Surprise - You've got half a church!

This past Saturday, I got a rather big surprise when I arrived for Mass. I walked into the church and noticed something was amiss. There was a pew by the front door, partially blocking the way in. Looking up from there I discovered the reason. It seems that the workers had been rather busy and unbeknownst to me, went and closed half of the church by building a wall.

What workers, you ask? Allow me to back up a bit.

I mentioned in my very first post that I had the intention of renovating this very lovely, but very rundown church. Well, at the beginning of December a crew showed up to begin doing exactly that. Detailing the plans and the steps that have already been taken will obviously be rather long, so I will do it piecemeal in a series of posts over the next few weeks. But just to get things started, let me insert a few of the architects drawings in which I have written in some of the changes that we plan to do. If you click on the pictures you can see them in a larger format.

As you can see from the pictures we have planned to do quite a bit. The logic here is simple: it is difficult enough to get things rolling, so once you do, it is better to do everything in one shot. We will redo the roof, change some walls, replace the floor, redo all the plaster work etc.

In addition to the roof, the biggest task will be removing the entire back wall of the church and part of one of the side walls. In order to do this, we obviously need to close the church. At one point in time, someone had the inspired idea of closing half of the church at a time. Since the most significant part of the work will all be in one part of the church, we can easily continue using the other half until that is finished and then switch sides.

In that sense, it was not a surprise to me that they cut the church in half with a wall, the surprise was that they did it a week before they said they would and didn’t tell me about it! When I got there that Saturday, the church was quite dusty from the work and in chaos. All the pews of the whole church were stacked up in half of the church. They had moved all of the statues in front of the wall, as well as the ambo, chairs, altar and Easter candle. The result was very crowded and very disorganized.

Worse than all of that, though, was that the sacristy and tabernacle were still on the other side!!! While that in no way pleased me, I have to say that I was actually relieved that they had left the tabernacle. I am certain that if I hadn’t come in those days, they would have moved it themselves in short order. Unfortunately, even though every one of the workers is Catholic as far as I know, none of them are practicing and none have any clue about their faith (one actually asked what was in the box, pointing at the tabernacle that I was delicately moving).

So, we then got to work rearranging everything for Mass as fast as we could. They had left a very narrow slit in the wall through which we were able to pass to get the things needed from the sacristy and to move the tabernacle into the active half of the church.

After the Mass on Sunday, I removed the Blessed Sacrament indefinitely. As the work progresses, I will see about restoring it, but for now, I don’t dare reserve the sacrament while work actively continues in the church.

Click here for a few more pictures of the what the church is like now.