The Raft on the Tiber

I know exactly what’s wrong with the Catholic Church. In the interest of full disclosure, I will divulge this secret here, for all the world to know. Hopefully, this will allow us to get to a point of understanding on what Catholicism is or is not.

Here is the secret...

The most common place a Protestant is going to encounter culture shock is at the parish level. You walk into a Catholic Church for the first time, expecting to find heaven on earth, and you sit down. The choir strikes up Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken", a grinning priest shuffles up the aisle after stopping the procession to talk to a teenager he knows. The parishioners yawn. Later, the homily deals with the dicey topic of what a pair of teenage girls thought about a particular “chick flick". You join hands during the Lord’s Prayer, and sing the Great Amen to a tune that would make Joani Mitchell proud. The Eucharistic prayers are rattled off as fast as is humanly possible, the Body and Blood of Christ are raised before the assembly for a hair longer than a tenth of a second, and lay people are left to hand out the Eucharist as the presiding priest takes a seat. The weary parishioners yawn, seemingly oblivious. “This Mass is ended…" is intoned wearily by the shuffling priest a mere 42 minutes after the introduction. You wander out into the bright morning light, stunned, and in your reeling mind is one thought: “my God, this is Catholicism?"

All this has happened to me personally – in a single Mass.

I was going to title this “Of Baseball Caps and Electric Blue Thongs", but figured it wouldn’t fit in the title area of my template. Dressing for Mass. Yes, this is an area of severe culture shock, not just to Protestants looking into a Catholic Church for the first time, but also for Catholics themselves if they come from another country.

Picture this: It was Holy Thursday of this year...

In the comments below, RL asks:

“So here's the question: Granting that my upbringing had some significant lacunae from a Catholic perspective, how would I go about finding a Catholic parish with anything approaching that level of seriousness about studying and applying the Scriptures? The outsider's perspective is that Catholic parishes and Catholics in the main aren't very interested in catechesis, and when they are, they're more interested in what one might call "Catholic distinctives." Or is that perspective hopeless provincial as well as Protestant?”

The short answer is that I don’t have a good answer. Of course, I won’t let that slow me down.