MILWAUKEE, USA - The Vatican agreed with parishioners of a Milwaukee cathedral upset with renovation plans for their church by ordering the archdiocese to reconsider the project, a newspaper reported on Monday.
An archdiocese spokesman had no comment on a report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that said a lawyer for the parishioners of the 19th-century Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist said the Vatican had ordered the archbishop to revise renovation plans.
Attorney Alan Kershaw was quoted as telling the newspaper from Rome that the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments had issued a letter on the renovation that cited violations of liturgical law.
The objections centered on the plan to move the cathedral's altar forward into the congregation, replace pews with portable chairs equipped with kneelers and move the tabernacle, or cabinet for consecrated Eucharistic wafers, into a side chapel.
In a rare appeal, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland traveled to Rome in June to try to resolve questions about the project.