Down with Pews

 

I sent this picture to a group of friends for the Feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran. A friend responded with a snide comment about the presence of movable chairs rather than nice pews. Pews in St. John Lateran? Well, then we’ll know we’re in serious trouble. 

I responded with “Down with pews.” A friend replied with the obligatory eyeroll emoji. 

Still, the fact remains that St. John Lateran, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity, Hagia Sophia, and other ancient churches do not have pews. In Medieval times, there might be stone benches on the sides of the nave for use by the elderly, infirm, very young children, etc. A quick online search corroborates this: pews are a modern invention. 

As one blogger says: 

In other words, seating in churches didn’t really become a thing until parishioners got bored enough to wish they were sitting down—that is, about the time of the Protestant Reformation.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. 

We are physical creatures. We respond to visual cues, positioning and physical posture. When you walk into a church and the interior is dominated by wooden pews, you’re going to assume that this place is for sitting passively for prolonged periods. 

Except that the purpose of a Catholic church is to provide a fitting place for the holy sacrifice of the Mass and reception of the sacraments generally. 

Which of the sacraments do you ordinarily receive sitting? 

The homily is one of, if not the, least important aspect of the Mass. Yet I have had family and friends who regularly attend Mass each Sunday speak about the Mass as if the only part that mattered was the homily. One acquaintance even went so far as to say he wouldn’t receive Communion during Mass if he didn’t “get anything” out of the homily. 

What do we expect? The church interior is covered in pews, the majority of most modern Masses is attended while sitting, one of the most common and visible “ministries” is usher, and the latest Council demanded homilies every Sunday Mass. 

Ah, you might say, but at our traditional Latin Mass we spent most of the time kneeling (Low Mass), or desperately trying to figure out whether to stand or kneel at the preface (High Mass). Still though, you remain “the man in the pew,” not a particularly felicitous designation. 

This is not to mention the fact that pews make having children at Mass infuriating as it is entirely unnatural to expect a two-year-old to remain inside a tightly confined space for an hour. 

If the latest Council wanted “full and active participation above all else,” they could’ve started by making a recommendation to scale back on pews. Why should the Mass be heard sitting? Why not allow the faithful to move throughout the liturgy as the Spirit moves them, toward particular stained glass windows depicting a saint or salvation history scene that comes to mind during the Mass, or a side altar, or station of the Cross? With the whole congregation moving closer during the Canon and Consecration? 

Families could bring pillows for kneelers and children’s seating, as many did in the olden days and some still do when attending chapels with minimal seating. And who cares if children are running around inside the church or joining together to form little clouds like at a four-year-old-league soccer game? That sounds a whole lot more like the Christ child’s trips home from the Jerusalem festal pilgrimages (where children evidently had healthy separation from their parents throughout the trip) than a typical, often miserable, Sunday Mass experience. 

This sounds like pietistic nonsense, but it wasn’t pietistic nonsense to the first 1,500 years of Christians. 

When I attended Eastern Rite liturgy for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the faithful stepped out of their pews multiple times to prostrate themselves in the aisle. 

And why not? I imagine there were plenty such traditions in local cathedral liturgy in the West in pre Tridentine days when liturgy was handed down locally and organically and not received via orders from a book published by a centralized bureaucracy. 

The Sunday before last, I descended from the choir loft to find a chunk of congregants earnestly debating about whether to stand, kneel, or sit at points like the Kyrie, Preface, etc. when their Missals had different instructions. I shrugged my shoulders and said it was local custom. But we seem incapable of accepting that some things really are not standardized and can be decided locally and informally. 

Pews aren’t going anywhere until we’re relegated to house churches. Still, I pray for a time when “full and active participation” extends to physical posture and motion during liturgy, emphasizing the faithful uniting themselves to the sacrifice of the Mass (and free movement of children) rather than passively hearing (and judging) the latest homily and NAB translation of Scripture.