Good afternoon Father McDonald,
My name is S. S. and I live in Bel Air,
Maryland. My daughter and I visited your church and attended the
11 am Mass on Sunday, January 21. I wanted to take a moment to let you
know that we enjoyed being in the presence of Jesus, you, and your vibrant and
friendly parishioners ! Your altar servers, acolyte, cantor,
and organist added a beautiful reverence to your Mass. We both thought
that your church is very beautiful. It appears relatively new and I
felt like the architecture was a classic Catholic church style and also modern.
St. Anne Church (the people and the building!) reminded me of the church
where I grew up, The Shrine of the Little Flower, in Baltimore.
Again, my daughter and I are grateful to have found your
parish and enjoyed celebrating mass with you while we traveled !
My comment: The sentence I highlight in blue is so true and exactly how I felt the first time our walked into St. Anne's. I love the blend!
3 comments:
It is nice to hear that your visitors found their experience in your church to be enriching. Your collective efforts are appreciated! True, your church is a blend of the classical as well as the modern, and it works. Are there elements that could be changed, improved etc? Yes and, that's true of any building that evolves over time and requires maintenance. Hopefully, as time progresses, you and your parishioners will begin to add embellishments that perhaps were contemplated but, were not executed given the magnitude and expense of the original construction.
Children's Masses should be abolished (although the "adult" Masses are not much better). The Jews don't coddle their children with such nonsense, they must learn Hebrew to participate. When I was 10, I could chant 5 Latin Ordinaries by heart. Have people grown less capable since the 1960s or is it that the "adults" in charge are condescending and elitist and think Latin is "too hard."
So-called 'children's Masses' are a recent innovation and an anomaly. Apart from anything else, when children 'put away childish things' they include the liturgy in that category.
And yes, what is offered to adults is too often no less childish.
Thirty years ago I was in conversation with an RE teacher who used to organize 'school Masses'. When I asked her whether the children would still attend Mass after they left school, she cheerfully replied 'Of course not!'
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