The Institute is a Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical Right. They have many fine priests who serve in various countries. Over the years they have grown and God has blessed their work with more vocations. The Institute house in Rome is a small but busy hub where the liturgical arts flourish and aesthetic sensibilities are always fully Roman.
Many personages have visited here, including Cardinal Burke, who recently celebrated Mass in the chapel, seen in the images below. As someone who has attended sung Masses in a small house chapel, I can attest how beautiful the experience is, despite the close quarters.
Similar house chapels are a common sight in apartments where clergy live in Rome. The Villa Stritch comes to mind, where American priests working in the Vatican have typically lived in recent decades. It is custom in such places for one room to be typically designated as the chapel with one or more altars. Permission is received from diocesan authorities to reserve the Blessed Sacrament.
The San Clemente chapel is small, but opens to an overflow room to accommodate more visitors for Mass. It also has a portable electric organ. Above the altar is a painting of San Clemente, in the style of the Mannerist movement. One window illumines the chapel with light and can be opened when incense is used. In addition, along the side wall there is a beautifully painted icon of the Madonna della Libera, patroness of Rodi Garganico (a town and commune in Apulia, near Foggia).
Because the altar is so important, and the chief accessory of worship, it has a consecrated altar stone inlaid in its mensa. To highlight this importance, it also has a civory - a flat canopy of red damask silk that acts as a shelter for the sacred rites. This canopy is also known in English as a 'tester.' This custom is still popular in Rome, by way of tradition, but also because in 1846 the Sacred Congregation of Rites laid down that every altar where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved should be so respected.
Following is a note about the altar in a house chapel, recalling its true dignity and majesty, written by the creator of The Home Oratory.
REMEMBER: No matter how intricate, ornate, or consciously “liturgical” one’s domestic prayer space may be, it remains something altogether different from—and vastly inferior to—a true, consecrated altar. However carefully arranged our candles, linens, and statuary may be, they cannot rival what stands at the heart of the Church herself. The altar found within a church is not merely a focal point for prayer or a symbol of reverence; it is a reality set apart by episcopal consecration, marked irrevocably for the offering of the Holy Sacrifice. Even when one acknowledges, with some regret, that certain churches have suffered from architectural experiments which can scarcely be described as beautiful, the altar itself nonetheless retains its dignity and authority. Its worth does not derive from aesthetics alone, but from what it is and what takes place upon it.
This is precisely why relics are sealed within or beneath it, binding the sacrifice of the altar to the witness of the saints and to the very bones of the Church’s history. It is why the altar is kissed, incensed, vested, and treated with an almost fearful reverence, and why there is now a renewed appreciation for antependia, restoring a visible sense of its sacred character. A home “altar”, by contrast, exists to arouse devotion, to recollect the mind, and to foster prayer within the domestic sphere. It serves a genuine and laudable purpose, but it remains, in comparison, something like straw beside gold. No amount of ornamentation, however pleasing to the eye or sincere in intent, can outweigh the value of a true altar upon which the sublime and unbloody sacrifice of Calvary is made present. Beauty may dispose the soul towards worship, but consecration alone makes an altar what it truly is.
We should not, therefore, be carried away by our personal enthusiasm or aesthetic sensibilities into thinking or perceiving that domestic arrangements, however elaborate or well intentioned, can ever stand on equal footing with the consecrated altar of the Church, where alone the true and eternal sacrifice is offered.
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