgy be in the evil case described in the well-known story, of the picture subjected by the artist to the observations of passers-by? … But this is not all. A taste for criticism grows upon the mind. When we begin to examine and take to pieces, our judgment becomes perplexed, and our feelings unsettled. … But as regards ourselves, the Clergy, what will be the effect of this temper of innovation in us? We have the power to bring about changes in the Liturgy; shall we not exert it? have we any security, if we once begin, that we shall ever end? Shall not we pass from non-essentials to essentials? And then, on looking back after the mischief is done, what excuse shall we be able to make for ourselves for having encouraged such proceedings at first?  (John Henry Newman on Worship, Reverence, and Ritual [Os Justi Press, 2019], 1–2)

[5] A Disciple of Dom Marmion, Dom Pius de Hemptinne: Letters and Spiritual Writings, trans. Benedictines of Teignmouth (London: Sands & Co., 1935), February 23, 1902, p. 140.

[6] See The Book of Gomorrah and St. Peter Damian's Struggle Against Ecclesiastical Corruption, trans. Matthew Hoffman (n.p.: Ite ad Thomam Books and Media, 2015).

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The Central Point in the History of Mankind

Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, Crucifixion (1908)

THE DEATH OF A GOD, dying for the salvation of men, is the central point in the history of mankind. All ages bear witness to and converge towards it: the preceding centuries point to its coming, the others are destined to harvest its fruits.

The death of Christ is the centre of history, and also the centre of the life of each man in particular. In the eyes of God every man will be great in proportion as he takes part in that deed; for the only true and eternal dignity is that belonging to the divine Priest. The degree of each one’s holiness will be in exact proportion as he participates in that bloody immolation. For the Lamb of God alone is holy.

But although Jesus Christ the divine High Priest appeared only once on earth, to offer up His great sacrifice on Calvary; yet, every day He appears in the person of each one of His ministers, to renew His sacrifice on the altar. In every altar, then, Calvary is seen: every altar becomes an august place, the Holy of holies, the source of all holiness. Thither all must go to seek Life, and thither all must continually return, as to the source of God’s mercies.

Those who are the Master’s privileged ones, never leave this holy place, but there they “find a dwelling,” near to the altar, so that they never need go far from it; such are monks, whose first care it is to raise temples worthy to contain altars. Making their home by the Sanctuary, they consecrate their life to the divine worship, and every day sees them grouped around the altar for the holy sacrifice. This is the event of the day, the centre to which the Hours, like the centuries, all converge: some as Hours of preparation and awaiting in the recollection of the divine praise — these begin with Lauds and Prime continued by Terce, the third Hour of the day; the others, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, flow on in the joys of thanksgiving until sunset when the monks chant the closing in of night.

Thus the days of life pass, at the foot of the altar; thus the life of man finds its greatness and its holiness in flowing out, so to say, upon the altar, there to mingle with that Precious Blood which is daily shed in that hallowed place: for, if the life of man is as a valueless drop of water, when lost in the Blood of Christ it acquires an infinite value and can merit the divine mercy for us.

He who knows what the altar is, from it learns to live; to live by the altar is to be holy, pleasing to God, — and to go up to the altar to perform the sacred Mysteries is to be clothed upon with the most sublime of all dignities after that of the Son of God and His holy Mother.

Meditation by Dom Pius de Hemptinne (1879–1907), a discipline of Dom Columba Marmion.