Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In churches with a retroquire area behind the altar, this may only be included in the broader definition of chancel. In a cathedral or other large church, there may be a distinct choir area at the start of the chancel (looking from the nave), before reaching the sanctuary, and an ambulatory may run beside and behind it. All these may be ...
In church architecture, a retroquire (also spelled retrochoir), or back-choir, [1] is the space behind the high altar in a church or cathedral, which sometimes separates it from the end chapel. It may contain seats for the church choir. [2]
The area around the altar is seen as endowed with greater holiness, and is usually physically distinguished from the rest of the church, whether by a permanent structure such as an iconostasis, a rood screen, altar rails, a curtain that can be closed at more solemn moments of the liturgy (as in the Armenian Apostolic Church and Armenian ...
Except in Solemn Mass, a priest celebrating Tridentine Mass remains at the altar the whole time after saying the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. The rite of Dedication of a church and of the altar points out that the celebration of the Eucharist is "the principal and the most ancient part of the whole rite, because the celebration of the ...
After the Reformation Protestant churches generally moved the altar (now often called the communion table) forward, typically to the front of the chancel, and often used lay choirs who were placed in a gallery at the west end. The choir and rear of deep chancels became little used in churches surviving from the Middle Ages, and new churches ...
In the Western Church, the cancelli screens of the ritual choir developed into the choir stalls and pulpitum screen of major cathedral and monastic churches; but the colonnaded altar screen was superseded from the 10th century onwards, when the practice developed of raising a canopy or baldacchino, carrying veiling curtains, over the altar ...
Cathedral: The home church of a bishop, which contains the cathedra or bishop's chair. [2] The church may be of any size. [3] Chapel: A smaller spaces inside a church that has its own altar Lady chapel: a chapel dedicated to "Our Lady", Mary, mother of Jesus; Radiating Chapels: Located around the Apse of the church, accessible from the ...
Since the eighth century most churches are oriented. Hence, even in the many churches where the altar end is not actually to the east, terms such as "east end", "west door", "north aisle" are commonly used as if the church were oriented, treating the altar end as the liturgical east. [6]