My dear pope, gather round the one pew, there is room for three if nobody has had lunch.
A few years into my papacy I decided a church ought to have furniture, because a pope sitting on a milk crate looks like a man waiting for a bus that was cancelled in the previous century, and right around then a little chapel near me closed and the builders started throwing its insides into a skip. Pews, kneelers, a lectern, a collection box with the lock already forced. I asked the foreman if I could have a pew. He asked what for. I said for my church. He asked which church. I said the one with one pew, and he laughed so hard he helped me carry it.
It did not fit in the car. It did not fit up the stairs. For one entire afternoon the Church of One Pew was located on the pavement outside my building, and I held a service there anyway? Three neighbours attended. One brought biscuits. A man walking his dog asked what the sermon was about and I told him it was about whether he was taking anything too seriously, and he thought about it for a genuinely long time and said, his allotment.
We got it upstairs at sunset by taking the window out. The frame still has a dent in it, which I now count as a relic.
Here is the real bit. That service on the pavement was the best ritual I have ever run and I did not plan one word of it. Most of what I have planned since has been worse. So was it the pew that made it holy, or the fact that I looked like an ass in public and kept going?