IB World Religions 3.2.3. Places of Worship, Pilgrimages and Retreats Notes

3.2.3. Places of Worship, Pilgrimages and Retreats

Church buildings and their plan

1. Christians use the word church for a body of believers and for the building they meet in. In most traditional Western churches the congregation gathers in the nave, the clergy act at the east end in the chancel, and side arms called transepts give the floor the shape of a cross.
2. Orthodox churches are usually square or cross shaped under a dome carrying an image of Christ Pantocrator (ruler of all). Worshippers stand under the gaze of the one they address.
3. Roman Catholic churches add the tabernacle, a locked box holding bread consecrated at an earlier Mass. A lamp burns beside it, and Catholics genuflect towards it on entering.
4. Reformed and Free Church buildings strip the interior so nothing competes with the preached word. Quaker meeting houses go furthest, seating Friends in a circle round an empty table.
5. Many Pentecostal and independent congregations rent halls, cinemas or school gyms. They teach that the gathered people make the meeting holy, so an unconsecrated room costs them nothing.

Altar, font and pulpit

1. Three furnishings carry most of the meaning, and which one dominates tells you a great deal about the denomination: the altar or holy table, the font and the pulpit.
2. Catholics and Orthodox say altar because they hold that Christ's one sacrifice is made present on it. It is often stone, and Catholic tradition sets the relics of a saint beneath it.
3. Reformed Christians prefer communion table, usually wooden and movable. Anglicans have argued over the two words for four centuries, and many parishes now set the table forward so the priest faces the people.
4. The font stands near the door, teaching that a person enters the Church through baptism. Baptist churches make the same point on a larger scale with a baptistery pool sunk into the floor.
5. The pulpit is raised for preaching, and in Reformed churches it stands central and high, so the room itself argues for the priority of the word. A side lectern, often carved as an eagle, holds the Bible.
6. Smaller artifacts finish the picture. Vestments mark the minister's role, stained glass once taught the stories to the illiterate, and a Catholic crucifix contrasts with the empty Protestant cross.

Icons and the iconostasis

1. An icon is a painted image of Christ, of the Theotokos (God bearer, the Orthodox title for Mary) or of a saint. Orthodox Christians call icons windows rather than pictures, holding that honour paid to the image passes to the person shown.
2. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 settled the vocabulary after a long fight over images. It distinguished latreia, worship owed to God alone, from proskynesis, veneration offered to icons and saints.
3. The iconostasis is a screen of icons dividing the sanctuary from the nave. Its central royal doors open and close through the liturgy, so the building stages what is hidden and what is revealed.
4. Orthodox homes keep an icon corner on an east wall. A family prays there with a lamp lit, and kisses the icons on rising and before sleep.
5. Catholic churches use images differently. Statues of Mary and the saints stand in side chapels, and the fourteen Stations of the Cross run round the walls to be walked in Lent.
6. The Reformers stripped or whitewashed images, reading the second commandment as a ban, and some Reformed and Baptist churches keep bare walls today. Lutherans and Anglicans kept theirs.

Rosaries, relics and reliquaries

1. The rosary is a string of beads used mainly by Roman Catholics. Five sets of ten beads carry repeated Hail Marys, each set framed by the Lord's Prayer and a doxology.
2. Each set is prayed while the mind rests on one mystery, an event from the life of Christ or of Mary. The Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious sets were joined in 2002 by the Luminous mysteries, added by John Paul II.
3. Catholics answer the charge that this is Mary centred by saying the beads occupy the tongue so the mind can dwell on Christ. The prayer is meditative rather than merely repetitive.
4. Orthodox Christians count repetitions of the Jesus Prayer on a knotted wool prayer rope. Most Protestants use no beads at all, praying extempore or from a book such as the Book of Common Prayer.
5. Relics are the bodily remains of a saint, or objects a saint used or touched. They are kept in a reliquary and brought out for veneration on the saint's feast.
6. Whole pilgrim routes grew up around relics, such as the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The Reformers rejected relics as superstition, and the Council of Trent defended veneration while ordering bishops to end the abuses.

Pilgrimage sites and practice

1. Pilgrimage is a journey to a place linked with God's action, with a saint or with a reported miracle, made as an act of devotion. No Christian denomination requires it, which marks a clear contrast with the Muslim Hajj.
2. Jerusalem draws pilgrims of every denomination to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa. Rights inside the Sepulchre are shared among Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and other communities under a fixed arrangement.
3. Rome draws Catholics to the tombs of Peter and Paul. In a Jubilee year the Holy Doors of the major basilicas are opened, and pilgrims walk through them as a sign of mercy received.
4. Santiago de Compostela is reached along the Camino, walked with a scallop shell as the pilgrim badge. Numbers have risen steeply since the 1980s, and many walkers now call themselves seekers rather than practising Catholics.
5. Marian shrines mark places where Catholics believe Mary appeared. Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe and Knock each draw millions, and Walsingham in England is unusual in having a Catholic and an Anglican shrine side by side.
6. Orthodox pilgrims travel to monasteries rather than to apparition sites. Mount Athos in Greece, a self governing peninsula of twenty monasteries, admits male visitors only.
7. Most Protestant churches keep no shrines, yet the practice returns in another form. Iona, Lindisfarne and organised Holy Land tours draw large numbers, described as journeys for learning rather than acts that earn merit.

Retreats and quiet days

1. A retreat is a withdrawal from ordinary life for a set period of prayer and silence. It is usually made in a monastery guest wing or a purpose built retreat house.
2. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola are the best known Catholic form. The full course runs thirty days in silence with a director, and an adapted version is spread over months of ordinary working life.
3. Benedictine monasteries have taken guests for fifteen centuries because the Rule of Saint Benedict orders that every guest be received as Christ. Visitors keep the hours of prayer without joining the community.
4. Orthodox retreatants stay at monasteries to keep a feast, to confess to a spiritual father and to venerate relics. On Athos a visitor rises for services that begin hours before dawn.
5. Anglicans and Protestants hold quiet days and parish weekends. The ecumenical Taize community in France draws tens of thousands of young people each year to repeated chants and prayer three times a day.
6. Charismatic and evangelical gatherings such as New Wine run on a different rhythm, filling the days with sung worship, teaching and prayer ministry rather than silence.