Moving Altars from the Middle Ages to WWII
“Archbishop Francis J. Spellman of New York, on his recent tour of North African battlefronts, said mass for the men at the Fifty-seventh Fighter Group of the United States Army Ninth Air Force.”
Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information, LC-USW3-028967-E
In 1943, the United States Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) photographed a series of images of Archbishop Francis Spellman of New York celebrating the Mass with U.S. airmen in Tunisia. The photos capture Spellman at various moments during the service, including the moment of elevation, in front of crowds of servicemen and women. In one of the most striking images, the photographer’s angle allows the viewer to see Spellman using a small altar and chalice against a cloth backdrop, with the congregation bowing their heads in reverence. A year later, a British photographer produced a series of images that displayed a small group of soldiers attending Mass at the back of a Catholic chaplain’s truck in the Netherlands with a small portable altar, candlesticks, and cross placed on the tailgate of the vehicle.
As John Seitz discusses in his article “Altars of Ammo: Catholic Materiality and the Visual Culture of World War II,” the photographs from Spellman’s 1943 tour and other images published in Life magazine during World War II staged Catholic rituals against the scenery of violence in order to depict a positive, peaceful, and morally righteous religious narrative for the viewer. Photographers and videographers purposefully staged their tableaus in certain ways and wrote captions to accompany their publications on the home front, eschewing especially unpleasant elements of the battlefield in order to present a united, pious, and righteous endeavor.
But while photographs of modern soldiers at Mass in wartime were sometimes stylized, the situations depicted had deep roots: portable altars, chalices, and patens were present on the battlefield and had been for centuries. Indeed, the use of mobile Catholic materiality originated in the medieval period, and the crusader texts that describe the Mass on campaign parallel the photographs of World War II in intriguing ways.
Figure 2 - “Using the tailboard of his ‘Utility’ as his Altar, Father C.V. Murphy offers Mass in a Dutch field in the front line. Taken by Sgt. Mapham. 6.10.44.” Imperial War Museums B 10583
Although built churches were the preferred location for the service, finding a permanent church on military campaigns was often difficult. Medieval Christian clergy often constructed temporary sacred spaces in which to perform the Mass in camp. Liturgical books, processional crosses, chalices, portable altars, censers, and candlesticks all feature in the various inventories of traveling medieval chaplains.
A closer look at primary-source texts related to the crusades reveals significant evidence for the use of portable tent chapels and mobile altars during the Christian invasions of the Levant. When Muslim forces attacked Peter the Hermit’s camp outside Constantinople, they killed the Christians, who were caught off guard. In his paraphrased account of an eyewitness text, Abbot Guibert of Nogent (c.1055-1124), records that “they found a certain priest performing mass, and they killed him in the very act of completing the sacrament; while he was sacrificing to God, they sacrificed him at the same altar.” Guibert reminds his audience that the Eucharist was of the utmost importance and the celebration of the Mass was what allowed the priest to enter into Heaven. But the setting of this episode, specifically at the altar, reveals the priest utilized a portable altar for his devotions in his tent within the Christian camp. Much like the photographers who captured the celebration of the Mass in the field, medieval crusade chroniclers recorded the use of the materials and rituals of the Church to ground the military endeavor, and its memory, in familiar terms for Christians.
Fulcher of Chartres (c.1059-1128), a priest who participated in the First Crusade, mentions the Mass of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary took place “in the tent of the king,” also noting the crusaders’ tents were transported by pack animals in the baggage trains. Between battles, Jean of Joinville (1224-1317), chaplain and biographer of King Louis IX of France, sat with his dying priest in his chapel tent. He even admonished a group of soldiers “because they were speaking in a loud tone of voice in my chapel and disturbing the priest, [so] I went up to them and told them to keep silent, and said it was most discourteous on the part of knights and gentlemen to talk while mass was being sung.” Despite the temporary and mobile nature of the chapel tent, its sacrality was equal to that of a permanent church.
Both the medieval texts and modern photographs above contain a constructed, authorial lens with which the audience is meant to see Catholic devotional objects in war. But while the photographs show peaceful moments centered on the Mass, the crusader texts highlight moments of disruption and violence occurring around these wartime altars. This hints at how the rhetorical agenda surrounding portable devotional objects in war has changed over time. Whereas crusade chroniclers, some of whom did not even witness the events they recorded, described the ill-treatment of holy items to signify the wickedness of their enemies, and therefore the need for holy war, the WWII photographers stressed the righteousness of the soldiers—and, by association, their side of the war—who demonstrated the proper reverence for Catholic liturgical objects. Future research into the official papal and state policies, as well as work on battlefield chaplains and their possessions, will untangle more of the parallels and differences between the medieval and the modern in the development of portable Catholic devotion, but it is clear that, from the crusades to WWII, Catholic materiality in combat did not just serve the needs of the faithful but also anchored broader conceptualizations of what constituted “just warfare.”
Sarah Luginbill is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation, "Portable Altars, Devotion, and Memory in German Lands, 1050-1190 CE," examines the patronage and production of medieval portable altars in what is now north-central Germany. More about her research can be found at medievalportablealtars.com.