Does This Happen in Your Parish?

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idrum677

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This is an account of what I experienced before a Mass last weekend. Sorry about the jump but I’ve already ranted on my blog about it.

Attending a different Mass this weekend, filling in as cantor, I made it a point to go early so to take advantage of the sacrament of confession being offered. There were only about a dozen or so people in the church, mainly of an older generation, so one would think it would be a great time for prayer. One would think…

Continued here…
 
Nope. If this is true, then I’m at shock. Remember the good old days when everybody actually dressed nice for church?
 
Yikes! No, nothing like this happens at my parish that I am aware of either…
 
Unfortunately, this why I try to avoid the Saturday 4:00 PM Mass in my parish. It is the noisiest before this Mass compared to the other Masses we have, including the Family Mass.

This is going to sound stereotypical, but I am going to say it anyway. The vast majority of these people were ADULTS by the time Vatican II came along. They were the generation that boasts of being trained by the “good sisters” of days gone by so by their own admission they" know how to be Catholic" – but you would not know it by the way they talk at the top of their lungs before Mass

I try to be charitable and offer it up, thinking that maybe they suffer from hearing impairments, which can make someone speak louder. Also, maybe they feel their age entitles them to ignore any manners of civility.

I am sorry about the stereotypical rant, especially since I am quickly behind them in the age category:D, but it is a real distraction.
 
Don’t worry. We have people in sweats and shorts bringing the gifts to the priests…we also have parents reprimanding their children during mass and also people playing on their iphones. No respect…its sad
 
Doesn’t happen in my parish. Despite the large number of people who were “ADULTS by the time Vatican II came along . . . (and) were the generation that boasts of being trained by the “good sisters” of days gone by.”
 
I remember going to Confession and then my children and I knelt in front of the Tabernacle and prayed the Rosary.

This apparently had an effect, because the whole church filled up for Mass without my being at all aware of anyone coming in! And they are not usually a quiet crowd, not loud like you were talking about, but not unnoticeably quiet.
 
Sacredheart1208 said:
Don’t worry. We have people in sweats and shorts bringing the gifts to the priests…we also have parents reprimanding their children during mass and also people playing on their iphones. No respect…its sad
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I’m not sure how parents reprimanding their children during Mass fits into all of this. Can you clarify?

No, this doesn’t happen in my church. We have a very reverent, prayerful atmosphere before Divine Liturgy. It does sometimes get a little loud for my tastes afterwards, but never in a totally disrespectful manner.
 
coachdennis said:
Unfortunately, this why I try to avoid the Saturday 4:00 PM Mass in my parish. It is the noisiest before this Mass compared to the other Masses we have, including the Family Mass.

This is going to sound stereotypical, but I am going to say it anyway. The vast majority of these people were ADULTS by the time Vatican II came along. They were the generation that boasts of being trained by the “good sisters” of days gone by so by their own admission they" know how to be Catholic" – but you would not know it by the way they talk at the top of their lungs before Mass

I try to be charitable and offer it up, thinking that maybe they suffer from hearing impairments, which can make someone speak louder. Also, maybe they feel their age entitles them to ignore any manners of civility.

I am sorry about the stereotypical rant, especially since I am quickly behind them in the age category:D, but it is a real distraction.
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Maybe this is a problem in the Northeast?
 
idrum677 said:
Maybe this is a problem in the Northeast?
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In defense of this group in my parish, once Mass starts they are a very devout group and pray the Mass with reverence and enthusiasm. In many ways the talking does reflect the ocncept of individuals coming together to form a community in prayer – if only they could do this more quietly 🙂
 
The last place I go to pray is my church before Mass. The Early Arrival Yak-Yak Club gets there about an hour before and uses the time to catch up with each other’s past week’s activities., the choir is practicting the same refrain over and over and there is an old time parishoner who thinks it is prefectly ok to interrupt someone saying their pennance after confession with casual conversation. What a disrespectiful circus! It makes one long for the good old, pre-Vatican II days when a cough or sneeze would get you a dirty look from your parents or the nuns for making too much noise.
 
Sacredheart1208 said:
we also have parents reprimanding their children during mass and also people playing on their iphones. No respect…its sad
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On the former, I see no problem whatsoever. Children, especially young boys such as me and my stepbrother were, are apt to get out of hand and sometimes need reminders lest they unintentionally scandalize the mass.

On the latter, try not to judge. I recently went to a parish where they didn’t have missals available, so I pulled out my phone and used Laudate, which, if you are unfamiliar, is a phone app that provides the daily readings (among MANY MANY other things) and was also handy because, as I am ashamed to admit, I still slip up on the new crede translation and prefer to read along. Depending on the time of the mass, I’ll occasionally use my phone to pray the LOTH before mass starts as well, or I’ll use the “common prayers” feature to choose a more specific prayer for before or after mass. I’d like to say that I’d hate to think that people thought I was just playing on my phone, but the truth is that whatever judgement is inappropriately being harboured in mass frankly does not concern me.
Catholic1954 said:
It makes one long for the good old, pre-Vatican II days when a cough or sneeze would get you a dirty look from your parents or the nuns for making too much noise.
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Really? A largely unavoidable physical reaction to dust in the sinuses such as a sneeze earned people social condemnation and retribution?

No thanks, I’m GLAD that THAT particular aspect about the parishoners is dead and gone. It’s one thing to wish that people were more quiet. It’s another thing to ostracize fellow parishoners for having a cold and coughing, or doing the unavoidable and sneezing because Sister “Glares-A-Lot” wore noxious perfume to mass.
 
Catholic1954 said:
The last place I go to pray is my church before Mass. The Early Arrival Yak-Yak Club gets there about an hour before and uses the time to catch up with each other’s past week’s activities., the choir is practicting the same refrain over and over …
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My experience, too :(. And after Mass, too. As soon as the priest is out of the church, the floodgates open and people behave like in the fish market. I now leave as soon as I can after Mass because I can pray better in my car driving home than in the church. Some people seem to grow into the Church, spend their adult life attending it and die without realising that it’s not a social club…
 
I often find those of an older generation who talk away often have hearing problems and are not always aware of the volume at which they communicate. Claiming a place in a pew as one’s own is totally unacceptable.
 
idrum677 said:
This is an account of what I experienced before a Mass last weekend. Sorry about the jump but I’ve already ranted on my blog about it.
Attending a different Mass this weekend, filling in as cantor, I made it a point to go early so to take advantage of the sacrament of confession being offered. There were only about a dozen or so people in the church, mainly of an older generation, so one would think it would be a great time for prayer. One would think…
Continued here…
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Catholics behaving badly. Some “Catholics” actually need to become Christian. This is no better than routine secular behavior. In fact, some of it is worse.
TheOne33 said:
Nope. If this is true, then I’m at shock. Remember the good old days when everybody actually dressed nice for church?
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The first thing some catholics jump to is WHO HAS A SKIRT ON??? That’d solve everything, right? NO!! It has nothing whatsoever to do with clothing. To listen to Catholics like this talk, an outsider would have to draw the conclusion that Christ always wore a 3-piece Brooks Brothers suit. But no. He was dirty and wore sandals. Being Christian is not about what clothing you have on your body. And here’s something really shocking: It never really was about the clothing you had on your body. That was all some sort of cultural rigamarole. People were just told to be quiet & dress up in those days, but being quiet & dressing up doesn’t equal being Christian either. It just equals being quiet & dressing up.
waterbrook said:
I often find those of an older generation who talk away often have hearing problems and are not always aware of the volume at which they communicate. Claiming a place in a pew as one’s own is totally unacceptable.
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Staking out your territory is not appropriate, correct. That is the act of a cat or a dog. Human beings are supposed to socialize and get along. Human beings are capable of aa high degree of moral development. :eek: Who could know sometimes, eh?
 
The last place I go to pray is my church before Mass. The Early Arrival Yak-Yak Club …
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My experience, too :(. And after Mass, too. As soon as the priest is out of the church, the floodgates open and people behave like in the fish market…
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me too …l 😦
I would love to pray before the Blessed Sacrament before Mass, but even when I’m kneeling with my eyes closed, people talk to me - non stop! I pray in the car before Mass, just close my eyes and picture the Tabernacle. After Mass, the same thing.

The pastor knows. He himself has complained of their noise privately to me, but he doesn’t say anything to the people talking (100% of the others arriving early), and he doesn’t address it from the pulpit.
 
Actaeon said:
I recently went to a parish where they didn’t have missals available, so I pulled out my phone and used Laudate, which, if you are unfamiliar, is a phone app that provides the daily readings
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I LOVE Laudate! I won’t use my phone during Mass, but it’s a wonderful app to maintain a good prayer life.
 
CS Lewis in “The Weight of Glory”

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson’s remark that the élan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics.
 
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