When is a chapel not a chapel?

  They are "reordering" my home church. The new parish priest has some ideas that the altar is too small, the altar rails have to go and  that the steps in the sanctuary have to be levelled. Various reasons are trotted out, health and safety being the foremost reason ( never remember any injuries from genuflecting!!)
      My home church, where I was baptised, where I made my first Holy Communion is, truth be told,  not the prettiest from the outside. Built in the mid 19th century the instructions seem to have been "make it neo gothic" and they certainly did!!

 But what I always loved about the church was when you stepped inside, you knew you were in a Catholic church. The noise from the traffic abated, the light was sifted through the stained glass windows and the sanctuary with its red lamp brought you face to face with the sacred.  The chapel in question was lucky in that the "wreckovators" never got near it, yes part of the high altar was detached to form the new mass altar, and the pulpit was moved into the sanctuary from its place among the pews, but otherwise not much changed in 150 years.

    You could feel the years in that structure, the sense of those who had gone before, who had paid for the building, for the high altar, for the altar rails, for the paintings of the stations of the cross, for the stained glass windows, for so many things. Parishoners who had given whatever they could as a testament of their faith and for the assurance that when they passed on, their souls would be remembered in the masses that were said in their chapel.  Catholics should know it as the Communion of the Saints. The Church is not just now, it is of the past, the present and the future.So in a sense when a "liturgical design consultant" starts to talk about "reordering" a chapel, of replacing altars, of liturgical space, of changing seats, they are in fact desecrating the memory of those who went before, as surely as if they were dancing on their graves.

GK Chesterton once wrote that" Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of classes - our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around."

   Of course those well educated Catholic priests and lay people who have "done" theology will say that the renovations are in line with the "spirit of Vatican II"  (that's for another day), that is the way the Church is going. Strangely I have done something that most of these innovators have not done, namely read the documents of Vatican II. Funny enough I can find no mention of ripping out statues, removing altar rails, geting rid of crucifixes and replacing them with vague shapes drapped over plus signs. Oh well maybe I missed those paragraphs!!

  When is a chapel not a chapel? When it is turned into a protestant prayer house!!