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Independent chapels that borrow rooms for Mass don't have stations (in my experience) and it seems to me there is a reason, that according to Church law, the stations must be blessed by the local bishop. That is, in a new church, after the stations are erected (the pictures/statues are hung on the walls), before the faithful can use them for Stations of the Cross, the local bishop has to come in and bless each one of them, usually with a specific ritual that entails sprinkling holy water on each station, incensing it with a thurifer and burning frankinsense, and saying the prayers, all in a public ceremony. Read any good description of indulgences for Stations of the Cross, and you'll see they say that to get the indulgences described, one must do the Stations at a place where stations have been erected and blessed by the local bishop.
That can't be done in a rented room, or in a hotel hall, or in a building where the walls holding the stations will be transformed for use other than for the Catholic religion. You can't have stations today and an art auction tomorrow in the same room.
In the rented hall where my friends have weekly Mass, it would be very nice to have Stations of the Cross before or after Mass, but we would have to erect stations temporarily, so they could be removed after Mass when we evacuate the place. I doubt our priest would approve of such a procedure. And I'm almost certain there is no bishop who would come and bless such temporary stations. If he did, would the stations lose their blessing when they are taken down each week? Would the blessing return when they are re-erected each week? Would the stations be useful anywhere ELSE as blessed stations such that they could be used elsewhere and retain the blessing when erected temporarily there? Would the bishop have to come in and bless them again before each use, or could the bishop give the power to the priest to be able to re-enact that blessing before Stations are prayed by the faithful?
My chapel is in a hotel room. No, they don't rent it on Friday nights for stations of the cross, though if they did, I would go.
I suspect you're not alone, Matto. I would go, too. I should think there would be some way of getting "supplied jurisdiction" to work for the indulgences in this crisis time.
Curiously, when the so-called cathedral of Los Angeles was erected by the deplorable Roger Cardinal Balony --- I mean Mahony, he did not bless the stations on the wall in the new church. Instead, he walked around the 'nave' (it's not really a nave) and smacked the wall with something resembling a burlap sack that had some kind of oil or other substance on it, and then clumsily rubbing the wall with the sack as if he didn't know what he was doing, so
it left a greasy smear on the wall. For the next year or two, anyone coming to the so-called cathedral would be able to see the random smudges of greasy splotches left from that action. He muttered some kind of words that nobody recognized. There was no images, pictures, statues, engravings or even markings on the walls at the places where he did this. The walls were pour-in-place concrete, with inherent surface abnormalities and air bubbles cut in half which resemble pits of various sizes. When the walls were first made, there is a process in construction known as "sacking," whereby a slurry of Portland Cement and water is used, and where a burlap sack is dipped in the mix, and the sack is slapped onto the wall and then rubbed vigorously, so that the cement fills the surface pits where air bubbles formed during the concrete pour. The procedure that Mahony used seemed to me to be an idea he came up with by his having previously watched the construction crew in action.
To this day, there are no stations in the so-called cathedral of Los Angeles. However, anyone asking about them is directed to the basement, "the Dungeon," as it's popularly known, where there is a dumpy chapel that doubles as aa oversized broom closet. This is not a joke. On one end of the 30' x 40' room is an area that occupies about 15% of the floor area of the entire room (180 sq.ft. +/-) where odd items, flotsam and jetsam, are kept for possible future use. This area can be closed off by a temporary, movable room divider that hangs from a track on the ceiling. When it's open (usually the case, so that visitors normally can see all the junk piled up) the 'chapel' has an appearance of disarray and chaos. Ironically, the doctrinal chaos is principally upstairs in the main church. There are no permanent pews, and no permanent altar. The room has an open floor area that can be used for any arrangement of furniture brought into it. When an altar is set up it is a temporary altar, which is then removed at the end of the service -- not unlike many of our independent chapels where the TLM Mass is said. Fr. Schell had three such portable altars, which he carried around (one at a time) in the trunk of his car, all over southern California.
This dumpy chapel is where the Stations of the Cross are located at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. They are nice, framed sculptures, in color, about 20" square. they are on 3 of the 4 walls of the room. The 4th wall is behind the movable room partition, and is piled high with junk. Nobody seems to know anything about whether or how these stations were blessed by the bishop, and nobody knows whether Stations of the Cross are held in there. I have never seen anyone use them for praying Stations, but I would imagine that someone must have by now.
The reason that the stations are erected in the nave of a church is so that the public can see the public practice of praying the Stations of the Cross.
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Topic: Stations of the Cross (Read 2306 times)