Experiencing Mass – in a Domestic Church in the Middle East

[Michie]

As regular readers of Catholic Stand may have noticed, although I live and work in Italy, I frequently spend time in the Middle East. The time I spend there is always interesting.

While technically the Catholic faith is not prohibited there, in general, nor in the particular place I am writing about here, its practice is limited “to within the walls of one’s house.” Consequently, there are no clearly visible churches, nor openly Christian symbols. Instead, there are several ‘house churches.’ These house churches are private homes converted interiorly into quite literally, “domestic churches.”

The conversion typically includes a few surprising features. Usually, metal plates bolted into the walls seal off the windows. Such a setup seals the chapel off from prying eyes. There is typically a long, narrow hallway or entrance way as well. This sort of entrance serves two purposes.

First, the long entrance serves to control the access into the chapel. This is because it can be sealed off at either end.

Second, it gives worshippers a place to leave their shoes! I have never seen this practice before, but it is apparently typical in India and in the Middle East. And it certainly does keep the chapel cleaner! But it is impossible not to see in it shadows of Exodus 3:5, as God tells Moses: “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.”

In previous times, these domestic Churches also had a designated porter. The porter would remove the sandals and hide them somewhere. In this way, there would be no indication of how many worshippers were inside.

Also in the past, “Happy birthday” signs and decorations were standard chapel furnishings. Such decorations provided ‘cover’ for the gathering. One chapel even had walls plastered with Styrofoam egg cartons in order to dampen the sound.

Continued below.

Experiencing Mass – in a Domestic Church in the Middle East - Catholic Stand

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[The Liturgist]

Second, it gives worshippers a place to leave their shoes! I have never seen this practice before, but it is apparently typical in India and in the Middle East.

The Coptic Orthodox and the Ethiopian Orthodox remove their shoes with the greatest enthusiasm in my experience. There are shoe racks at St. Anthony’s Coptic Orthodox Monastery in Yermo, California, in two of the the three main churches, while in other Coptic Orthodox churches you leave your shoes under the pew, while walking into rooms behind the iconostasis, through what in an Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic church would be called “the Deacon’s Doors”, but in many Coptic Churches, one passes through the Iconostasis, the men to the left of the central Holy Doors (although that is not the right term, since very few Coptic Orthodox churches have doors; most just have curtains, which are left open throughout the divine liturgy and also during parts of the Divine Office, for example the Psalmody on Saturday evening) and the women to the right. The priests or a priest and a deacon will distribute the Eucharist to the men and women as they enter these chambers to the left and right of the altar, which has a Byzantine-style Holy Table, in contrast to the Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East, which have altars flush to the wall like Roman Catholic churches, although with some specific quirks, for example, some Syriac Orthodox altars have two columns supporting a small baldachino of sorts, and they tend to be narrow and feature gradines; the Armenian altar is more shallow but also features gradines (the raised shelves on the altar table), and the same is true of the Assyrian altar, and of course Chaldean and Armenian Catholic altars are indistinguishable from their counterparts in the Assyrian Church of the East and the Armenian Orthodox churches.