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Sunday, January 10, 2021

HOW TO MUCK UP A BEAUTIFUL CHURCH

 Annunciation parish in Denver, Colorado:



You can’t see it, but there is a free-standing altar in all that clutter. Poinsettias are placed in front of a flimsy free standing altar, thus helping your eye to look at the first and official altar, the high altar. 

I guess this church was decorated for Christmas during Advent as all the violet  colors are still in place, and these too add to the clutter, not to mention the Christmas trees with distracting decorations on them. 

But a stunningly beautiful sanctuary it is if all the unnecessary clutter was removed. 

Get rid of the flimsy free standing altar. Pull the “table” part of the altar away from the reredos  so that it once again becomes the altar of sacrifice and allows for Mass to be celebrated facing the nave or the liturgical east. That’s the altar. You don’t need another one in front of it. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aside from more color, it appears decorated to the degree of St Joseph except St Joseph is all trendy monotone lights on fake trees and appears as if several dump trucks of poinsettias were poured into the sanctuary and chapels.

Anonymous said...

yeah, looking closer, the Denver church regrettably used monotone lights it seems, but at least seems to have used real trees with real decorations, and you likely could catch the evergreen scent when first entering.

Which beats uniform sterile plastic trees devoid of any decoration past sterile monotone designer lighting and fake trees reduced only to interior decorating corner fillers.

The Denver church far more captures the real feeling of Christmas. Most folk decorating churches today never apparently learned a thing from the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Straight to the more unrealistically perfect fake trees they go, invariably.

Anonymous said...

And may be wrong about real trees, but at LEAST they are actually decorated.

Department stores use undecorated fake trees.

Lazy households who have no real Christmas traditions only put up fake trees with only monotone lights, those folk and those who subscribe more to Christmas being mainly in aping modern interior decorating trends established by commercial enterprises.

which last line fairly describes most churches today.

Anonymous said...

Romulus Augustus here, having lived in Denver the city has many beautiful churches with high altars, communion rails, statues and confessionals intact somehow many did NOT get wreckovated after the Second Vatican Disaster!! Denver is a very Catholic city and has an F.S.S.P. parish just a few miles South of Denver in Littleton called Our Lady Of Mount Carmel ALL TLM parish!!!