While at the “Henri Coandă” International Airport in Otopeni, Eduard von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and Hungarian Ambassador to the Holy See, retreated to the airport chapel and posted a short message about it on a social network.
“Want to know how to do a REAL airport Chapel? Go to Bucharest Airport… (including incense and sung prayer service),” he wrote on Twitter.
Some of his followers added positive comments on his post: “That’s awesome, so freakin’ awesome,” wrote an engineer from Texas, USA; “Beautiful! How I wish we had these in North American airports!!” added a Canada-born marriage and family therapist.
An American woman wrote: “Now that’s amazing. Look at this! I have a friend who was a stewardess and she used to hop into chapels all over the world to go to mass or to visit the Blessed Sacrament. Now I can see what she was talking about. Amazing!”
An educational expert from Great Britain added a famous quote by Russian writer Fyodor M. Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world,” while The Catholic Travel Guide asked for permission to use the ambassador’s photos for its category of Airport Chapels Worldwide.
Around 150 airports in the world have chapels, yet most of them have a neuter look, being designed for multi-confessional prayer.
The Chapel “Prophet Elijah” is at the International Departures section of “Henri Coandă” International Airport in Otopeni, which serves the Romanian Capital city of Bucharest. The chapel was consecrated in 2003 to cater for the travelers and the airport workers’ spiritual needs.
Here serves chaplain Costel Dinu. He declared for the Patriarchate’s Lumina Newspaper that, in addition to the usual services, the chapel also holds the special services on the feasts of Resurrection, Christmas and Epiphany. On Easter, travelers and airport workers receive the Holy Fire and some of them even participate in the service which is held until dawn.
Thus, the Orthodox chapel has an important missionary role and is also a visiting card for Romanian Orthodoxy in “the global village”.
Photo credit: Ziarul Lumina / Mihnea Păduraru
Want to know how to do a REAL airport Chapel? Go to ?? Bukarest Airport…
(including incense and sung prayer service) pic.twitter.com/BSKv94X7kM
— Eduard Habsburg (@EduardHabsburg) February 21, 2020
