It should make us think of Heaven

Fr. Acervo is a young, pious, and awesome priest. He is an associate priest at my former home parish back in Michigan, and he is a frequent celebrant at the parish in which we attended Mass in the usus antiquior. So I think I am qualified to say that he is a humble and precise speaker. The same rings true for his blogging.

That being said, Fr. Acervo has taken his gloves off a bit in his most recent post: On Sacred Architecture

Church architecture has suffered greatly over the last few decades with people building not churches, true temples of God, but functional or multi-functional gathering spaces and community halls.  If our architecture is bland, then our worship will be bland, which in turn will make our faith bland.  While it’s understandable that parishes are always trying to keep their costs down, what’s resulted has been a very minimalist approach to architecture.  In short, we’ve become cheap toward God.

 He was commenting on a post over at Our Sunday Visitor: "Catholic Churches: Houses of Heaven on Earth". You should go read the article, and go read Fr. Acervo's comments, one of the most poignant points that he makes is:

If the sanctuary looks like a stage or if the church looks like an auditorium, it's hard for the Mass to not look like a show...Heaven is not perpetual entertainment.  It is perpetual adoration.  Architecture should fill us with awe so that we can experience this foretaste of heaven.

The hard question is this, what do we do if our parish church does have a Sanctuary that looks like a stage?