The controversy over formal church approval for Catholic university theologians brought with it years of buildup, historic implications and coast-to-coast press coverage.
But that is not what got the nation’s Catholic bishops most exercised at their annual meeting this week.
The bishops issued a strongly worded, to-the-moment plea to end bombing and economic sanctions in Iraq. But that’s not what inspired their most visible passion.
They discussed charity, aging and a crisis in the holy city of Nazareth.
But the agenda item that brought the most prelates to their feet–fully 33 bishops and archbishops put their oars in, including five of the nation’s eight cardinals–was a draft of a document on church architecture.
Many reporters had left by the time it was presented Thursday. A few who remained wondered why an organization that had been building churches for 1,600 years needed a new document explaining how to do it.
Indeed, to the uninitiated, Domus Dei, roughly “the house of God,” looks straightforward. It traces the theology of worship and liturgy, offers basic principles for church design, then spends about 30 pages discussing practical considerations of church building and adornment.
But within that simple structure was a universe of complications.
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who has championed the cause of worshipers with disabilities, spoke about the need to get people not just in the nave of the church, but in devotional side chapels. He added that with the church’s emphasis on the “liturgy of the word,” Gospel readings and preaching, most churches need to pay more attention to sound systems.
Bishop Edward Braxton, a former Chicago priest now serving in St. Louis, objected to a passage that said liturgical movements within a church should be simple and non-repetitive. That description of beauty, he argued, was “highly Aristotelian and Thomistic” and failed to reflect different kinds of beauty that have come out of Vietnamese, Hispanic and African-American Catholic communities.
The real fight was over the location of the tabernacle.
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A tabernacle, in a Catholic church, is an enclosure for wafers that have been consecrated and have become for Catholics the body of Christ.
Tabernacles commonly used to sit in the center of the sanctuary. As part of the renewal of the liturgy undertaken during the Second Vatican Council, the church allowed tabernacles to be moved to the side, to side chapels or out of the main church altogether.
In recent years, tabernacles have become a symbolic flash point in church politics. Conservatives want the tabernacle back where it used to be. Liberals want to try new configurations.
Parishes in the midst of renovation projects have found themselves swept up in guerrilla warfare between national activist groups, and some have been torn down the middle by the question of locating the tabernacle.
But to consider it as politics doesn’t do the issue justice. For Catholics, the Eucharist is at the heart of worship, and they believe Christ truly lives in it. On the other hand, they believe the focus of Sunday mass should not be the tabernacle but celebration of the Eucharist itself.
In other words, where the tabernacle goes says something basic about the life and purpose of the church building. (For the record, the bishops almost unanimously rose to say the tabernacle should be in plain view to everybody at mass.)
To non-Catholics, it may seem an exotic issue. But the visual simplicity of many Protestant churches carries a similar theological weight and history, tangibly and intentionally illustrating the belief in a direct, individual and personal relationship with God. The open floor and unadorned walls of a mosque, too, demonstrate powerfully the shape of Islamic belief and worship.
News usually occurs around the edges of faith, where people struggle to apply their beliefs to current events, inside and outside their religious communities.
But it is worth noting that the Catholic bishops saved a considerable part of their energy this week for church buildings–mundane business perhaps, until you remember that those buildings are the way ordinary people live out a most extraordinary aspect of human existence.
Coulda, woulda: Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces, N.M., offered a more technical–and lyrical–critique of Domus Dei after he counted 199 separate uses of the preachy, moralistic, but ultimately ambiguous word “should.”
“If I could, I would say what I should about the shoulds and should-nots that, rabbitlike, dance over these pages. Should we not try to eliminate this six-letter word?” he asked. “Should we not attempt also to clarify its meaning?”
You can guess his answer: “I think we should.”
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