I’m sorry, but I don’t quite follow this argument.  Prayer is not the mass, and the first thought that comes to mind is Christ’s teaching that when you pray do so quietly on your own and don’t make a fuss about it.  Prayer is valid anywhere, any time.  A church may be more conducive to prayer than a busy street, and guidelines may be helpful.

 

The Mass is different; a man-made ceremony with its own set of rules and requiring a consecrated space. Where these spaces were might well cause conflict.

 

 

Is it from ideas like Peter the Chanter’s that the distaste for public prayer meetings arises?

 

Anne

 

 

Back in October I posted a question about the theme of praying in church as opposed to praying outside of church.  I cited Peter the Chanter in De penitentia to the effect that it was better to pray in church than elsewhere, and asked whether there were other examples of this theme in pastoral or normative literature.  Let me now ask my question again, but in a different way.

In response to my earlier posting, Bernadette Filotas kindly sent me an extract from her work discussing prohibitions in the Frankish church in the early Middle Ages of mass being said in homes and other inappropriate places.  This seems to reflect tensions between Christian ideas of sacred space and persistant traditional (Roman and Germanic) associations of the sacred with the domus.  More directly, the prohibitions represented tensions between episcopal authority and the authority of the secular aristocrats who owned these private chapels or oratories.

In other words, Frankish bishops prohibited the saying of masses in the oratories of private homes because, in fact, priests were doing so; the question of where mass and other rites ought to be performed was a live one.  When Peter the Chanter and others in the twelfth and thirteenth century asserted the superiority of praying in church, were they seeking to move into churches prayer that was in fact taking place elsewhere (homes, streets)?  Was this a commonplace, or was it a live issue?

Thanks,

Tom Luongo