What does it mean to consecrate a church? And why is this necessary?

Fr. Rutledge explains the meaning and symbolisms of the process of consecrating a church. There are three primary parts: blessing of the exterior building, procession and sealing of the relics and the consecration of the interior church and its altars.

Donate Today

Transcript of the Video

[Bill Drew] Welcome back to the Immaculata Church Project here in St Marys, Kansas. Today we are going to give you a final construction update video.

Alright, so we will touch a little bit on the outside. What we have and what you see behind me here is that we are wrapping up: on the north entrance we are doing the final grading there, in another week or two that will all be poured. They just made a pour today, two more pours for sidewalks and all of our concrete work will be complete. And on the south lot we've got landscapers here pulling irrigation lines; sod is ordered for around the church, all the shrubs will be showing up in the next couple of weeks. By the third week of April, we should have all of that exterior wrapped up.

So that pretty much wraps up what we have left on the outside. Let's go on inside and take a look at what needs to be done in there.

Alright, so in the narthex here we are finishing up the stonework. Don and his guys got another week or so and then they'll start working that stone down into the basement and the parlor behind me. We still have some stonework to finish up on the main altar predella and then a few spaces behind there as soon as the altar rail is finished.

So as we move into the nave here, you can see on both sides above the confessionals that the finish trim carpenters are finishing up; they should have those wrapped up by the end of the first week of April, and then the stain guys can come in. We are setting up to have this area cleared in two weeks to put the rest of pews in.

So here behind me we have the Saint Joseph's side chapel. We have four side chapels. Those spaces will be the last of the spaces to be finished. Here behind me is the Saint Joseph chapel. All the wood is done on the walls above; once the altar and the reredos goes behind it (that's a hand-carved piece: it will probably take another six months before that arrives) so these chapels will be finished up after the consecration date.

So again more on the side chapels: this is the Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel that the Silver City Benedictine monks generously offered to design and do all of the work in. They are about halfway done; they are going to be showing up after Easter to finish the flooring and put all the gates in. This chapel will be done before consecration.

This chapel also proudly hosts the only stained-glass window in the church and that's above the main altar. It depicts a flower that is on Our Lady’s garment in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

So in this transept crossing area, you can see we have all the pews. They are all installed, bolted down and ready for final clean-up. These pews were designed with the special Marian monogram that matches the monogram that is on all of our capitals; it was designed especially for this project.

But we also have in this area, that was just completed about a week ago, the 14 Stations of the Cross. You can see those behind me here. We just have to add the little wooden cross to the image and those will be complete as well.

Behind me here is one of our two major side chapels: this is the Saint Pius X altar. You can see they are just doing the final buttoning up on that. The guys in front of me here are working on the communion rail. There are about 6 to 8 stone guys working on this over the next few weeks to wrap up all of these items. The main altar is installed. As I mentioned earlier, we still have the stone to put on the predella, the steps below the main altar, and the tabernacle is still on its way.

The Ambo or Pulpit, weighs about 25,000 pounds

So this piece is our ambo, or pulpit. Sep VanderPutten is doing all the marble work. He and his crew have really about 4½ - 5 weeks to do about 8 weeks-worth of work, so they've been working hard and working weekends to try to get this ready for us. But you mentioned to me before, Sep, that this is all done some by hand and some by machine? [Sep] So the unique thing about this piece is the staircase here, that is the Volakas, the marble from Greece. In order to get that curved staircase to turn out the way we wanted it to, the factory ended up deciding to carve it out of one block and being the size that it is, it's too big to fit on a CNC so that staircase is all done by hand. There are other portions of the ambo that are routered on a CNC but the staircase to the ambo is hand-carved. And as you can see, it matches up well with the rest of the ambo. That piece by itself is about 6,500 pounds! Altogether we estimate that the ambo is about 25,000 pounds. [Bill] Wow, that's a magnificent piece! And then that will also get a pair of gold-plated brass handrails? [Sep] Yep, yes those will be fastened to the side. It will still be a bit of a narrow walkway, but it fits great in the space and the idea was not to take up too much room, so it really is a unique piece. [Bill] Great job, Sep! [Sep] Thank you.

So I mentioned the major side chapels: this is the second major side chapel, the Sacred Heart side chapel. This altar is not complete; it's not fabricated in full, and will not arrive until after the consecration date. So this chapel will actually be worked on several months past the consecration date.

This is one of our side corridors that accesses the back of house. This first room here to my left is the servers’ robing room, that's where the altar servers will get vested. The corridor continues through - we have our working sacristy, which is part of the sacristy, and finally we walk into the vesting sacristy. All the casework is done in here; mid-month all the cabinet doors will show up and all the cloth covers will get put on the main vesting table. This space does have very fine finishes, as you can see behind me here there is a piscina, which is the sink that the priest washes his hands in as he starts to pray to get ready to vest for Mass.

The painters are in their final touchups and they are doing all of the handrails and the railings in the staircases, but they are pretty much wrapping up. And this is the office complex: we still have base trims to put in here, most of the walls are painted, cabinets installed, countertops, sinks, I think the plumbers have a few more toilets to install, but within two weeks this space will all be turned over.

So here we are on the north transept. As you can see behind me here all the hardscapes are in. This is a view not too many people get to see because our cameras are on the other side. Up here in the north parking lot our concrete guys are rubbing out all the light poles. Behind us here, Lupe and his crew are getting the light poles ready, which are pretty much the final piece up here in the parking lots.

This is our last construction update video! Now I am going to turn it over to Father Rutledge and he is going to explain the consecration ceremony.

[Fr. Rutledge] So in this last video before we consecrate The Immaculata, we wanted to take some time to explain to you what it actually means to consecrate a church: not only in general but in specific. Now clearly we won't have time to go into all the little details and all the prayers of the rite of consecration of the church, but at least please do tune-in to the livestream when we do it on May 3rd so that you can follow the consecration of the church and all of the details.

But we are starting here outside just to give you sort of a general idea of what a consecration of a church is. It really is taking a place, right now there is nothing holy about it other than its architecture and maybe some of the artwork, but nothing in it has been blessed or separated. But after the consecration of this church, this place will be separated only and permanently for the worship of God, such that if something were ever to happen in it that is profane we would need to re-dedicate it to the worship of God. Now clearly when we start coming and talking about the rites of consecration, the whole ceremony begins outside here where we are at on the front porch of the church, the faithful will be gathered in front of the church, no one will be allowed in; there is a deacon who will be inside who will be sort of the custodian of gates of the church and the bishop will process here to the front porch of the church. He will bless what is called Gregorian Water (Gregorian Water is water mixed with wine, ash and salt, and those things are representative of many things: water Our Lord’s humanity, wine of His Divinity, salt of His resurrection, ash of His humanity and his death). And so the bishop will bless Gregorian Water here in front of the church, then he'll go around the outside of the church and he will begin to sprinkle the outside of the church. The whole rite symbolizes a certain baptism - like the baptism of the soul, you dispose the soul through actual graces, you dispose the soul on the externals, but then little by little you make your way inside. So the bishop will go all the way around the church sprinkling out Gregorian Water and then he will come back here to the front doors of the church with all the faithful behind him, with only the deacon inside who symbolizes sort of the angel in the Garden of Paradise when he kicked our parents out of the Garden of Paradise with his fiery sword. And the bishop will ask for admittance, and the deacon will open the gates of the church to him so that the bishop / Christ can finally enter into the church. So now we will go inside and explain the rest of the ceremony inside.

So after we processed into the church as we described, there at the front doors, the bishop, the clergy, everyone processes up to the altar. The faithful will come in and take their places in the various pews, and then once everybody is in the two canters will come up here to the steps of the sanctuary. And as is often the case when it comes to very solemn moments, they will intone the Litany of the Saints and everyone will sing and invoke all these saints as we do on great penitential and solemn occasions. So then once the Litany of the Saints is over, the bishop will process coming down out of the sanctuary and he will go all the way around the interior walls of the church again sprinkling it with this Gregorian Water with which he used to sprinkle the outside walls of the church. He will sprinkle all the walls of the church all the way around, then he will come up the center aisle and sprinkle all the floor of the church. Again, the whole idea is just like how we prepare the soul for baptism then we eventually wash it in water so that we give the significance of the purification and sanctification.

So once the bishop has purified all the interior of the church, the walls and the floor, now there is a very unique ceremony that happens wherein the sacristans will lay out ash in the form of a Saint Andrew’s Cross here going down right outside of the chancel. And then the Bishop will come to this Saint Andrew’s cross of ash and he will take his pastoral staff, his crozier, and he will mark the letters of the two main alphabets, the Greek and Latin alphabet, he will mark each of those letters down the Saint Andrew’s cross. So the reason why he does this, why he marks these letters in these two alphabets is because in the Catholic Church doctrine has been preserved; the doctrine of scripture and tradition has been preserved in these two main languages of Greek and Latin, and by doing it with his pastoral staff that shows that the teaching authority of the Church is the one who gives us the truth, and now it's done in ash which again is the symbol of our humanity, a symbol of humility, and so only those who are humble will receive not just the wisdom of man but the wisdom of God in this spoken doctrine of the Church.

So now we come to a point in the ceremony which we are getting very close to the essence of the consecration of the church. We will have now a procession of the relics that will go into the main altar. Now I did kind of skip over a section earlier in this video. Remember on the night before this day of consecration there is a vigil; there is a vigil down on campus wherein the relics of two martyrs are sealed in with three grains of incense into a special little container. The bishop seals them, we sing what is called the Matins of the Martyrs and the faithful keep watch, keep vigil over these relics for the night on the vigil. The vigil is meant to be a day of penance, a day of expectation. Well here on the day itself those relics we brought up to the church still outside the church and at this point in the ceremony, the bishop and all the clergy will have a grand procession; they will process all out of the church, they go all the way out and go to the spot where the relics are being kept. The bishop will pray to Almighty God for the grace to handle these relics with reverence and dedication, and then four deacons (who will probably be priests, but they will be dressed as deacons with red dalmatics) they will have a bier, like a thing on which a statue might normally be carried, and they will place these relics on that bier and these four deacons will come in a very solemn possession all the way into the church and bring these relics up to the altar. All the faithful and all the clergy are singing some very beautiful antiphons which again you will see in the livestream on the day of consecration, they will bring the relics all the way up here to the altar and the bishop will take those relics, which in our case are the relics of two great martyrs, Saint Emerentiana and Saint Caesarius of Terracina, and he will take the container that they were in that he sealed the night before, he will place those relics down here into the sepulcher and he will create a cement to seal these in using again the same Gregorian Water that he made outside. He will use that cement and he will seal in and close off the sepulcher once and for all, and from this day forward the relics of these two great martyrs will be under the spot where the Sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the daily offered on this altar.

So now you can see where we are coming to the very heart of the consecration of the church. We have throughout the church embedded in the walls 12 of these: these are called the Consecration Crosses. And so in baptism, just as the priest pours the water and sanctified the soul and afterwards he anoints the child's head with the sacred chrism, so the bishop will do the exact same thing here. He is going to go around all 12 of these consecration crosses: he will come to it and he will anoint with the sacred chrism and then he will incense it. After he is done with that, embedded in the wall will be one of these (this is a candlestick holder that has been fashion and designed based off of our columns) the candlestick holder will be embedded in the wall and a deacon will come behind the bishop and wipe off the chrism, then he will embed this candle that has been designed by one of our students, it will be lit, and every year on the anniversary of this consecration these candles be relit, and that represents the doctrine of the 12 apostles which has enlightened the souls of the faithful throughout the centuries.

So once the bishop has anointed the sixth cross on the walls of the inside of the church, he will make a quick little break and he will come out here to the external doors and will anoint two crosses on the jams of the doors on both of the two main doors of the church, and that symbolizes that Christ is the door, as He says: I am the gate. He is the door by which any man who enters into life must enter. And so again, referring back to this main theme of the baptism of the soul and baptizing this church such that anyone who enters into the church understands that they are entering in through Christ.

So now that everything else in the church has been consecrated, the last thing to do is to consecrate the altar itself. Now as you know from our previous videos, we've spoken about the three main parts being the mensa, the stipes (the supports) and then the sepulcher. Now the sepulcher has been taken care of as we discussed already. Well now, the bishop is going to come to the mensa, the table top of the altar, and he is going to anoint five crosses and you can see at least a few of them here in the shot, there are five crosses on the table top of the altar, obviously representing the five wounds of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And the bishop will anoint each of these five crosses at the different corners and then he will anoint the altar where the mensa meets the stipes, the supports, and that again refers to the permanence of the altar, this is a place where forever the sacrifice of Our Lord will be offered. So he anoints each of the four corners of the mensa and the stipes all the way around the altar. Once he has done that, he will incense the altar all the way around it, again referring to it as a holy mountain, a place holier than all these Old Testament places that are symbolized by the anointing the altar: Jacobs altar, the altar of Horeb, and all the different altars of the Old Testament. And then lastly the bishop will do something very visible; it's very visually stimulating. He will take grains of incense in piles on these crosses and he will have two intersecting candles and he will light them on fire and then these five different pyres, you can say, on top of the altar we will get it a very rich and deep sense that this place is sanctified, the fires of the Holy Ghost who is above us here in the sanctuary are coming down and creating a place of sanctification.

So then once all those ceremonies that we’ve describe that happened out in the church, the bishop and all the clergy will process back here to the sacristy. In the meantime, the main altar will be cleaned off of the fires and the incense and the altar clothes, the candlesticks, reliquaries, flowers everything will be laid out for the first Pontifical Mass and the Mass will be that of the Dedication of the Church, and from this day forward on the anniversary of the dedication, May 3, the Immaculata will always celebrate that as a first-class feast. Also it's good to know that if you were to visit Immaculata on the day of the consecration, even if you are not able to attend the ceremony, if you visit the church on that day you can gain a plenary indulgence just for visiting the church anytime that day, of course with all the usual conditions.

And so May 3 is coming very quickly, we have close to 30 days left, and if you are able to come for the event for the consecration we look forward to trying to welcome you with the greatest hospitality possible especially for all those who have supported the project we really hope that we can receive you properly. On the day after the consecration we will be offering a Solemn High Mass at 8:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 4, and that Mass is specifically for all of the benefactors who are coming to St. Marys from out of town, so we hope you will be able to attend that. If not, please follow the livestream and again pray for the success of that day because it will be a very beautiful, a very historic day for all of us here in St Marys and for all of you who have helped support this project. Thank you.