Tim Walters- Church Visit 1

Church name: St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church
Church address: 36 North Ellsworth Street, Naperville, IL 60540
Date attended: February 10th, 2015

Church Category: Liturgical

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

In my time at Wheaton, I have mostly been involved in churches which would be considered "low" in their liturgical style.  Therefore, I figured it would be illuminating to visit not only a high church, but a Catholic church.  However, the Mass was quite different than any service I've been to in recent years (the closest in style would be that of a Church of the Resurrection service).  When I walked in to the chapel (the service was being held in the chapel because of renovations in the main building), the entire room was silent.  This is quite different than any of my normal services.  In those, people are chatting, laughing, and discussing things before the service, instead of silently entering the chapel and sitting quietly.  Also, it was quite different because the main crux of the service was not the service, but the Eucharist.  The sermon, in fact, was maybe 3 minutes at max.  This was actually the most different aspect of it for me; I usually have a 30-35 minute sermon in the service.  These were some of the major differences between the churches.

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

There are two aspects of the service that I found most interesting or appealing were the reverence the parishioners had for the service and the liturgy.  First, as I mentioned earlier, all the parishioners entered the chapel in silence and sat in quiet mediation prior to the service.  While it is not something I am used to seeing, I appreciated the reverence they had for what was about to come.  While I have grown up in a church which fosters a social component prior to the service, I also wish that people would come to more properly understand the posture one should have when approaching the church and the Scriptures.  Secondly, the liturgy, while I was confused by it, also slightly made me feel connected to generations of Christians who had repeated some of the same phrases (whether in latin or the vernacular).  To put it in a different manner, the liturgy helped me to feel more fully a member of the communion of saints; it helped me feel more connected to the invisible church.

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

While the liturgy made me feel connected to generations of believers, it was not also particularly friendly to one who had not been inculcated in the culture.  Since it was a weekday service, the structure did not seem to be as explicitly delineated as it would be if it was a Sunday mass.  The lack of knowledge of the proper responses to the calls left me feeling as if I had stepped into a foreign country where I new a few words of the language, but did not truly understand the language or the culture.  I did understand some of the calls and responses, and was able to participate, but on the whole this was not true.  Therefore, if I had to put the response more clearly, the most disorienting and challenging aspect of the service was cultural; I was not used to being in a highly liturgical church which relied so heavily on church tradition.  That being said, I have also mentioned things I found positive about the experience.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

While this may sound harsh, the thing I found most illuminating was a deeper understanding of some of the controversial ecumenical issues that exist between Protestants and Catholics.  I had a basic understanding of Catholic doctrine because of studying Thomistic thought and others speaking on the issues, but I had never experienced a service for myself.  I had never actually experienced a group of parishioners praying to Mary for salvation and for atonement.  I had never actually witnessed a group of people partaking in a transubstantiation-based Eucharist.  The experiences I gained now help me to understand some of the reasons why Protestants and Catholics have their divides.  I do not agree with a lot of the theology (especially the soteriology) of Catholicism, but I now have a deeper appreciation for the practices and beliefs they hold.  Therefore, the service helped to more accurately orient me to the actual issues pertaining to the distinctions between groups.