Post intelligent and civil comments. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the NLM
"...and divisions in the church seating for the different classes of person. The best seats cost a shilling or sixpence and could be found in the 'Tribune' or the 'Enclosure' immediately in front of the sanctuary. You can see such privileged positions in the picture above of the old Sardinian Chapel (the ancestor of SS Anselm and Cecilia, Kingsway). The poorer members stood behind in the 'Body of the Church' and this section often had its own communion rail."
That's digusting in the purest sense of the word.
No, the administration of the Sacred Species in the appearance of wine was specifically allowed by the SCR at different times for medical reasons. I am unfamiliar with the whooping cough exception, but it was allowed for those with what we now think as advanced tuberculosis in the 1700's.
This practice (often refered to as "pew rents") prevailed in the American Episcopal Church well into the 1960s. This is how parishes collected money for maintenance, upkeep, and clerical salaries. Many of the Anglo-Catholic parishes, however, despised this custom as being uncharitable and did not do it.
If I am not mistaken, pew rents were even collected in the colonial-era Catholic churches here in Philadelphia--Old Saint Joseph's and Old Saint Mary's.
Is there record of healings associated with administration of the Blood of Christ for those with whooping cough? TB?
Pew rents was a comman practice even here in Canada in the catholic churches of early Toronto, circa 1900 or earlier.
Our parish had pew rents up until 1920...it was how we paid off the church debt.
I attended SS Anselm and Cecelia when I worked in London. I have sugested St Etheldreda and St James at Spanish Place to visitors.
Alec Guinness spoke of running up Kingsway to attend Mass at St Anselm's after he had converted. Running in anticipation of communion as opposed to being late for Mass.
Maybe some of the possessiveness of pews comes from the pew rent period. In parishes I have seen, people almost always sit in the same pew week to week, no exceptions.
Actually, I think pew rents were introduced as a way of keeping the peace. Being possessive of "your spot" existed before pew rents did.
I know I'm that way, when you have an established "spot", evil eye upon anyone who sits in that spot...;)
Thom,
The class aspect of it is certainly an issue -- something the Camden Society went after in the Anglican communion. The fundraising aspect is a little more understandable. (And of course, in those times, this aspect of class, even pew-rents, was considered a normal thing. They'd probably think nothing more of it than we would to pay to light a vigil candle.)
Though, in our own day, we have our own issues in this regard: the all-popular fundraising mechanism of holding parish-sponsored gambling in the Church basement (i.e. bingo).
In my parish church, one of the pews still has my family name (it was a perpetual pew)!
Having expressed my disgust, I do know that this practice still happens regularly in some Synagogues. (In some places, there have "lotteries" where families can bid on the seats for High Holy Days for a year.)
My great-great-greatgrandfather, who came over from Ireland with his brothers rather suddenly and left the seminary to do so, also left the Catholic Church for various kinds of Protestant, married Protestant women, raised Protestant kids, and apparently died Protestant. He was a high up Mason, too.
However, he apparently also paid pew rent in the local Catholic church, even though he apparently never even set foot in it. Don't know if that was to help the small local Irish/Catholic community, or whether he was hedging his bets.
He was an interesting guy.
Personally, I'd rather buy season tickets to the local symphony and hedge my bets on Jesus' FREE gift.
:-)
There is a Catholic church a few blocks from me (In Philadelphia) that was built in 1888, that apparently did pew rents until the 40's. If you look on the ends of the pews in the aisles, you can see the brass holders which held cards with family names. They still have some cards, as wells as a record sheet.
Thom, I don't think pew-rents are the disgusting practice you assume. Firstly, it's important to realise that Jesus's gift is free - no one under the old system was excluded from the mysteries. Pew rents simply helped to run a church.
You also have to recognise that in London at that time there was a class distinction which was maintained by the top and the bottom of the social scale, which is to say that the lower classes would not have wanted (or thought it a good thing) to be near the front with the higher-ups. The social hierachy is not necessarily a bad thing.
Of course in Rome today at the Papal Masses the first rows are always taken up by dignitaries and nobility.
The seperate communion rail at the back of a church is still a feature in some churches when there are so many people to communicate at the High Altar rail; it's a practical arrangement, not a segregation.
Ah, df, there's a reason for everything, but an excuse is not always implicitly implied. ;-)
I believe that St Patrick's Cathedral in New York still had a rented pew in recent times. Also, I heard about pew rentals at a parish in my hometown even into the 1950's, until the "old man" (the founding pastor) finally went to his reward.
Thom,
I think the "free gift" aspect you are bringing up doesn't really fit here. A pew-rent doesn't suggest otherwise.
Also, when you say it, I think you're forgetting that people paying that were contributing to the Church ultimately -- which is more laudable than contributing seasons tickets to oneself (laudable though that is in the case of the symphony!)
Pew rent? That can be trumped by the chantry chapel we've had for generations!
A good friend of mine still owns his pew (it is, in fact, more like a box) in his local Church of England parish. Even though the Church laws changed the law of the land says that it is his! This is all rather odd because he is a Catholic so the box is always empty!
Archbishop Weakland once wrote that he grew up in a parish with pew rents. Because his family was too poor to pay them, they had to seat in some undesirable place, and it was apparently a source of some embarassment to him as a child.
I don't know why, but I think sometime last week I was reading Inter Oecumenici, the instruction on implementing the liturgical norms of VII. I noticed a paragraph or section forbidding the practice of preferential seating/placement of, shall we say, grandees. I thought of Ted Kennedy and John Kerry always getting great seats at papal Masses in the US, but rented pews would be another example, and the fact that this (1964?) document makes mention of this subject suggests it was something occurring into the 20th century.
My grandparents paid pew rent in Lowell, Michigan well into the 1930's.
Pew rent was not regarded by them as a securing a special privilege; it was simply the way parishioners supported their parish. Every parish still has pew rent to this day - except that it now takes a different form: that of dropping one's envelope into the Offertory collection.
Is it out of place to cite Mark Twain's comment on pew rents? Twain went one Sunday to Trinity Church in Boston to hear the famed Phillips Brooks preach, seating himself in the choicest pew. The lease holder arrived and, stumbling around for words, said, "Sir, I pay a hundred dollars a year for this pew." Twain replied, "Sir, you pay entirely too much."
Pews have had an interesting history. At first the customary posture of the worshippers in the western, as to this day in eastern churches, was standing and kneeling, and no seats were provided for the congregation.
Later on, as a concession to the infirm, stone seats were attached to the walls or, more rarely, to the piers of the nave. This gave rise to the term 'gone to the wall' to describe the old, the weak, and the failure.
By the end of the c13, many English churches appear to have been equipped with a number of fixed wooden benches. These were often known as 'pews' (probably derived from the Latin podium and meaning a seat raised up above floor-level). Such pews, often in village and town churches, were sometimes elaborately carved at the ends, and on the back, with figures of saints, symbols of the Passion, or grotesque animals.
In England after the Reformation sometimes elaborate seated enclosures were constructed in the naves of medieval churches spelt 'pues' but, perversely, they sometimes had a Catholic origin. They were often placed on the sites of abolished chantry chapels where bodies were actually buried and this was a way that families with formerly endowed chantries could maintain their connection with the sites in church. In the c19 the Camdenians, led by John Mason Neale, condemned them on the basis of maintaining class distinction and excluding the poor. But he did not realize their medieval territorial origin.
In English and Irish Protestant country churches the local land-owning family still maintain large pews for their exclusive use, either near the chancel, or in galleries at the back. But so did land-owning Catholic families after the Catholic Relief Acts who invariably built raised tribunes to the side of the sanctuary of new churches for their exclusive use.
Pew rents appeared in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were of two kinds. In proprietory chapels they financed the income of the resident minister and clerk and helped to pay for maintenance. In parish churches they protected the interests of the well-to-do and were substituted for church rates. The poor sometimes had benches provided for them at the side, as in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, for instance, where they still remain, though now all seats are free. Pews and benches in galleries were, I believe, free.
To finance the endowments of new churches and chapels built in the populous suburbs in the c19, the Church Buildings Act 1818 and subsequent Acts allowed for payment for the exclusive use of certain pews. The pew-rents were normally to be used for the salary of a 'spiritual person' and clerk to serve in the chapel.
But what of Catholic churches? Rents for seats were charged to help pay the parish debt, the maintenance of the building and the subsistence of the clergy. In Dublin the great Neo-Classical churches built after Catholic Emancipation in 1829 were often divided in the way described by Fr Schofield and evidence of the divisions, in the form of fine balustered wood and marble rails, still survive in some churches. But even modest Catholic churches with simple benches and even chairs had attachments designed for cards bearing the sitters names and many still survive here and in the United States. But few, if any, pew rents now remain.
What happened on the Continent I am not sure. There are, of course, galleries for royal and aristocratic families, and the grand pews for the local mayor and civic dignitaries found in France, but seating generally was, I believe, free.
On which boring note, I shall say 'Adieu'.
Well, pews also rose in Protestant countries because you HAD to sit through those sermons! And it was cold in the churches, so a pew enclosed with a highish wall (see the 17th and 18th C English versions) were more comfortable.
Archbishop Weakland once wrote that he grew up in a parish with pew rents. Because his family was too poor to pay them, they had to seat in some undesirable place, and it was apparently a source of some embarassment to him as a child.
Of course this brings to mind the modernist misconception that one needs to be able to see what is going on in order to fully participate in the Mass...
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