What I Did on Sunday

Around October of 1998, somebody in my parish decided that, before every Sunday Mass, we should introduce ourselves by name to someone we didn't know. Since I am hopelessly shy, I simply could not bring myself to do this, so I decided to attend Sunday Mass elsewhere until they got tired of it. They haven't tired of it yet, sad to say. I've been attending a different parish each week, and I have found it to be a very enlightening experience. I am learning quite a bit about the great diversity that can be found in the Catholic Church today.

I offer special thanks at this time to a gentleman named Kevin Koster, who was a member of the Catholic Online forum in the late 1990's. I actually swiped the idea for this series from his brief "Oh, Give Me a Home" series of the summer of 1998. I've just continued it and embellished it somewhat. Of course, for several years in the 1980's, I also went to a different barber shop each time I needed a haircut, so the concept was not totally unknown to me. In addition, I used to travel to different places with my father to visit horse race tracks and have been to more than my share of those. Now, the same concept is applied to Catholic parishes around my diocese and in neighboring dioceses.

I offer one important tip for the reader: I take God very seriously. I take the Church very seriously. I take the Mass and the sacraments very seriously. I take myself not at all seriously. Consider your tour guide on this journey as comic relief.

"Actually, the entire series should be captured and recorded as a rare, first-person snapshot of real-life Catholic worship in the US at century's end. It is exactly the sort of historical observation that is most ephemeral and yet most revealing. And, for inveterate 'church-hoppers' like me, it's also endlessly fascinating (although sometimes morbidly so-- I admire your courage more than that of a restaurant critic, sir!)."

Note: Many of the terms used in this series may be unfamiliar to the casual reader. An excellent glossary of liturgical and other Catholic terms has been provided by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; you may want to read through it first or refer to it whenever a new term appears. This glossary has been revised and the one glaring error I found was corrected: the term "extraordinary ministers" is now used instead of the incorrect "special ministers." See Redemptionis sacramentum. Hooray!

No article was written in italicized weeks. As is evident from the numbering of the topmost article, even though I stopped writing for a while, I have continued to attend Sunday Mass at a different parish each week for the past seven years. I've been waiting for them to stop the silliness at my own parish, but, sad to say, as of January 2006, they haven't stopped yet, so I'll just keep chugging away. We just got a new pastor, though, so maybe there's hope. Oh, yes-- if you're a single Catholic lady and you find this fascinating, I'm still available, which sometimes seems like one of the greatest scandals in the Catholic Church today.

Second Wind

First Shot