Monday, August 27, 2007

St Patrick's Goodies

As I mentioned St Patrick's Cathedral has a wide range of many liturgical "goodies"

First off we have a pontifical lavabo set. A Bishop gets the special privilege of having a nice large basin and jug in order to wash his hands, which in the extra ordinary form happens about 3 times!. Whilst a simple priest must content himself with a little dish and a cruet.
Here are the enclosed lanterns, they maybe used as torches, very handy if your outside in the wind! If anyone has a few of these lying around then, it would be greatly appreciated if you could send them to Marian Valley, or should i say Windy valley!
The Cathedral also had good looking cruets.
Ah the Cathedra, the seat of a bishop, this one looks amazing and has two seats for deacons, quite handy in a pontifical liturgy!
Here is the old Choir and high altar. I quite like the choir, I had to sit in it after all, being a torch bearer is quite a cool job. The High altar looks good, but with the "new" renovations and free standing altar , it really is quite cut off from the nave!.The gospel was said form this stand, I quite like the eagle design
The archbishop even wore his pontifical cassock! our bishops here in Queensland only, if ever simply wear incorrectly their house cassocks!
His grace wore a pair of fine pontifical gloves, which were apparently made by st bede's studio.
Well stay tuned, I hope to do a few more posts in the near future.
On a concluding note, here is a shot of the lunch that some of the servers and juventumtem members shared after the pontifical. Just for reference, yes that is my bottle of water!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor deprived child! :-p Looking at other Cathedrals just make your jaw drop doesn't it! ;-) Unfortunately Brisbane's got absolutely no Catholic culture to speak of! Just about every other Cathedral in Australia would have the proper setting of two Deacon seats next to the Cathedra etc... I just hope whoever that become the new AB in Birsbane will knock the Cathedral down and "re-renovate" it!

Stephen said...

At the Brisbane Cathedral, the marble Cathedra is the only permanent "seat". All other seats are placed in the sanctuary to suit the needs of the liturgy, and removed afterwards. In the case of a Mass with two deacons (which we rarely have had) a deacons chair would be placed either side of the Cathedra.

The more common practice is to have one deacon who sits at the right hand of the Archbishop whilst the MC stands at the left.

The big difference between St Pats and St Stephens is that at St Pats (as at St Marys in Sydney) the archbishop celebrates almost every Sunday except when he is absent. At St Stephens the Archbishop celebrates only about 3 or 4 Sundays in a whole year. Therefore the cathedra in St Stephens is sometimes referred to as the "sede vacante" (empty seat).

Stephen said...

btw

Although St Stephens does suffer its problems with layout, I doubt that it would be re-renovated in my lifetime.

Miind you it always had its problems even before the renovation.