The Tabernacle Debate Is Front and Center

“Stop Moving the Tabernacle!” exclaims Michael Sean Winters in the National Catholic Distorter Reporter. His cri de coeur comes from the renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Norwich, Connecticut, which restored the tabernacle to the center of the former altar, on the main axis of the cathedral. Winters laments that at least three other cathedrals have restored the tabernacle to “the central focal point of the sanctuary.”

Sorry, but Winters’ “stop moving the tabernacle” ranks up there for me with “feel sorry for me because I’m an orphan…after I shot my parents!” I didn’t hear any such standing athwart in the 1960s when none of the faithful but a couple of liturgists decided to relegate the Blessed Sacrament to corners and closets. Perhaps we were not yet sufficiently “synodal” to take seriously the average Catholic’s protests of the time.

Behind Winters’ defense is the assumption that renovations a half century ago that moved the tabernacle off “the central focal point of the sanctuary” were correct and their reversal is liturgical regression. Winters plies all the usual lines: “Eucharist is a verb before it is a noun.” “The Mass [a term revisionist sacramental theology generally eschews] is…the source and summit of our faith.” 

Of course, most of these lines also depend on other assumptions—which a half century of “experience” (the otherwise sacred talisman of the synodal church) of faithful Catholics suggests were wrong. After all, the phenomenon of lost faith in the Real Presence and lost reverence in churches is evident. Yes, there may be many different causes for it, e.g., deficient catechesis. But I’d also suggest one reason is what your symbolism says. A reality located in “the central focal point of the sanctuary” says this is important; a reality you have to search for in the corners says it isn’t.

Do the faith and experience (notice which I think is more important) of the Catholics still going to church and still believing in the Real Presence say something about the adequacy of the theology (or at least its “pastoral application” in ecclesiastical architecture) of the “shuffle-off-the-tabernacle” crowd? Or is that phenomenon to be explained away by reference to aging and deceased liturgists who, in the 1960s, decided otherwise?

And, while we’re speaking of those theologians, I want to reject another principle that many of them hold sacred: the notion of the absolute normativity of the Church of the first five centuries, the Ecclesia quinque saeculis. According to the liturgists of that era, the Church’s liturgy should be stripped of the barnacles that accreted over the ensuing 1,500 years, something Vatican II supposedly undertook. It was the logic of “return to the sources.”

I do not deny the importance of the “return to the sources.” But implicit in that slogan is an assumption that is ecclesiologically problematic. The Holy Spirit is always active in the Church. The Holy Spirit did not leave with the end of the Western Patristic era, only to fly back into Holy Mother Church once “good Pope John” opened one of his vaunted windows. The Holy Spirit was also active in the Church in the medieval, Renaissance, and post-Tridentine eras. The liturgical development of that time cannot just simply be cast off because it didn’t exist before A.D. 500. 

It’s interesting that, in his attempt to jettison the idea that where you put the tabernacle has something to do with Eucharistic devotion, Winters appeals to medieval times, quoting liturgist Timothy O’Malley that “‘there were high degrees of eucharistic devotion in the Middle Ages and it was not focused on the placement of the tabernacle.’” Well, you can’t have it both ways: the Ecclesia quinque saeculis is normative but just look how devoted those medieval Catholics were!

So, yes, there is a historical contradiction here, but I will suggest the problem lies more deeply elsewhere: an allergy to the reserved Sacrament.

Liturgists who want to shunt the tabernacle off to the sidelines usually also love to insist that the early Church did not reserve the Blessed Sacrament in the church but perhaps kept some of the sacred species for Viaticum in the priest’s residence. Yes, devotion to the abiding presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament came slowly and flowered in the Middle Ages—perhaps because, during periods of persecution where churches did not exist, the architecture did not facilitate that development. 

But it did develop and it did flourish, to the point that tabernacles came into existence, were made ever more noble, were put in churches, and eventually—horror of horrors!—made “the central focal point of the sanctuary.” To overturn that process is to say that the Holy Spirit had a hiatus until the Annibale Bugninis of the world came along with new design plans in the 1960s. If that sounds risible, it’s because it is.

Altar and reserved Sacrament are not antinomies. Pace Winters, who complains, “[t]he tabernacle competes with the altar of sacrifice for the eye’s attention,” there is no competition. Yes, the altar is where the Eucharist takes place. But the Eucharist persists after Mass, and that reality is not insignificant and certainly not less important than the altar on which it was confected. The practical consequences of the “either/or” mentality of 1960s liturgists and their architects of church “renewal” are far more akin to Protestantism than a Catholic sense. 

Finally, one last observation—about the bishop’s chair. Winters seems upset that, in the re-renovation, the cathedra was displaced in Norwich by the tabernacle, the chair now on the side of the sanctuary from which the bishop “has to step forward several feet” to lead prayers. I cannot say I regret that. Christ is the central focus, not His alter Christus. The new Mariology loves to speak of Our Lady as “first disciple.” Maybe, like the humble Mary, His Grace might better be on the side. 

This, indeed, remains a criticism of the Novus Ordo more broadly: the prominence of the priest to the point that the liturgy almost inevitably seems to acquire his personality stamp. And I say that as one who welcomes the Novus Ordo and has no sentiment to return to the Extraordinary Form—even though I will not say that everything about the Novus Ordo (including the celebrant’s posture) has stood the test of time. Pardon me if I don’t detect a whiff of a perfume now supposedly out of style: prominent clericalism.