Chasing Catholic Cooties Out of a Cathedral

. No disrespect is meant to either Christian denomination mentioned. The sardonic title was chosen merely to indicate one party's strength of feeling about another, but who had to deal in a civil manner for a sales transaction. Please explore this with me as an inquiry into human culture and ritual processes.
. What makes a certain space or location sacred? I remember a prayer from long ago in which this line was included:

"Lord, this place is sacred not because You are here

but because we are here."

That about sums it up: without the reverence of humans, sacredness would be an empty concept.
. Currently many Catholic church buildings are being given up and placed on the market. Unlike other sales citing the square footage, specifying the heating system, etc. there is an important value that cannot be readily shown to buyers: it is a holy place. I encountered such a situation first hand at a church in Massachusetts, where the Catholics there put up for sale a very large, well kept church with generous parking space. Ironically the new tenants were not a commercial firm but a church, but also one with whom relations are historically difficult for Catholics.

. The roots of the animosity go at least as far back as 306 A.D. when Constantine I, Emperor of Rome adopted Christianity for himself and his empire while also moving the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople (modern Istanbul). Though the Empire continued to include the West until the "Fall of Rome" in 476, major political and religious power had already passed East to the new capital.

. Europe and Asia Minor continued to adhere to a tradition of Empire, then under Christianity and non-Roman leaders, but in reality fractured into many independent kingdoms. These political divisions continued to haunt the Church appearing, by proxy, as theological disputes culminating in the eleventh century. In 1054 the Pope of Rome and the Ecumenical Patriarch excommunicated each other, beginning the formal division of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Interestingly the Catholics continue to accept the validity of Orthodox ordination of priests, a recognition not returned by the Orthodox.

. Which leads me to the present story... One might assume that since it was already consecrated, all the new parish had to do was ask the Catholics not to secularize the building and then just move in.

. That's not what happened. A special two-day Orthodox Rite of the Consecration of a Church was performed. The Metropolitan (like a Cardinal) of the District presided over a Vigil ceremony lasting three hours on the first evening and an all-morning service the next day, cocelebrated by many clergy.

. I was there as part of a non-denominational choir invited to sing the first nine hymns of the vigil liturgy. We had rehearsed these pieces in their original Slavonic, as composed by Rachmaninoff. That is the liturgical language used by the Russian and some other Eastern European Orthodox churches. So our participation was very welcome and fit right in.

. When our half-hour stint was over I was able to turn my attention to the physical surroundings as I was very curious how far they would go in "de-Catholicizing" the building and the worship space. First I noticed that they had left the pews in place, though some Orthodox churches do not install them. I also expected they would remove the fourteen mural depictions called Stations of the Cross, common in Catholic churches. Contrary to their tradition the new owners did not remove them. I speculated that was either because these were not paintings, but bas-relief sculptures architecturally part of the walls and thus difficult to remove; or were left in a spirit of ecumenism and tolerance.

. The organ sits unused up in the choir loft, as all their services are sung a cappella. The rack of votive candles in the foyer was allowed to remain and appeared to be well-patronized, apparently for their parallel custom of lighting a candle as a symbol of a spiritual petition.

. But the altar area was completely reconstructed. The new star of the altar is a beautiful iconostasis, a panel spanning the entire breadth of the altar nave. It was elaborately carved and painted with sacred art by Serbian artisans -- taking three years -- then shipped to the USA.

. The parish hall downstairs was immediately put into use by these lively people as is. The post-vigil evening included a meal, Serbian musicians, singers and dancers.

Going Forward to Yesterday, Part II: I Love to Decode

. My January 16 posting "Going Forward to Yesterday" was about a weak parallel between the excruciating efforts of scholars to decipher text in Aramaic and Hebrew in the faded and/or fragmented Dead Sea Scrolls and my pitiful attempt to restore some text, in English, from some shards of a broken page. Nonetheless it is like "air guitar": one gets a bit of a thrill of imitating the art of the Real People.

. There were four stages to my quest: . 1) assemble the pieces into their likely original places, despite missing sections; 2) do optical character recognition (OCR) to attempt to turn the image into text; 3) correct the mistakes made by OCR --there were many-- and turn it into the maximum recognizable text; 4) identify the original document from which the page fell out.

. Actually the OCR step was not really necessary, but I included it to simulate the lack of clarity even in the reconstructed document. After visually examining the document, comparing to the OCR and extrapolating, here is the clarified text that I guessed was as close to the original as could be made:

. "Our primary need, then, is to continue the faith in a Government which during four consecutive years has given proof of its attachment to the cause of good government, of its sincere and ardent desire to promote everything to perpetuate its tradition of progress, and conduct the Province to the high position which nature destined it to achieve. And with this faith alike in the Government and in the future of our Province, let us continue to invest, with courage, our accumulated wealth, in the development of the Province's resources; let us be true ..."

. Now using any physical and contextual clues I attempted t0 hypothesize what the source document was.

1) It is from an English-speaking country. 2) Province is capitalized as if referring to a specific political division that would be clear to the reader; 3) a four-year term (not included in excerpt I provided above) evinces a non-parliamentary government or a government official chosen by regular elections.

. From these three clues I surmised it is a document from a Canadian province and that it is either from -- or defending the regime of -- the provincial premier, perhaps one running for re-election.

4) The mention of development as if it were a current issue and the fact that the list includes only natural resources implies a western province or the northern area of an Eastern province 5) the inhabitants have an inferiority complex at that, implying a frontier society; 6) the back of the page, numbered 28, appears to have been stuck to a flimsy cover, as if it were the last page of a very short paperback document; 7) the mention of "accumulated wealth" and "return from otehr lands" are curve balls. Why would citizens leave a place charcterized by wealth, unless perhaps the wirter is speaking of his own wealth, and the common folk left for economic reasons not mentioned, but impled by the apologetic and exhortatory style 8) appears written in the flowery style common in pre-World War II formal writing.

. I'll go out on a limb and guess -- based on the above and the flimsy extrapolation from the fact there is no French translation and no francocisms crept into the writer's vocabulary, that it is: Ontario (or possibly neighboring Saskatchewan).