In case you know what you like but maybe don’t know why, here is a great quote from the architect Geoffrey Webb, from his 1939 book The Liturgical Altar:
“The reason for [the Church’s] meticulous directions is to be found in the supreme importance which the Church attaches to the altar in her liturgy. Not only does she consider it the central focus of the whole liturgy, the raison d’être of the building in which its stands; not only does she indicate that the church exists for the altar, rather than the altar for the church; not only does she look upon it as the sacrificial stone, upon which Christ, our Priest and Victim, offers Himself daily in His Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is the central act of her liturgy; but she has proclaimed again and again that in her mind the altar represents her Lord Himself. He is Altar, Victim and Priest; and the reverence for the altar, expressed in the restraint and dignity of its design, symbolizes the reverence due to Christ Himself.”
If the spindly “community table” of your church doesn’t seem quite right, here’s why.
February 29, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Don’t you mean the peoples table?
February 29, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Yes, that too. But of course, the altar IS the people’s table in a sense, because Christ shares His heavenly table with us in the sacraments. It’s just not the people’s table alone.
March 2, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I get it. To contain the altar of sacrifice is the function of having a church in the first place. It is the focal point of the practice of our faith. Everything else is of secondary or ancillary importance. So that is why they are tearing the altars out every time they remodel a church and neglect to build them in the new churches. Oh, wait, I am confused. What ARE the new churches for?