A family realizes a longtime dream of a home chapel — right before they would depend on it the most 

On Jan. 1, 2020, Brendan and Molly Koop, along with their eight children and some extended family members, including Brendan’s priest-brother and deacon-father, gathered for Mass in their freshly finished home chapel.

With seating for about 15, the chapel was the realization of a longtime desire and a nearly four-year painstaking labor of love, and the Koops were grateful for its fruition.  

On that New Year’s Day — the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God — they envisioned family evening prayer and Sunday rosaries in its sun-drenched space. What they couldn’t have foreseen was the role it would play in the midst of a pandemic that would make their own parish temporarily inaccessible, and how that would help bring them closer to each other and their heavenly Father. 

The idea of a chapel was something that Molly, 42, and Brendan, 44, felt placed on their hearts years ago. Married in 2001, they desired to truly embrace the Church’s idea of the family as a domestic church, the place where children first learn who God is and how to seek his will. When the Koops asked Brendan’s brother, an architect in Manhattan, to design a house for them near Ham Lake, they incorporated that vision in every detail. 

The house was effectively finished in 2015, with the exception of a large addition planned for the back: the future chapel.  

“We couldn’t afford it right away,” Brendan explained. “It’s like many home-building projects: You get into the middle of it, and you realize your funding is rapidly going away.” 

The chapel was tabled, but not forgotten. As time and finances permitted, Brendan leveraged his experience as an engineer to design the 18-by-12-foot chapel first digitally, working out problems via software so that when it came time to build, he knew exactly what to do. For inspiration, he looked to history — including the Cathedral of St. Paul, which he has described as “the most beautiful church in America” — and the contemporary work of University of Notre Dame architecture professor Duncan Stroik.  

The resulting plan was rooted in classical design, with the focus on the East-facing altar, inset between two colonnades under a Roman arch and circular window. Flanking the sanctuary are niches with statues of Mary and St. Joseph, set against walls Brendan hand-stenciled with their traditional symbols. He designed the 16-foot-high vaulted ceiling to give a sense of verticality, and therefore transcendence. Stations of the Cross line the walls. 

“It smells like a church, too,” Brendan noted: The pews came from a closed Catholic church in southern Minnesota, and their lacquer had absorbed decades-worth of incense. 

Brendan did most of the chapel work himself. In an interview with The Catholic Spirit in March, his kids ribbed him about all the tools he acquired. He said he heavily depended on YouTube tutorials along the way. 

As he worked, the project drew attention from neighbors. Some expressed skepticism, and even concern about the value of a house. How does one sell a house — if necessary — with a dedicated chapel? The Koops were unfazed. Brendan built it for permanence, he said: “Every single wood joint in that chapel is glued — every single one. It’s very solid. It’s not going anywhere in the future.” 

For Molly, the process led to deeper reflection on the chapel’s meaning, and its purpose in their domestic church, which St. John Paul II called “a church in the home …, where God is honored, his law is respected, prayer is a normal event, virtue is transmitted by word and example, and everyone shares the hopes, the problems and sufferings of everyone else.” 

For the Koops, the visual, material elements of their home were meant to be a reflection of how they wanted to live, pray and be together as a family. “What do we want our kids to learn from growing up in this family and in this particular space?” Molly asked. 

That’s why their home has large communal spaces to foster time together, including a dedicated homeschooling room, and a shared bedroom for the boys and a shared bedroom for the girls (luckily, they joke, they have an even number of each), with the idea that shared spaces would lead to close relationships among their children.

The dining room table is walnut, the same wood as the chapel’s altar, to connect the daily meal to the eucharistic meal. The library is the room that leads into the chapel because, Brendan explained, reason leads to faith. (He chronicled the house’s progress — and his vision for a house designed to foster a holy home life — on his blog “Ecclesia domestica,” meaning “the domestic church.”) 

The foyer includes family pictures mixed with photos of modern saints of varied ages and vocations. “When you walk into this home, anyone who comes here knows that our faith is central to our lives, and the pursuit of growth in virtue and holiness is central to our family,” Molly said. 

From Brendan’s web research, he hasn’t found another family that has been as deliberate as his about designing a new house based on a vision of the domestic church. He has, however, come across other families who have home chapels. And, other Catholics have reached out to him to get ideas for their own potential chapel projects.  

The idea of a home chapel isn’t new, the Koops note: It was common in England and even the early United States, where Catholic families housed priests or faced religious persecution. And it’s an extension of a home altar, an idea gaining popularity as more Catholics explore shaping their lives around the Church’s liturgical calendar.

The family regularly prays in the morning and reads the daily Gospel in the chapel, and some of the kids bring their Church-related studies to the space. Brendan, Molly and their older children spend personal prayer time there. On Sundays, they pray a family rosary, and have prayed Stations of the Cross together. Brendan installed lights that can change color to match the liturgical season and speakers for playing sacred music. 

The oldest Koop child, 18-year-old Clara, noted in March that she feels so used to having a chapel in her home that it doesn’t strike her as unusual — until it comes up in conversation with her friends and they’re surprised. “I’m definitely going to miss it when I go to college,” said Clara, a high school senior. “It’s really important to me to have that special prayer space.” 

Even though Brendan’s father, Deacon Steven Koop, and brother, Father Evan Koop, are ordained, Brendan and Molly didn’t envision Mass being a central use of the chapel. They saw it primarily as a space for private or family prayer. They deliberated over whether to include a tabernacle. In the end, they thought the altar looked weird without one. They didn’t really expect it to be used to house the Eucharist. But, with Father Koop’s visits, they realized there was a remote possibility that it could be used temporarily. 

Then, in March, Minnesota’s first cases of COVID-19 were discovered, indicating that the pandemic had arrived. Their parish, St. Paul in Ham Lake, like other parishes across the state, suspended Masses and other activities. And they, like most other Catholics, only had recourse to the Mass via TV and the internet. But, unlike most Catholics, they had a more fitting place than their living room to watch it. They livestreamed their parish’s Mass from a table in the front of their chapel, standing and kneeling in their pews, following the liturgy’s familiar rhythms. With Brendan working from home, and the children’s homeschool co-op activities canceled, they prayed most evenings in the chapel as a family. 

Gov. Tim Walz’s statewide stay-at-home executive order came two weeks before Holy Week, and the Koops reconciled themselves to the idea of the Triduum without their parish. Meanwhile, Father Koop, who had been studying in Rome, returned home amid Italy’s COVID-19 outbreak. His mandatory traveler quarantine ended the Wednesday of Holy Week, so he moved in with Brendan and Molly’s family for the Triduum. 

“We were able to have all of the Triduum liturgies in our home, which was a beautiful gift after having been away from the Eucharist for many weeks,” Molly said. On the Easter Vigil, each family member held lit candles in the dark as Father Koop chanted the “Exsultet,” a long prayer that speaks to the wonder of the paschal mystery. Family members took turns reading the Mass’ seven Old Testament readings. 

“(We) just had that experience of Easter Vigil, which is supposed to be in a parish, but this was an extremely rare circumstance where my brother could do it at our house,” Brendan explained. 

As the pandemic wore on, it became clear that their 8-year-old son, Oliver, wouldn’t be able to receive his first Eucharist at their parish this spring as they had expected. So, they obtained their pastor’s permission for him to receive his first Eucharist during a Mass at their home chapel.  

“I think back to the first day of 2020 when we were celebrating Mass in there for the first time since the chapel had been completed,” Molly told The Catholic Spirit in November. “Certainly, we never could have known what a gift and what a space this would be for our family.” 

The chapel is something “we’re confident is from the Lord,” Brendan said, “and something that — especially in the year of 2020 — (we) have really benefited from in our spiritual life.” 

The Koops have a deep sense of being stewards, not owners, of the chapel, and they envision it having a future role they cannot yet know. A retreat house? A small monastery? Already, they have offered it to neighbors and friends as a place to pray. 

“This is not our chapel. None of what we have is ours — it’s a gift, and we’re blessed enough to use it,” Brendan said. “We want the Lord to use it however he wants.” 

The Koops, who are members of their parish’s pastoral council, are emphatic that the space is not intended to replace the Church of St. Paul or its community. But, Molly noted, the chapel is also an outgrowth of their parish’s faith formation, which encourages families to create a special place in their house for prayer. The Koops imagine one day praying in the space with their grandchildren. 

“I try not to plan or think too much ahead, but if this year has told us anything, the Lord has just great plans for the way he hopes to use this space, and we don’t know what those could be,” she said. “Hopefully we can be docile to that, and our family can grow to love him more in this space.” 

But, Brendan added, while a chapel is meant to enhance prayer, it’s also meant to come from it.  

“The important thing is it should be an outgrowth of you or your family’s prayer life,” he said. “Building something or having a prayer area, if it was just there for show or if someone thought, ‘Well, if I build this, it will make me pray,’ — ultimately, that doesn’t work. We have to have that internal, interior life first and foremost, and have that interior chapel. And if we don’t have that, then nothing exterior is going to help us.

“But if we do have that, then there are many exterior things that do help us in prayer,” he continued, “and that’s why as Catholics, we have these beautiful buildings and statues, and things like that that help remind us.” 

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