(no subject)

[beatrice_otter]

Note to fic writers: most buildings Roman Catholics use for worship are not cathedrals. They're just regular churches. It's only a cathedral if it's the church that a bishop (or higher) presides over. So there's usually only one cathedral in a region. And it's always really big and fancy with a large and ornate worship space and lots of offices for the bishop and his staff. By "large" I mean the sanctuary (worship space) is usually bigger than a football field and by "ornate" I mean the building is probably enough of a work of art that tourists come just to look at it. Some areas have large and ornate churches that are big and fancy enough they could be cathedrals, except for the fact that they don't have a bishop; those are called basilicas. Ordinary churches are much smaller and plainer, and have a lot less fine art in them. The vast majority of Roman Catholic churches are neither that big nor that fancy.

Calling an ordinary church a cathedral is sort of like calling an ordinary single-family home a palace. Both in the sense that it's absurd because it's not anywhere near big and fancy enough to be called that, but also because it implies that the place belongs to royalty. Back in the days when Europe was ruled by kings and princes, bishops were "the princes of the church."

(Also. These days, in the majority of American churches of any denomination, you are more likely to see jeans than suits. Nice slacks and a nice shirt are the most common thing to wear in most churches, but not anything as formal as a suit even on Christmas and Easter.)

Comments

[ratcreature]

Your general point stands, though over time and shifting fortunes these church buildings do accumulate.

I guess the US is still too young to have a bunch of (former) cathedrals in fairly insignificant towns that used to be significant and used to have a bishop, but now they don't. Or in a metropolitan region some smaller town has the cathedral because that used to be the bigger one in the twelfth century but never grew past thirty thousand but a bigger city that's now over ten times the size is still organized under its now tinier neighbor.

And sometimes these formerly important churches aren't even all that impressive because the last time it had a bishop was ages ago, only the locals still call it something pompous like a "Dom" (though admittedly anything called "cathedral" tends to be big at least).

[melannen]

Yeah, I've been to Holar Cathedral in Iceland, which is not Catholic, is neither large nor fancy, though it does have a bishop!

Meanwhile here at home in the US, the local Catholic cathedral is called the Basilica. (And the closest church called a cathedral is Anglican.)

[ratcreature]

My city has a Catholic church that I guess technically is cathedral since the diocese got refounded in the 1990s, but it's not an impressive, big or very old building. IIRC some rich guy funded it in the 1890s, so that local catholics could have a church, and it's some kind of historicized revival style that isn't neo-gothic, but I'm not exactly sure what it copies. (Reformation had done away with the local catholic bishop and diocese for some centuries, but I guess significant catholic immigration and now softer protestant/catholic split made it worthwhile to reorganize.)

[beatrice_otter]

Sure, there are exceptions, but I was just going for a general rule for people who know nothing. If they know enough to start talking about exceptions, this post is not for them!

This post was inspired by a fic in which the small Catholic church in a tiny Midwestern town was called a cathedral.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I'd be suspicious of them actually being Catholic and not some weird splinter group that just claims to be the "true" catholic church, who plonked their "cathedral" in the middle of nowhere after being kicked out...

[gingicat]

I have a funny story about Sunday clothes. A former coworker of mine was a choir member at a Methodist (I think) church in Foxboro, and she would often vent about how, on football game days, half the congregation showed up wearing their Patriots gear - as well as the pastor!

[beatrice_otter]

Doesn't surprise me! My first internship was in a suburb of Pittsburgh, and there it was the Steelers.

[dewline]

Good to be reminded of this particular distinction.

Thank you.

[beatrice_otter]

There are exceptions, as other people on this post have pointed out, but they are exceptions and should be treated as such.

[mindstalk]

"bigger than a football field"

Do you mean American football? Cathedrals are more than 100 yards/meters long?

[beatrice_otter]

Big ones are, yes.