Domestic Vocation

The Anchoress, in a lengthy (and excellent) post on class and class warfare, brings up something interesting about "honoring the poor" by stripping churches of the beautiful art and expensive chalices and ciboria:

I have a cousin who is a priest. He has worked in some absolute hellholes and he’s also rubbed elbows with the very privileged. He notes that it’s only the very rich who want to strip down churches into bare halls, or who want to serve Communion in wicker baskets because “that honors the poor.” The poor don’t really appreciate the wealthier folks deciding what “honors” them, he tells me. Condescension, for example, doesn’t do it.

My cousin says that truly poor folks he has ministered to are the ones who want beautiful churches, and they recoil at the idea of serving Communion - the banquet of the Lord - in baskets instead of something finer. The “something finer” used at mass isnot the “insult to the poor” the rich believe - rather it’s a promise of hope, a promise that everyone is in the game, not just some, that nothings is withheld from anyone. It is a reason to work, to become educated, to pursue the thing for which one senses one has been born, which is never “simply to be a nothing.”

I think that really sums it up nicely. Our parish has glass pattons (not really pattons, but very wide-mouthed bowls), glass "chalices" (except for the main one, which is gold), and a ciborum which is made of wood. We did upgrade our tabernacle when a local parish went back to using the tabernacle behind the altar (it's a landmark and was built more than a hundred years ago in all its gothic glory). They gave our parish the one they'd been using in the coat closet - I mean adoration room - when they'd taken our Lord out of the marble one in the sanctuary. (This "room" was about the size of a janitor's closet and was not even in the church; it was in the hallway around the bend, and any time we visited for Sunday Mass, we'd practically trip people as we all genuflected when we got to the wall outside the room. No one else seemed to ever genuflect there.) So, anyway, we now have this beautiful tabernacle, but our altar, ambo, etc. are all wood. We do have a stained glass fund now, though, which gives us great hope. Many have been the Sunday that Hubby and I gaze at the plain glass above the altar and dream of which saints can go there. And I daydream about having enough funds to buy several chalices and ciboria so that we can have really nice things for holding the Body and Blood of our Savior.