Reed Bartley - Church Visit 2

Church name: Holy Angels Roman Catholic Church

Church address: 180 South Russell Ave, Aurora, IL 60506

Date attended: March 20th, 2016 

Church category: Tridentine Mass

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

To begin with, when walking into the church service we were given a palm branch which the priest made sure to make clear had been blessed ahead of time. After passing the holy water, we sat down at a pew in the back of the sanctuary. At this point, the facts that the palm branch had been blessed and that there was holy water were already different than my regular context. The sanctuary had beautiful stained glass windows all around and the Eucharist was front and center. Everyone was seated until the priest entered the sanctuary and began to read in latin while facing away from the congregation. We listened to him and read along in the bulletin that was handed out, and the members of the congregation would occasionally respond with a couple of words before the priest would continue reading. There were also times when the entire congregation fell on their knees and continued to listen to the priest as he prayed. The priest then gave his homily. After this the pattern of the priest reading in latin continued until there was a long period of silence when the priest consecrated the Eucharist and would turn and show the elements to the congregation. After this the congregation partook of the Eucharist. The entire worship service was very different than what I was used to, even apart from the latin. There was no sung worship and the congregation had basically no participation in the service outside of the Eucharist. The priest faced away from the congregation for most of the time and the people mostly sat in silence. 

How did the worship service illuminate for you the history and contours of global Christianity?

The service really helped me to see why the vatican would have changed the latin requirement of the service because it was really impossible to know what was going on. Beyond this, it helped me to realize how important the protestant reformation was in that it it really is significant when you consider that Jesus is the great high priest and there is not an authority needed on earth for people to commune with God through. This plays a huge role in a person's experience of God and how they are able to know him and his love. It is also really enlightening to see how people worshipped for over a thousand years, since my modern evangelical worship service seems so alien to what I saw at the Holy Angels Roman Catholic Church.

How did the worship service illuminate for you your personal identity as a Christian?

The service really helped me to greater understand the significance of what it means that I am a Protestant and that I get to commune with God personally through prayer and worship and I don't need a priest to forgive my sins and serve as a proxy. It also helped to illuminate how much I take my worship style for granted in my identity as a Christian, in that I seem to assume that sung praise in a modern American way is pretty fundamental to the way I experience God at times, particularly during a worship service. This is particularly striking when I realize that I take communion also, yet for me it seems almost parallel in importance to praise and worship, when for Roman Catholics the eucharist is the primary way in which they experience God's presence and grace.