Interruptions in Mass?

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silicasandra said:
He was not Catholic.
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and I guess he didn’t want to become Catholic but this is all for another thread if so desired before we get too embroiled into this one. Sorry to the opening poster for slightly derailing it because this is one of my pet peaves in that instead of training him not to receive communion he could have become Catholic and received communion and the Priest alone will only really be the one who knew whether the guy was Catholic or didn’t want to become Catholic but happy enough to sit in a Catholic church week to week.
 
I was going to edit my post to add some information about this man, but I ran out on time and lost the edit. I would think that it would be obvious that a person who believed he was the bodily reincarnation of Christ should not come forward for Communion. His coming to Mass and behavior at Mass had a lot more to do with being thankful to the priest for finding him a home and something to eat on a regular basis. He had also been forbidden from attending Protestant worship services because of the (much more severe) disturbances he had caused there, such as insisting that all the worshippers would go to Hell unless they followed him - and he still said these things after starting to attend Mass, but not during out of respect for Father.
 
Well, we had a sort of “interruption” of Mass today. The priests got their schedules mixed up and no one showed up for the 9am. :eek: Finally one did and Mass got started, but about 10 min. late.

This has never happened in the 20 odd years I’ve belonged to the parish, that I know of, but I guess it had to sooner or later, with 3 priests and 7 Masses on the weekend. We were just worried that something bad had happened to one of the priests.
 
I can think of quite a few. Once when I was in college, there were votive candles around the tabernacle and some fake greenery as well. The greenery caught fire during the Eucharist and a student who was sitting in the front row noticed it. She got up from her pew, genuflected, ran up the altar, passed the priest, who had paused with his arms outstretched and was still oblivious to what was going on, picked up the burning greenery and dropped it to the floor where she stomped it out, sheepishly walked back down the steps, genuflected again, and knlet down in her pew. The priest sort of coughed and then continued on with the Eucharist as if nothing had happened.

Other Masses I’ve attended have been brought to a stand still by a seizureing altar boy, a stray cat, a tornado, a congregation that started out reciting the Gloria and ended up reciting the Credo, a teenage girl having a fight with her brother and mom, a parishoner passing out and urinating all over the pew, and a situation where not one Eucharistic server was present or willing to come up and hold the Precious Blood.
 
At one Mass the cantor began to sing the Lamb of God at the time for the Sanctus (Holy, Holy) - both are sung to the same tune. The priest had a horrified look on his face before he figured out what happened and continued the Liturgy. After Mass he told me he thought he had a stroke. We laughed for a while.

On vacation to my parents’ house in the Fla Keys, we went to Mass. It must have been a Holy Day/holiday because the exterior of the church was dressed up a little bit more than usual. My wife took our son outside during the homily and saw the wind blow a tiki torch over and into a bush - setting it on fire. My wife ran and got an usher and it was put out without incident. She told us about it after Mass and I jokingly told her it was God trying to communicate with her and she shushed him like she often does me.
 
An ex priest of our parish was a GP before becoming a priest, on several occasions we witnessed him leaving the altar to administer first aid to a collapsed individual at mass.

One one occasion though there was little he could do as the individual in question had infact died from a massive heart attack. It was a very busy mass, and he was a well known (and fit) parishioner in his 50’s, the priest and pass keepers managed to remove him from the pew and took him out of the church, it had happened after communion (during the thanksgiving hymn) and the priest came back in and asked us to leave the church by the side door at the end of mass. I think until that point the congregation simply assumed he had collapsed, at that point we realised he was dead.
 
Two weeks ago, right as the lectors were bowing to our altar after having finished their readings, a young, smiling and giggling, boy of about 3 or 4 ran down the aisle towards the sanctuary up the steps around the altar, he stopped at the font, which is at floor level with a large bowl-like above it with a little waterfall. I expected him to jump in because he was looking down into the water for a few seconds. Then he saw a parent coming down the aisle so he started running back around the altar. The deacon caught the tyke and handed him off to his parents.

This was the same week we had the Gospel reading of Mark 10:2-16 that had the verse:
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f And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them.g
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When Jesus saw this he became indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
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Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child* will not enter it.”h
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Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them.
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Needless to say when our priest got up to give the homily he was chuckling and mentioned how we should be like that young child who came up before the readings.

Was pretty funny. But I bet the parents were pretty embarrassed.
 
This isn’t necessarily an interruption, but a story along the same lines;

When I was 8 or 9 years old, my family attended a small country parish in Indiana. My mom was the regular organist and had gone into labor either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. So there wasn’t time to get a backup to play for the Mass. Well since I played, they decided that I would do the Mass. Here I was, 10:00 and the opening hymm was announced and my music was numbered differently than the missles in the pews. So everyone was on a different song then me and the priest just looked up into the choir loft at me when he heard a different intoduction to what they were supposed to sing. 🤷

During that song I guess I improvised, but caught on for the rest of the Mass. After my mom recovered, I would play a recessional or communion hymm on my own, but I don’t remember being asked to do the Mass alone anymore.:rolleyes:
 
The most disturbing interruption to Mass I’ve witnessed was on 9/11/2011 - the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The city warning sirens went off during communion and everyone ran for the shelter (I live smack in the middle of tornado alley and this was only 4 months after the Joplin tornado, so we were pretty skittish). When we realized the skies were sunny and blue and no chance of a tornado, everyone at the same time remembered it was the 10th anniversary of the world trade center attacks. It scared us to death and we huddled in the basement storage rooms, some people crying, some praying out loud.

Our city leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided to sound the sirens ‘in memorium’ for those who died in the attacks, never thinking to let anyone know beforehand and never dreaming that anyone would think we were under attack.

I’m still mad at the mayor over that one…
 
Cor_ad_Cor said:
I once attended Easter Vigil at the university parish on a Big Ten campus…the same night that university won a national championship basketball game! At the offertory, the noise outside had so overcome the liturgy inside that the pastor just grinned and called a liturgical half-time.

My other favorite was a few years later at the same parish for daily Mass when an elderly, hard of hearing gentleman sat next to me. When Father introduced the day’s Mass, the man turned to me looking confused, then shouted, “What did he say?” It took me about three attempts to reach the proper shouting volume to relay Father’s words, and the rest of Mass followed that same pattern.
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Hmmm… St. Paul’s at IU, Bloomington during the Bobby Knight era? 😉
 
Once, several months ago, the priest was opening his homily by talking about internet news. It went something like, “There’s war in the Middle East, recession at home, record unemployment, a presidential campaign starting up, and what is the top story on the MSN homepage? Justin Bieber broke up with his girlfriend.”

From the back of the room, a very young, grief-stricken, female voice piped up, “I know!!”

It took a few minutes before the priest regained his composure.
 
Well, I have one funny and one serious story.

Funny story:

Oldest son was a toddler at the time, and like most boys in the 2-3yo set, was utterly fascinated by fire trucks. Well, one Sunday, the firetrucks came down the street adjacent to the church and you could hear the windows rattling as they passed and it was momentarily too loud to continue the Mass (not a huge long time, but long enough for three big trucks to pass by). Then one little boy in that 2-3yo set calls out “Truck!” and then another, and then another, and then another. Just when you thought it was over, another one would say it.

Serious story:

I can’t remember why, but we ended up sitting in a completely different area than normal because it was crowded that Sunday (more than usual, but not Easter Sunday crowded). We were sitting behind an elderly couple and the sister of the wife of that couple. All of a sudden, when it was time to stand up for the Creed, the sister keeled over in the pew. I was right there behind her, and I had a pretty good view–the woman was not breathing and looked like she had died right there. Well, oldest son (now the older of two children) started praying for her. Ushers called for an ambulance and also got one of our priests who was not celebrating (we had three priests, and it was customary for the non-celebrating priests to come out when it came time to distribute the Eucharist, so they were close by). The priest came out and anointed her, and she suddenly sprang up. The ambulance came and took her for a more thorough exam. It was later related that her “heart skipped a beat”. Um, yes, I was there … that was about 5 minutes worth of beats that her heart skipped.
 
One Christmas Eve Vigil I thought we were going to be escorted out of the building. Our parish looks rather like a plain white gymnasium, and to decorate the apparent committee we have decided to put up four plans and I think one bow, and it didn’t look much different. In our parish we have a Priest who you would say is “spirited”. Yelling like a Baptist preacher throughout the entire Mass from the beginning to the homily to even the consecration and final blessing, it’s sometimes hard for us not to burst out laughing anyway. But at the end of Mass our “parish life coordinator” (Who is basically a person who is in charge when there is no resident Priest) walked onto the altar and thanked the decorating committee for their wonderful job on decorating it, saying it was “elegant in its simplicity”. That nearly made us laugh, but it wasn’t enough. However, she went on, thanking Father for his wonderful Mass he celebrated, saying it inspired “in all its exuberance”. That was the final straw, and my family as well as our entire pew of friends we had with us busted out laughing very loudly for a few minutes. We hung our heads in shame as we told her to have a merry Christmas and went on our way home.
 
I’ve posed this story on CAF before, but it usually gets a pretty good response. So I’ll post it again. This happened at my childhood parish in northern NY State many years ago, pre Vatican II. I was a young schoolgirl at the time.

Our parish had expanded so much that a larger church had to be built. A temporary structure was built, it was somewhat reminiscent of an extremely large mobile home (but about ten times as large.) It had heating, but no air conditioning, and had vinyl flooring.

Our pastor was from Boston, and had a very nasal voice. Monsignor usually offered the 11 AM Mass, which was the High Mass, meaning, naturally, that it was sung. Or rather, what passed for singing when coming from Monsignor, bless him! The slightly off-key (sharp) loud droning was an assault to the eardrums, and most people avoided going to the 11 AM Mass. Basically, it was full of kids who had gotten assigned to go to Mass with the family envelope (as my sister and I frequently did,) or people who had stayed out a little too late the night before and had slept in late.

One hot summer day, the doors were wide open as Monsignor was droning away. My sister and I heard some clattering on the vinyl floor, and looked toward the back of the church.

A little dog from the neighborhood had wandered in and was processing up the main aisle.

Before the nun sitting behind us could “shush” us, the dog sat down midway up the aisle, threw his head back, and howled!

An usher tried to catch the dog. The dog scampered further up the aisle, sat back down, and howled loudly again, nearly matching Monsignor’s pitch.

By this time everyone in the church, including the altar boys, were at least giggling, if not laughing out loud. Even Monsignor’s mouth was curving upwards at the corners as he continued to sing. And remember, this was back in the day, where most of us were convinced that laughing in church would send us to hell, or at the bare minimum, tack on a couple hundred years to our purgatory sentences!

The dog was finally corralled, and banished outside, and Mass continued. But the following weekend, and every Sunday thereafter, a younger priest with a rich baritone voice offered the 11 AM Mass, and Monsignor took over the spoken 9 AM Low Mass.

Looking back on it, I like to think that the Holy Spirit used that little doggie to deliver a message loud and clear to Monsignor. And I think that Jesus, and all the Saints in Heaven, got a good chuckle that day!
 
ATeutonicKnight said:
One Christmas Eve Vigil I thought we were going to be escorted out of the building. Our parish looks rather like a plain white gymnasium, and to decorate the apparent committee we have decided to put up four plans and I think one bow, and it didn’t look much different. In our parish we have a Priest who you would say is “spirited”. Yelling like a Baptist preacher throughout the entire Mass from the beginning to the homily to even the consecration and final blessing, it’s sometimes hard for us not to burst out laughing anyway. But at the end of Mass our “parish life coordinator” (Who is basically a person who is in charge when there is no resident Priest) walked onto the altar and thanked the decorating committee for their wonderful job on decorating it, saying it was “elegant in its simplicity”. That nearly made us laugh, but it wasn’t enough. However, she went on, thanking Father for his wonderful Mass he celebrated, saying it inspired “in all its exuberance”. That was the final straw, and my family as well as our entire pew of friends we had with us busted out laughing very loudly for a few minutes. We hung our heads in shame as we told her to have a merry Christmas and went on our way home.
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I can relate. My pastor is a big man with a huge voice. Never uses a mike and he isn’t even yelling. He should have been an opera singer, I think.
 
Four stories:
  1. A deer wandered through the open door of a local church during the 6:30 morning Mass several years ago. It hopped over several pews, and with the guidance of several of the people in the congregation, it was able to find its way outside and into the adjacent park.
  2. My parish also experienced the fun of having a Protestant church down the street install the exact same wireless microphone system - on the exact same frequency as ours. We discovered this fact one Sunday during the 10:00 Mass when the priest had just completed his homily and sat down for a moment of silent reflection. Suddenly from the speakers came a voice announcing the opening hymn for the 10:30 service at the Presbyterian Church a block away. (Man, can those those people sing!) 🙂
  3. The Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree Honor Guard walked into church just prior to the opening hymn and took up positions along the center aisle…which inspired a youngster to yell loud enough for everyone to hear, “Look, Mommy! Pirates!”
  4. During my wedding Mass, my brother-in-law set up his video camera in the choir loft and taped the Mass, which included a really funny episode. Two of my sisters and their families were in adjacent pews, one family per pew. At Communion, those who were old enough to receive left the pews, leaving my two nephews, one from each family, alone in their respective pews. They would have both been 7 years old at the time. As soon as they were left alone, one turned around and smacked the other on the head…and a fight broke out. The funny thing was, nobody stepped in to stop it, and as their families got within eyesight of the pew, they simply stopped and acted like nothing had happened.
 
Glennon_P said:
Four stories:
  1. A deer wandered through the open door of a local church during the 6:30 morning Mass several years ago. It hopped over several pews, and with the guidance of several of the people in the congregation, it was able to find its way outside and into the adjacent park.
  2. My parish also experienced the fun of having a Protestant church down the street install the exact same wireless microphone system - on the exact same frequency as ours. We discovered this fact one Sunday during the 10:00 Mass when the priest had just completed his homily and sat down for a moment of silent reflection. Suddenly from the speakers came a voice announcing the opening hymn for the 10:30 service at the Presbyterian Church a block away. (Man, can those those people sing!) 🙂
  3. The Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree Honor Guard walked into church just prior to the opening hymn and took up positions along the center aisle…which inspired a youngster to yell loud enough for everyone to hear, “Look, Mommy! Pirates!”
  4. During my wedding Mass, my brother-in-law set up his video camera in the choir loft and taped the Mass, which included a really funny episode. Two of my sisters and their families were in adjacent pews, one family per pew. At Communion, those who were old enough to receive left the pews, leaving my two nephews, one from each family, alone in their respective pews. They would have both been 7 years old at the time. As soon as they were left alone, one turned around and smacked the other on the head…and a fight broke out. The funny thing was, nobody stepped in to stop it, and as their families got within eyesight of the pew, they simply stopped and acted like nothing had happened.
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Those weren’t really your nephews. They were my grandchildren.😃
 
During my pastors homily one Sunday a child was apparently misbehaving in the pew, his father picked him up and draped him over his sholder and began to make his way to the doors. The child began to scream at the top of his lungs, “NO NO I’LL BE GOOD, I’LL BE GOOD” over and over again all the way out of the church. The pastor who had stopped speaking during all of this, after everyone turned back around to look at him, said, “Well, I guess we have all been there.” That brought down the house. 😃
 
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