missypie

I'm a protestant but love to visit the cathedrals of Europe...to think that the people built something so huge and beautiful so long ago... But I always come away with a few questions that I hope some devoted Catholic or other cathedral-informed person can answer:
1. Why all the little chapels at the side and in the back? Are they/were they used for small services such as weddings and baptisms or just for prayer?
2. Most of the little chapels seem to have one or more arrangements of fresh flowers in them. Of all the times I've wandered around cathedrals, I've never seen anyone actually lay the flowers at the alter. Do the cathedrals themselves order the flowers from a florist and have them delivered or do people bring them?
3. Lots of folks seem to pay and light candles near statues of the Virgin Mary and I can understand that. But of the chapels devoted to other saints...how would one decide at which one to pray?
4. There is always a cost to light candles...sometimes there are big candles and little candles...What is the money used for? Does someone come around at the end of each day and extinguish the candles, or do they burn all the way down? What is the significance of lighting a candle, as opposed to just praying?

ThinGorjus

Um, sweetie, someone should inform you that there are Protestant cathedrals, St. Paul's of London, for example.

elaine

HI
I am neither Protestant nor Catholic but I'll chime in with what I know, not necesarily a complete answer.

Soome of the little side chapels as you know are dedicated to particular saints or various aspects of Mary, etc. In many cases they were funded or endowed by a family who wanted to make a contribution to the cathedral, or which was particularly grateful to a particular saint, perhaps a prayer was answered or someone in the family died and they were hoping for saintly intervention for the soul. But I'm not talking about recent fund-raising, in most cases I'm talking hundreds of years ago when the cathedrals were being built.

Some people have a favorite saint to whom they want to pray. Many saints, often due to their history or the circumstances of their martyrdom have been designated as having particular
influence in certain areas. For example
St Lucy was martyred by having her eyes gouged out; she is currently one of the saints associated with eye disease, so someone with an eye problem might pray specifically for her help.

nytraveler

And how about Westminster Abbey? Or any other cathedrals all over England, Holland, Germany, etc. There are numerous protestant cathedrals here in the US too (St. John the Divine in NY etc.)

Answers will not be the same for all countries but here's a stab at some.

Chapels are used for both private prayer and some small services.

Flowers are not brought by worshippers - but are organized by the church - unless it is a funeral or wedding or other private ceremony.

You decide to pray at a chapel depending on what the particular saint is the patron of (like St. Christopher for tavelers).

That is not a cost to light candles it is a donation. It is supposed to pay for the candle with hopefully some extra for church funds for the poor etc.

ThinGorjus

You can't call Westminster Abbey a cathedral because there is a Westminster Cathedral in London and it is Catholic.

nytraveler

I know it is called an Abbey - but I've never seen any monks - and why should't it be considered a cathedral (although I recognize the the Church of Englnad may not so designate it). There no rule I've ever heard of that you can;t have 2 cathedrals ( 1 catholic and 1 protestant) in the same city with the same name.

KT

Umm...Westminster Abbey is not, and never has been a cathedral.

Since terminology seems to have become an issue here:
A cathedral is a church that is the seat of a bishop of a diocese. The Roman Catholic church has bishops, so it has cathedrals. Anglican churches (including the Church of England and the Episcopalian church) do, too.

Most Protestant denominations do not have cathedrals. In places like the Netherlands, churches that were originally built as cathedrals ceased to be cathedrals when they became Protestant churches (e.g., Dutch Reformed or whatever).

KT

Follow-up now that I've seen the above exchange.

Westminster Cathedral is the cathedral for the Catholic Diocese of London. St. Paul's Cathedral is the cathedral for the Anglican Diocese of London. (Southwark is the cathedral for the Anglican diocese that includes South London and vicinity.)

Westminster Abeey is a royal peculiar -- it answers to the Crown and is technically outside of the Anglican hierarchy.

KT

And so is Westminster Abbey, with two b's and one e!

capo

Most of you may know this already but I didn't. Just looked up the origin of "cathedral"...

&quot;of, relating to, or containing a <i>cathedra</i>, a cathedra being &quot;a bishop's official throne&quot;

wills

I think it is great that you ask these questions. I was just in a little (Catholic) church in Rome for mass and I have to say I was appalled at the behavior of some tourists that came into look while mass was going on. I wonder how protestants or for that matter anyone would feel if people wandered through their services sight seeing? Based on your questions, I am sure you would be, but when you visit try to be reverent, those cathedrals in Europe are active churches. Just something I noticed.

Keith

Wills,

I observed the same behaviour at Notre Dame de Paris.

Keith

OReilly

Dublin is one of the few cities with two Cathedrals, both Protestant:

http://www.cccdub.ie/music/stanford/...ttendiary.html

There is no Catholic cathedral, just a Pro-Cathedral.

I am Catholic, but no expert on these matters, but here are my thoughts (just remember, each country has its own customs in this, as well as everything else):

1. Special masses are said in side chapels or daily masses on off-peak period (you will often see that in large Italian churches, such as St. John M.) Some larger churches have a baptism chapel. The reason for the side chapels is due to the traditional shape of the churches - cruxiform.

2. Often there will be a group of lady volunteers that are responsible for &quot;dressing&quot; the churches for masses. For weddings and funerals, flowers are supplied by the parties.

3. Many Catholics would have a special devotion to a particular saint or will pray to a saint that is &quot;in charge&quot; of the area; e.g. my mother was devoted to St. Anthony &amp; St. Theresa, the Little Flower and would always light candles at their shrines, as well as the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary. St. Jude is the saint of hopeless cases and I think St. Anthony is the one you pray to if you have lost someting. There is a long list!

4. The money either goes to the upkeep of the church or various charities. The significance of lighting a candle for devotional purposes is far older than any of the &quot;modern&quot; churches - it goes back to the dawn of time and it global.

This is my understanding anyway.

regards ... Ger

missypie

But aside from deciding what is and isn't a cathedral, does anyone else have any input on my questions?

Travelnut

Very good questions - I will read and learn as well.

KT

Sorry to get so off subject, missypie.

The reason(s) for all those chapels is somewhat different at different times and places. As Elaine said, they often were endowed by wealthy families, either as a place to have massses said for the family or to house family tombs. Another purpose was to house holy relics.

At the time when priests said mass facing away from the worshippers, many times the priest and his attendants were in the chapel while the worshippers stood outside. This is generally true of apsidal chapels, the ones that radiate off the ambulatory, the curved structure at the east end of many Gothic (esp. French Gothic) churches.

flanneruk

1. There are really two sets of answers. Some side-chapels were added over the centuries, mostly as a result of benefactions by people who wanted prayers to be said to the saint or whatever to intercede with God for the soul of the benefactor. Often by some confraternity that the benefactor established through his/her bequest. To understand this, you need to understand the doctrine of Purgatory. If you don't, ask. Obviously, therefore, side-chapels are core to what most Protestants rebelled against at the Reformation.

Some (often rather few) were designed in at the cathedral's origin, and were there to focus devotion on something locally appropriate. They also had a practical function: in medieval times, the ratio of priests (who need to say Mass daily) to laity was much higher than today (and higher even than in the golden era of the 1950s, which many posters from NYC, Chicago, Sydney, Dublin or LIverpool will remember.) So there needed to be lots of altars just to accommodate multiple, simultaneous Mass celebration.

These days sidechapels have limited use.

2. I can only answer for the (rather hoity-toity) world of England's Catholic and Anglican great churches and cathedrals. They typically have a volunteer flower manager, who organises this in the appropriate way. In the English countryside, now (or rather at Easter, since there are few flowers in churches in Lent), they're donated by local people: in urban churches at Quarant'Ore (when the churches were filled to overflowing with flowers) they're bought in. Almost all English cathedrals, of either denomination, buy their flowers in: almost all English churches rely on (sometimes strong-armed) local flower donations.

3. You pray to whoever you think is good at your problem.

4. Candles are almost always extinguished every night (for obvious safety reasons). Their burning is a symbol of your prayers going up to Heaven

One last, crucial point. Many Anglicans don't like being called Protestants. The use of the term 'Protestant' to describe Anglicans is typical Catholic (and especially Irish-descent Catholic) solipsism: all Christians who aren't Catholic, goes the argument, are Protestant.

However in many English circles, 'Protestant' is used only to describe those more fundamentalist varieties of Christianity that grew up in reaction to the via media Anglicana - the Anglican Middle Way.

Anglicanism's limited acceptance of many tenets of most versions of Protestantism (it still has bishops, uses a godd deal of pre-Reformation liturgy, has a Creed that's virtually word for word identical with Catholicism's, and encourages churches being named after saints) is part of the reason why many Anglican churches retain most of the features (even candle-burning) you're curious about.

Underhill

Although you didn't ask about the use of incense, the answer is that it symbolizes prayer as the smoke rises to the ceiling.

I remember once seeing flowers being arranged at the cathedral in Hartford, the first time I ever saw peonies. Two women were doing standing displays that were incredible. I've also seen local women arranging flowers in small French churches, and in a few instances people bringing a small bunch of flowers to lay at the feet of a statue.

One way to tell whether a church is a cathedral when you're in one is to look for the bishop's throne up near the altar. of course, you can sometimes find a throne in a church that is not a cathedral, as when the Archbishop of Canterbury presides at a coronation in Westminster Abbey.

Joelleinitaly04

Regarding how long the candles stay lit. I was resting and people watching at the church of the Seplechar (parden my spelling) in Jerusalem, where lots of people want to light candles - more than there is room. The priest would come out every 10 minutes or so and remove all the candles so there would be room for more people to light the candles. As someone who lit a candle myself, this did not bother me. Sometimes you do need to be practical.

Alec

Another reason why there are so many side chapels in RC cathedrals (and other big churches). Such churches had large number of priests, many monastic, often members of the chapter, who were obliged to say Mass daily. Until the reforms of Vatican II, priests had to say Mass on their own, assisted by a server or altar boy. Also because of strict rule on fasting from midnight, Masses could only be celebrated in the morning. Hence the need for many altars to accommodate private Masses. Nowadays priests simply concelebrate Mass if pastoral needs don't demand having multiple celebrations.
BTW, Westminster Abbey was a cathedral briefly at the Reformation, 1540-50, with Thomas Thirlby as Bishop of Westminster.
In many cathedrals, those chapels not required for private devotion or some other use like baptism have been turned to other use, like exhibition, storage and office. But many chapels and altars remain as they are, often containing masterpieces and precious relics.