By: Paul McKenna

Paul McKenna — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:20:20 +0000

With respect, I am surprised [at the actions of] Fr Chamberlain and his legal team [regarding the Teschemakers chapel and altar argument]. . . . It was in a pre-vatican II environment that this church was built, and to understand the relationship of THIS altar to THIS church one has to return to the cultural norms that existed when the church was built.
These norms directed that the altar was emphatically not a chattel. In fact there could be no church without an altar. No one would consider a roof to be a chattel, but an altar is an even more important part of a Catholic church than it’s roof. The Altar was the very reason for the church and without a stone altar, the church could not be consecrated. I stand to be corrected, but I recall that part of the consecration ceremony involved the bishop symbolically ‘mortaring’ the altar to the floor of the church to emphasise the cohesiveness of the two and the doctrine that the church, of which the building is a symbol, is rooted indissoluably to the sacrifice and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, symbolised by the altar.
It is true that many churches had to wait a number of years before their parishes could afford an altar worthy of the ediface. In such times, Mass was offered on wooden altars which were always considered liturgically as a temporary measure until an appropriate stone altar could be obtained. Yet in these cases the church could never be formally consecrated. So too, if an altar was damaged, the church was considered desecrated and had to be re-consecrated.
In my opinion this is all grounds for considering that the removal of the altar does require a resource consent as it directly affects the cultural meaning and heritage of the building, and this is subject to the Resource Management Act.

— Paul McKenna,
Architectural Consultant

Abridged: NZC moderator

Comments on: Battle over chapel altar moves up a notch

By: Paul McKenna