House of God or Multifunctional Worship Space? 

The National Catholic Register carried a story September 3 about Anglican cathedrals in the United Kingdom increasingly renting out their spaces for pop concerts and discos. Many justify the practice as a revenue source: maintaining great cathedrals purloined from the Church costs money, money not coming in from either the collection basket or government subsidies. 

But the story points to a deeper phenomenon: a modern[ist] notion of sacrality that is transitory—fleeting holiness.

Once upon a time, a church was called domus Dei, the “house of God.” When Catholics made a “visit to the Blessed Sacrament,”—i.e., stopped into a church to pray—their actions bespoke the holiness of the place. They genuflected. They kept silence. They made the sign of the cross. And those actions also gave a church a certain atmosphere, a certain ethos.

Granted, the same phenomenon is not found in most Protestant churches, arguably because there is no Blessed Sacrament reserved in the building. But the erosion of a sense of sacrality has also affected Catholic churches, where the Blessed Sacrament is present. Why?

Let me suggest a few thoughts.

Up until Vatican II, most Catholics could find the Blessed Sacrament in a prominent tabernacle on the central altar of a church. A certain interpretation of the Council led to the idea that altar and tabernacle were somehow antinomies, resulting in the Blessed Sacrament being shunted off to some side chapel or corner for adoration and prayer.

Unlike some liturgists who seem unable to hold two thoughts complementarily together at the same time, I am unconvinced that Sacrament and altar are in “competition” and, therefore, the displacement of the tabernacle is unwarranted.  Prescinding from that question, however, let’s ask what the practical effect of the shuffling off of the tabernacle has meant.

If you need a specific space for Eucharistic prayer, then what is the rest of the church for? For prayer? To what or whom, given that Vatican II teaches the Eucharist is “the source and summit” of the Christian life (Lumen Gentium 10)? Are we praying to the altar? To Mary and the saints? To God in the abstract (when He is sacramentally present over somewhere in the transept)? 

Or are we not praying? If the “prayer space” is the “Blessed Sacrament Chapel,” is the rest of the church a museum to visit? A place to satisfy one’s artistic and aesthetic hunger? A venue to see “pretty things” that only “the Church” (Lenny Bruce understood what people meant when they called it “the” Church) produces—or, at least once upon a time, did. 

If the rest of the church is somehow “less” holy, how far of a jump is that from ephemerally holy? Is it “more” holy when Mass is being celebrated (after which “holiness” again retreats to the Blessed Sacrament chapel)? Does that ineluctably lead us into mongrel notions of “church” that gained traction after Vatican II—for example, the church as “multifunctional” or a “worship space”? 

How is a church “multifunctional”? Is worship a “function” alongside other “functions” more (e.g., a Caritas supper) or less (e.g., a chicken juggling show) noble? No doubt the professional proponents of the “poor” will tell us the Lord welcomes the Caritas supper—but in the church? As if—according to St. Paul’s own question (1 Corinthians 11:22)—there are no other venues to eat? One Italian commentator captured the olfactory dissonance well: the whiff of “incense at 10 a.m., spaghetti bolognese sauce at 5 p.m.” 

And if a church is “multifunctional,” does it cease to be a good in itself, the domus Dei, and instead become a merely utilitarian good, a “space” available for “functions,” stuff of varying sacrality: “Holy Mass at 8 a.m., Buddhist funeral chant space at 11 a.m., pop concert at 3 p.m., Carol Lessons at 5 p.m. (nothing says Christmas like a Gothic choir), supper at 6:30 p.m.?” The Holy Spirit’s got to do a lot of relocating in a day!

Of course, a certain theological trend will insist it’s “all holy,” all “the work of the Holy Spirit.” It’s the Church spilling over into the world, where “grace is everywhere!” It’s why we needed to rip out those altar rails, which dared to “bound” the “supernatural existentials” found all over the place.

Might we ask, rather, whether coherence requires liminality, boundaries, and stability? The optimist says the Church is flowing into the world; the pessimist observes tides go both ways. When borders are not marked, the ecclesial “sanctuary” merely blends into the nave (which maybe then provides some rationalization why you need a separate Blessed Sacrament chapel), diminishing the sacrality of the “holy ground” (see Exodus 3:5) adjacent to the altar. At the same time, ordinary ground, e.g., the Home Depot parking lot, suddenly becomes “sanctuary” with the privileges and immunities once limited to sacred ecclesial precincts. 

Sixty years after Vatican II, the consequences—intended or unintended—of a “model of church” that erases boundaries raises questions that deserve discussion: the significance and place of the reserved Sacrament; the permanence of sacrality in sacred places and why that sense of sacrality is eroded. Renting out Lincoln Cathedral for discos is just a symptom.

Sacrality is something stable, something abiding. It’s why people recognize a church as a church, even if the canonists are satisfied that they have “desacralized” the building. 

What we are seeing today is the idea of sacrality as something akin to a “function,” a fleeting quality that can be turned on or off like a light. Space—even ecclesiastical space—suddenly just becomes space. It is sacral space in the morning, semi-sacral in the afternoon, rental space in the evening. That is an understanding of sacrality far removed from what Catholics traditionally understood it to be. 

Proxemics is the study of how we use space and where elements in a particular space stand and how they relate to each other. A legitimate proxemics question is how one apportions space. The rearguard defense of Vatican II tabernacle marginalization deplores restoration of the tabernacle to the central axis and sightline of a church. But proxemics and symbolism tell you: what’s “front and center,” what first gains your attention, is most important; what doesn’t, isn’t.

In the light of that basic human experience, what is modern ecclesiastical architecture really saying, especially about the permanence of sacrality? And are we then surprised it becomes equally transitory when applied to priesthood, religious profession, and marital vows?