So how did this unassuming church come to have 24 seats from the Second Vatican Council as choir stalls in the front half of its nave?
Father Tiemen Brouwer, a Dutch priest serving at the church, told CNA he thought perhaps the council seats were gifted to the archconfraternity after Vatican II because they would be useful. The rest of the seats, he guessed, had been destroyed.
But no one from the archconfraternity was able to confirm this theory.
“No one knows why they are there, just that they are there,” Kees van Duin, a member of the archconfraternity and a permanent deacon to the Dutch Catholic community, told CNA, after he queried a number of the older members of the religious association.
All that is known is that a piece of the Catholic Church’s modern history is preserved there for anyone to come and see.
“I always say, wherever you sit [in those seats], you are sure to be sitting where a bishop, or maybe even a cardinal, sat,” Brouwer said.
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency’s senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.
Credit: Source link
