…The jubilant music, clapping, shouting and swaying — more commonly affiliated with a service at a Baptist church — are a regular part of St. George’s worship service.
“Our black folks find it difficult to go to white parishes because they’re laid back. Here we try to touch our African roots,” said Martin Amissah, musical director at the Arbor Hill church and brother of the pastor, the Rev. Kofi Ntsiful-Amissah…
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I don’t know what to think of this. It’s good that the parishioners here are still Catholic – so many people who long for a livelier service end up going to Baptist or Pentacostal churches. Perhaps there’s something to be said for Pansy’s view that the Tridentine Mass sidesteps all these vexed questions of style. We’d go to the local indult chapel more often if only the people there didn’t turn around to stare when I make the responses, if Father wouldn’t mumble into his sleeve, and if they didn’t expect me to wear an old lace curtain on my head. I don’t, and the way they look at me you’d think I’d left off my blouse instead of the chapel veil. The literature rack creeps me out, too: way too much Michael Davies and not enough John Paul II. There really is no such thing as a perfect parish – the most sensible thing to do is to find one where the eccentricities don’t distract one too much from the holy sacrifice of the Mass, and to cultivate an attitude of detachment toward the things and people that irritate you.
There really is no such thing as a perfect parish – the most sensible thing to do is to find one where the eccentricities don’t distract one too much from the holy sacrifice of the Mass, and to cultivate an attitude of detachment toward the things and people that irritate you.
This is true, there is not perfect parish because there are no perfect people, and all people have different preferences.
Really though in a place where formation is so bad, eccentricities reign over the Sacraments. That is my personal problem. It is not just ethnic ones, that is one example. It is polictical ones (feminism, Catholics for Hilary, Catholics for Choice), generational ones (Jesus Sun of God parish for Young Adults) etc etc…
I like Mass in Latin and plenty of Gregorian chant for the same reason: it takes the focus off the temporal fads and puts it on the traditional and the eternal.
I wonder if the leftist wackiness of these dioceses (Richmond, Albany) is what drives some indult communities into extremes in the other direction. For example, if the parishoners Elinor describes didn’t feel so marginalized, perhaps they’d be more open to the writings of John Paul 2, the reforms of the Tridentine Missal that called for the laity making the responses, and the reality that Canon Law no longer mandates women’s headcoverings in church.