Category Archives: 2-Experienced

The man, Steve Shiffrin, wrote and this blogger commended him, for his in-general observation about entering a Protestant church at service time and being “barraged” with greetings vs. entering a Catholic church at mass time and being ignored, the latter because for Catholics a church is for praying, not greeting.

I liked his wording —

I do not mean to criticize Catholics or Protestants here (I aim to describe general patterns).  . . .

I believe that the reason Catholics are not as social when they gather for Mass is that there is a sense of the sacred in church, and a sense that the right thing to do is to quietly pray. There is surely no intention to make visitors feel unwelcome. [Emphasis
mine]

Similarly, Protestants are not trying to make visitors feel uncomfortable. Quite to the contrary, they are simply making clear that visitors are welcome.

General patterns yes. And that’s the way it used to be in Catholic churches. Things have changed. The “sense of the sacred” has slipped away, imperceptibly. When is a church not a church? I have asked, answering, Before and after mass, when it’s a social hall.

I’ll take his “general patterns,” allowing for Catholic experience that’s as it used to be, even in Chicago and environs. but as for Chicago and environs, my before-and-after mass description holds as a general pattern. Which is what got me writing this little book.

I must hold back from endorsement of his wondering “whether the sense of the sacred works against community bonding in Catholic congregations.” Not now, certainly, and not in any parish I grew up in or experienced as an adult.

Activity, thy name is Catholic, I must say, as it’s Protestant and Jewish in my extended experience as a newspaper reporter covering churches and synagogues, including the latter on weekends, including Sundays, based on my researching religious-education classes some years back for a book that never got written.

I include also the Latin-mass congregation in Oak Park, where church mice could not be quieter during mass and in the worship area at any time, but in the vestibule after mass it was wall-to-wall family-to-family major helloing and chatting.

So well said:

I imagine a Protestant walking into many Catholic churches feels unwelcome. A Catholic walking into a Protestant church feels barraged. But there is more. I do not mean to criticize Catholics or Protestants here (I aim to describe general patterns).

I believe that the reason Catholics are not as social when they gather for Mass is that there is a sense of the sacred in church, and a sense that the right thing to do is to quietly pray. There is surely no intention to make visitors feel unwelcome. [Emphasis
mine]

Similarly, Protestants are not trying to make visitors feel uncomfortable. Quite to the contrary, they are simply making clear that visitors are welcome.

I wonder, however, what impact this difference in the ritual has on the communitarian sense of Protestant congregations and without arguing against a sense of the sacred, I wonder whether the sense of the sacred works against community bonding in Catholic congregations.

Food for thought here.

Mark this for proposed 3rd part of this little book, “The Interior Life.”

The new mass was “a bitter trial,” said novelist Evelyn Waugh.

In 1965, Evelyn Waugh wrote to the archbishop of Westminster of the growing tide of liturgical changes: “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.”

The prominent Italian Catholic literary figure Tito Casini went further in 1967, publishing the provocative tract La tunica stracciata (“The Torn Tunic”), with a preface by a curial cardinal. He virulently took to task the cardinal charged with implementing the reform, Giacomo Lercaro, for “a perverted application [of the council] detested alike by Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and unbelievers, in the name of piety, unity, concord, art, poetry and beauty.”

­Lercaro’s adept secretary, Fr. ­Annibale ­Bugnini, would describe Casini’s work as “defamatory” and as a “poisonous attack on the liturgical reform and on the conciliar renewal generally.” As the New Yorker of ­September 9, 1967, reported, Pope Paul VI was not pleased.

Casini and Waugh had a point. What began to happen to the Sacred Liturgy of the Western Rite of the Catholic Church in the 1960s (or perhaps earlier), and which led to the production of brand-new rituals produced to meet the needs—almost self-consciously—of that ethereal entity “modern man,” was perceived as madness by many, and caused distress to a great number of faithful Catholics.

How the cookie crumbled once these reformers had done their work.

. . . as explanation for my interest in Holy Mass besides the usual for a mass-going octogenarian with a long history of mass attendance.

Along lines of something I wrote a few years back as “Church Reporter” for the (now defunct ) Chicago Catholic News:

Meditating at Mass: PRAYER AND MEDITATION

No paragon of these am I, even if at 18 I left home to study them full time. After two years of it (novitiate), I got my SJ degree, which I relinquished many years later but would rather not go into right now.

Even so, much of it has stuck. At Mass, for instance, I often enter the zone of prayer and meditation, which makes me a poor participant in the liturgy.

Doesn’t mean I think of nothing else (distractions, you know) or that I am superior to the fellow or gal next to me who belts out the songs and other responses. In fact, you could argue I’m not as good because I seem to reject the communal aspect of today’s liturgy.

So allow me to hang my head in shame at that, asking only for tolerance. I am what I am, stuff happens, and all that. Bear with me.

That said by way of self-exoneration . . .

Do we not exceed the limits of liturgical propriety when we proffer the handclasp of peace to other pew-sitters far and wide, even getting out of our pews to hug and chat or even extort the same from them? Just asking, don’t get mad.

Communion time also. What about our meeting and greeting on way to the communion station? Ushers do it. They are the souls of geniality as if they were the host greeting you at the door of a party.

And they and others seem sometimes to take it amiss if you don’t participate, like the elderly gent at Ascension-Oak Park some years back who stood where communion-goers passed, glad-handing one and all. When I didn’t oblige, he was surprised and wounded.
Do we get carried away with our communality?

Something missing here? Sense of the sacred? The R-word, reverence?

I had to wonder, and decided to look into the history of  changes in the Mass.