Threats and Sanctuary

By: Timothy Brunk, October 26, 2025

In the third week of August this year, those gathered at Villanova University for Orientation Week were the victims of what university president Peter Donohue characterized in an email as a “cruel hoax.”  Malicious actors phoned in a report of an active shooter on campus.  As text messages from the university’s Department of Public Safety lit up smartphones all over campus, thousands of people began a scramble for safety in academic buildings, dining halls, the library, a new library still under construction, office buildings, and the two major worship spaces on campus: St. Thomas of Villanova Church and Corr Chapel. 

Corr Chapel has one main entrance.  The chapel also has a movable altar.  Those sheltering in the chapel moved the altar to that entrance in order to barricade the door.  I could offer comments here about the gun culture in the United States that laid the foundation for this event.  However, my focus is on something else.  I am struck by the symbol of using an altar as a shield.

The Order of Dedication of an Altar has two options for the Entrance Antiphon.  One option is taken from Psalm 43 (42):

Turn your eyes, O God, our shield, and look on the face of your Anointed One / one day within your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.¹

Here, God is invoked as a shield.

The Prayer following the Litany of Supplication contains these words:

Mercifully accept our petitions . . . .

so that this altar may be a place

where the great mysteries of salvation

are accomplished. . .²

God as a shield.  The altar as a place where the mysteries of salvation are accomplished.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers these lines about the altar.

The altar, around which the Church is gathered in the celebration of the Eucharist, represents the two aspects of the same mystery: the altar of the sacrifice and the table of the Lord.  This is all the more so since the Christian altar is the symbol of Christ himself, present in the midst of the assembly of his faithful, both as the victim offered for our reconciliation and as food from heaven who is giving himself to us.  “For what is the altar of Christ if not the image of the Body of Christ?”³ asks St. Ambrose.  He says elsewhere, “The altar represents the body [of Christ] and the Body of Christ is on the altar.”⁴

God as a shield.  The altar as a place where the mysteries of salvation are accomplished.  The altar as an image of the Body of Christ.

Do I think of God as a shield?  Do I think of the altar (and by extension the sanctuary) as a spiritual and metaphorical sanctuary?  When should the worship space offer physical sanctuary to those in fear for the lives or their well-being? When does withholding such sanctuary give the lie to our worship?

[The image accompanying this post on the Pray Tell home page is a picture of Corr Chapel.]

¹ Order of Dedication of an Altar 33

² Order of Dedication of an Altar 46

³ St. Ambrose, De Sacr. 5,2,7:PL 16,447C.

⁴ St. Ambrose, De Sacr. 4,2,7:PL 16,437D