This article argues for an environment of worship that encourages the full participation of the people and complements the symbolic meaning of the actions of worship, particularly the sacraments. It is written in the context of Roman Catholic worship but reflects the concerns of nearly all highly liturgical traditions. Many of these have been emphasized throughout the Christian church, given the recent phenomenon of liturgical convergence.
We are all aware that today’s liturgy requires a different kind of space than the liturgy of yesterday. But different in what ways? Just what adjustments are required? It may be helpful to reflect on some of the differences between past and present needs. Both new buildings and remodeling require attention to them.
Before Vatican II, the church building was, above all else, a place for devoutly attending Mass. Mass was celebrated as a drama in the sanctuary to be watched by those attending. The primary mode of communication was visual, signaled in architecture by the central, elevated, and normally very large high altar, and signaled in a rite by the dramatic elevations of the host and chalice at the peak moments in the Mass. Any number of secondary elements served that visual concentration: precision movement by celebrant and ministers, symmetrical side altars and candles, deep sanctuaries drawing the eye forward and upward. Virtually everything else was subordinated to that central function of the church building as a place for devoutly attending Mass. Devotional services outside Mass took place before the altar and normally culminated in benediction. Other services either took place outside of church (e.g., anointing of the sick) or were carried out in relative privacy in corners with a bare minimum of ceremony (e.g., penance, baptism).
Today’s liturgy is the result of a reform that sought to replace devout attendance with active participation. Today’s ideal worshiper is not a spectator, but one who is part of what is taking place. The people in the pew concelebrate the liturgy with the ministers in the sanctuary (see #54 of the Instruction of the Roman Missal for the strongest possible statement of this understanding of the people’s role at the liturgy). This displaces the visual as the primary mode of communication. To be sure, watching is an indispensable element of participation in any public act. But watching is not the only element in active participation. People are expected to sing, respond vocally, listen, and, above all, to feel as a real part of what is taking place.
The absolute centrality of the altar has also been displaced by the restoration of the importance of the proclamation of the Word and the communal celebration of sacraments other than the Eucharist. Respect for the presence of Christ on the altar has been balanced by respect for his presence in proclaimed word and worshiped assembly and for his action in all the sacraments.
The arrangement of the church building requires that these enrichments of the Catholic perspective be taken fully into account. Many experts now prefer to speak of the environment for worship rather than speaking of church buildings and furnishings. The term is indeed appropriate. Liturgy is an activity that communicates on many levels and in diverse ways, and it is only when all of these various modes of communication (hearing, feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting, sensing movement) are integrated and work together that the liturgy can work well. There is a genuine ecology of worship that should unite Word and sacrament, people and ministers, Christ and church.
When that ecology is neglected, we have to cope with a liturgy that is confusing and distracting, because it does not clearly signal what we are doing. For example, any number of recently built or recently remodeled churches have a large altar in the center of the sanctuary, flanked on either side by a lectern and music stand. This says, and says loudly, that the Word is only a mere appendage to the sacrament, on more or less equal par with commentary, announcements of parish schedule, and the songs of the liturgy. It is not enough to reduce the size of the music stand. The prominence of the Liturgy of the Word, not only for Mass but also for the other sacraments and for common prayer, requires that we rethink the proportion between altar and lectern. If our worship is to signal the importance of the Word, then the place of proclaiming the Word will have to look important. One of the ways to make it look important is to scale down the size of the altar. As long as the altar is located in the dead center of the sanctuary and is as large as it normally is at present, the altar will be perceived as the only important focus of attention. The conventional elongated altar is an inheritance from the medieval Mass-with-back-to-people and is totally unnecessary now that it can be seen in front of the celebrant.
In fact, our oversized altars confuse the kind of sign that the altar is supposed to be. The point of turning the altar around was not simply to make it visible, but to make it visible as the Lord’s Table around which we gather. But our very large altars inevitably mean that the gifts are swamped in a sea of linen and unnecessary decorations. The average large altar makes the Eucharist look more like starvation rations with window dressing than the banquet of the kingdom. A smaller altar, say four feet wide, would force the removal of flowers and candles to other places where they belong and allow the gifts to look more like a generous banquet.
The height of the floor on which the altar stands is an equally critical matter. The point of turning the altar around and moving it forward is to create a sense of unity with the congregation. That sense is destroyed when the altar stands in an excessively elevated sanctuary or when it stands on steps that are too high. In contemporary liturgy, dramatic elevation of the altar is a distraction. An altar is easily visible without seeming remote if the floor beneath it is elevated six inches for every thirty feet of distance between altar and people. In other words, an altar that stands a hundred feet from the back pew should stand on a floor twenty inches higher than the floor of the nave. If it stands higher, the congregation senses distance and remoteness from the altar.
Scaling down the altar and placing it lower than it once was is a real departure from the practice of the past, and some may see this as demeaning the altar. Emotions aside, it must be observed that the altar does have a different function now than it did in the past. In the old liturgy, it was the liturgical center. Now, the importance accorded to work, to the congregation, to the communal celebration of the other sacraments means that it is a liturgical center, functioning in relation to the lectern and to the people gathered around it.
Also, the primary mode of according a sense of importance to the altar in the old liturgy was its dramatic visibility. Now, the importance of the altar can be dramatized ritually with the shift of ministers from the lectern to the altar after the liturgy of the Word, with the offertory procession, with the visibility of the gifts on the altar, with speaking aloud the eucharistic prayer. We no longer need to rely so exclusively on elevation and size to make the altar appear as a thing of importance. Some new churches are being built with the altar to one side of the sanctuary.
This solves several problems at once. The lectern can come into its own, suggesting the importance of Word as well as a sacrament. The vexing problem of the celebrant’s chair is also solved. When the chair is at the side, its use makes the celebrant seem to be in temporary retirement from the celebration. When it is placed directly behind the altar, the chair either has to look like a throne or the congregation must live with looking over the top of the altar at a bodiless head. In this plan, the chair requires no pedestal or only a very low one, and the celebrant can be readily seen by most of the congregation. The greatest advantage of this plan is that chair, lectern, and altar together constitute a strong focus of visual attention. Credence tables, music stands, and devotional appointments can be readily seen as the secondary items that they are. Radical as this plan may look at first sight, it is also the one that most readily accommodates either a statue or a tabernacle at the side without distracting attention from the liturgical action itself.
Contemporary liturgy requires a larger and lower sanctuary than we normally had in the past, and not only because there are more ministers running around the sanctuary than there used to be. The ministers represent the church at the altar, and so the sanctuary should be experienced as an extension of the place where the people are. In some older churches, this is an architectural, financial, or emotional impossibility. In such cases, some kind of makeshift will be inevitable. But in other churches, the only barrier is imagination.
Another acid test of liturgical ecology is the placement of the font. There is a general awareness that baptism should be celebrated as much as possible as an action of the entire assembled church. It is often indicated by placing the font somewhere at the head of the nave or in the sanctuary. Placing the font at the front does mean that people can see more readily, and there is much to be said for this concern. But there are requirements beyond mere frontal visibility. One of the most important is room for candidates (or parents), sponsors, and ministers around the font. Not all sanctuaries readily provide this sort of room. The font should also be visible to the eye as a thing of importance and dignity. This does not necessarily require that it be of immense size. But when the font draws no more attention to itself than a music stand or credence Table or is rivaled by the tabernacle, it does not have the proper place of importance in the sanctuary.
There is still something to be said for having the font at the back of the church, near the entrance. There is nothing to be said for its being kept in the small and generally invisible baptisteries of the past. If the main aisle is wide enough, the font should stand there. Placing the font in the back suggests in a dramatic way that baptism is an entry into the church, especially if it can be used for holy water, instead of the conventional little bowl. There is an almost superstitious fear of having people touch the font or the water in it, a curious inversion of piety that makes the water more important than those who are baptized. This should be firmly resisted. The real difficulty with the font in the back is not that people cannot see, but that they generally cannot turn around comfortably during a baptism. If pews had a little more space between them, it would be possible to turn around without peril to nylons and knee bones. It should also be noticed that the word font means “fountain” or “pool,” not the sink suggested by the style of the average font. Indoor plumbing has been around for a while, and it is time that the church makes use of this convenience. Priests and catechists deplore the fact that most ordinary Catholics are so tied to the baptismal symbol of washing that everything else escapes them. A real fountain with moving water would suggest life, movement, celebration, as no font without running water can.
Active participation demands that processions play an important role in the liturgy. There is nothing like a parade to get people involved in a civic event, and the procession is the religious counterpart of a parade. A generous aisle that cuts through the midst of the assembly is a must, as is generous space between pews and sanctuary. Almost every rite of the church, to say nothing of the need for room for such necessities as wheelchairs and bassinets (this writer does not approve of the leprosarium called a “cry room”), demands that there be free room for movement.
Closely related to the processional space is the entrance and exit space. A truly appropriate entry to a church would say loudly and clearly that this is a place of significance and a place that gives welcome. Outside, even a small patio entrance would do this. Inside, there should be room for conversation, informal greetings, and real entrance rites. It is not surprising that priests are often reluctant to begin a wedding, a funeral, or a baptism at the entrance to the church. Many of them are not places where most of us would care to linger, much less pray in! Some newer or remodeled churches have the sacristy near the door. Then, not only the space, but also the ministers give welcome to the people, who have come to pray with them. Places used for genuine social occasions, like theaters and good restaurants, have just such generous entrance spaces. Places that have a more utilitarian purpose (like supermarkets and take-home eateries) allow you to move as quickly as possible from the parking lot to the counter. The question is, do we want the church to seem like a spiritual supermarket or a place that houses a serious social occasion?
Many people complain that new or remodeled churches are “cold,” and the complaint is genuine. Some are cold because of insufficient attention to lighting and color or because of poor arrangement. Some are cold because of puritan housecleaning that removes all touches of the past. With careful planning, such things as statues and vigil lights can be placed where they are still accessible for devotion, but not a distraction from communal worship. Some innovations are utterly tasteless—like tabernacles resembling microwave ovens or the refusal to use old and perfectly serviceable pieces of furniture that do not match the new decor. Any room that has all new furniture has certain sterility and flatness because it conveys no sense that this is a room whose users have a common past.
But it should also be realized that the newer church building is much more suitable for public, communal celebration than it is for private devotion. Nothing is colder than an amusement park in the winter or a good restaurant in the early morning, because those are places meant to be filled with people socializing. The more a space is functional for public gatherings and communal celebration, the less it is apt to be a pleasant place for solitude. Our newer churches probably require devotional chapels or corners that invite private prayer and reflection. This would be a far happier solution than the compromises that now afflict our churches—old high altars left in place for the reservation of the blessed sacrament, vigil lights burning before abstract Madonnas, and all the rest. Compromise is an excellent political principle, but it is liturgically disastrous. Good liturgy calls for wholehearted affirmation, and a church that is neither here nor there is anything but a strong affirmation of what we are about.
If a parish does not have a sense that certain things from the past are liturgical distractions, then perhaps its liturgical sensibilities need further education. Improvement of the celebration and understanding of the liturgy may be more necessary than remodeling the building. Better, perhaps, to make a few absolutely necessary changes and to live with a makeshift for a while, than to do a full-scale remodeling that will saddle the next four generations with the problems of their grandparents. Remodeling ought to be done with an eye to further and later improvements. If compromise is inevitable, and sometimes it is, then it should be carried out in such a way that those who are able to make further improvements will not have to undo everything that has been done in the present remodeling.
