WASHINGTON – Furnishings for Pope Francis’ Mass in Washington in September – an altar, a special chair, a stand to hold the Holy Scripture — are taking shape at a dusty cabinetry shop in Frederick, Maryland.
“We had to design something that respected his personal beliefs but also was fitting and noble enough to go in the Basilica,” said Joseph Taylor, who was part of a three-person team of student designers from Catholic University.
Taylor and his teammates, Ariadne Cerritelli and Matthew Hoffman were selected from among 18 student nominations to design the papal furnishings. They planned the wood-and-granite altar to match the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, outside of which the Mass will take place on Sept. 23. The altar and most of the other furnishings will be moved inside the Great Upper Church of the Basilica after the Mass.
“We weren’t designing anything too contemporary or modern,” Taylor said. “We wanted to design something that looked like it had always been in the basilica and it belonged to the basilica.”
The new papal furnishings include the chair, the altar, an ambo (a stand to hold the Bible), several deacon’s chairs and a lectern, which will hold a relic from Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan friar who is to be canonized during the outdoor Mass.
For Cerritelli, who visited Serra’s home during a family trip to Spain as a child, working on the project is an example of her faith coming full circle.
“It’s just something that’s extra special for me,” she said.
Parts of the altar and chairs were on display for the media Monday, but other elements are still under construction in a woodworking shop in Poolesville, Maryland.
The students originally wanted to build the altar out of stone, so it would blend in with the interior of the Basilica, but that would have made the altar far too heavy. Instead, the furnishings will be built with locally sourced materials, such as cherry wood, and will then be painted to look like marble, they said.
David Cahoon, a deacon with the Archidocese of Washington and a full-time carpenter who owns the carpentry shop in Poolesville, is the lead for the project. “Deacon Dave,” as he is called, also built an altar for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Washington in 2008. This project, he said, is “a lot more intensive.”
“Back then we built three pieces in my shop by hand,” he said. “[Now] we’ve got 16 pieces of furniture that have to be done in a matter of weeks, and there is no way I could do it by myself.”
The three architecture students passed their design plans off to Cahoon’s construction team of at least eight other people, including craftsmen, stone carvers, tailors for the seat cushion and an artist to place gold tiles on the mosaic that will decorate the middle pillar of the altar.
For Cahoon, getting to build a second set of papal furnishings is a distinct honor.
“I can’t find enough words to describe what it means to be able to take your career as a carpenter and unite it with a vocation as a deacon,” he said. Cahoon said that marrying his wife and building a family were the highlights of his life.
“But but this, career-wise, is about as good as it gets.”
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