There is a difference in how Protestant (let’s include Mormonism in that for the sake of argument) and Catholics interact during services, especially evangelicals. Evangelicals get together over coffee donuts, bagels before services to chit chat, find out how each other’s week went. In my experience, attending Mass is far more contemplative and personal than a social thing. Catholics come maybe fifteen or ten minutes, say hello to friends, then find a pew and pray and read the missalette for the day, maybe glance at the weekly bulletin. When Mass is over, it’s pretty much out the door, no coffee and donuts or bagels and hanging around for half an hour chatting. I’ve experienced both types of things, having attended a “non-denominational” evangelical church for more than 20 yrs, while at the same time attending Mass. It was easier to develop local friendships with the evangelical milieu than the Catholic. Sad but true.
On the other hand, Catholics have a firmer grasp of dogmatic ideals, if not the minutiae, where Protestants, even reading the scripture, struggle to understand meaning and application. It isn’t laid out for a Protestant how to act here or there unless they can quote the scriptures, and often most Protestants don’t have a clue what scripture says and how to apply it. The language differential is a major problem–the King James (Authorzed) Version (KJV) is almost a foreign language–hard to translate for a person uneducated in how language works and progresses. What does “thou” mean, never mind “Hast”?
Catholics don’t depend on their own reading, they can’t, they would have the same problem. The Church’s teaching authority lays out scripture and readings at services in a far better, much more concentrated form in the pulpit than Protestants. They take a section of scripture and make up their own little argument for what it means, going back and forth between this part, that part, this quote, that quote, to make up a story and moral. Catholics have a self-contained section of scripture from Old Testament and New Testament, which for the most part brings forth the basic teaching as the Church has relied on it for ages, a fully independent guide to morals and action into which dogma is placed in context. It isn’t up to me, as a Catholic, to draw my own conclusions about what the reading says, I simply have to live up to it, make it morally and socially relevant in my life and live the life that the Church, through the call of Jesus Christ, calls me to live as vocation, or at least spiritually since not all have been called to vocation, either religious or secular.
We’ve had several visits before and I guess our son is on the lookout.