Wow, twice in a week where PopeWatch agrees with the Pope:
On Wednesday, Pope Francis called out the common habit of chatting with people around you before Mass, stressing that this is a time for silent prayer, when we prepare our hearts for an encounter with the Lord.
“When we go to Mass, maybe we arrive five minutes before, and we start to chit-chat with those in front of us,” the Pope said Nov. 15. However, “it is not a moment for chit-chat.”
“It is a moment of silence for preparing ourselves for dialogue, a time for the heart to collect itself in order to prepare for the encounter with Jesus,” he said, adding that “silence is so important.”
Go here to read the rest. Silence is usually golden, but at Mass it is priceless
Good Popery. As the Greeks said to St. Paul, “We would like to hear more of this.”
At our parish, silence is the norm before Mass. But after? Hold the ear drums. Prayer is very nearly impossible.
If people really and truly believed that the Lord God Almighty of the Universe is present (body and blood, soul and divinity) at the Holy Eucharist – He who is our Creator and Final Judge – and that we would actually eat His flesh and drink His blood, then we should fall prostrate in abject fear and trembling at being in the presence of the King Most High. How can there NOT be silent worship at the great awe of being in the Holy Presence of Him Who was before the Big Bang started this 13.73 billion year old, 40 billion light year diameter universe? This is the Creator Who from one unified force made gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. He constructed the fabric of space-time as the firmament of the heavens. He caused quarks to become neutrons and protons, atoms to form from nucleons and electrons. He compressed vast inter-galactic areas of hydrogen gas to start the first stars to undergo nuclear fusion and light up an expanse that dwarfs the imagination. He then gathered the stars together into huge islands called galaxies and stretched them far and wide throughout the cosmos. And after some 9 billion years of this He sparked life onto a small and insignificant rocky little planet with a thin N2 / O2 atmosphere circling a minor yellow dwarf star out on a sparsely populated arm of an unimportant galaxy. And He caused that life to produce all manner of living things (both plant and animal), finally creating a sentient being made in His own image and likeness out of the dust of the ground that He made from the exploded remnants of the first super novae. But most amazing of all, He humbled Himself to come as a child of one of these creatures of star ash, and to die an ignominious and horrible death so that He might save them from their sinful folly.
If we really believed that, then we should get on our knees and say what St. Peter did, “Behold, Lord, I am a sinful man.” There is NO excuse to be doing lips and jaw exercises at Holy Mass.
LQC: Yes. The Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the tabernacle is Who is important. And since all men, every person ever created is in Jesus Christ’s Sacred Heart, if we truly love our neighbor, we must acknowledge our neighbor in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.
This is one of the reasons I prefer to arrive at Mass right on time.
I have seen whenever a pastor of a parish firmly, but politely and gently, admonishes people to refrain unnecessary chatter inside the church, it stops. Hence, the fault lies more with the clergy than the congregation on that.