Home Forums All Things Catholic Applause after mass Reply To: Applause after mass

#3793
Anonymous
Inactive

My parish doesn’t clap after Mass, but at the youth mass, the hubbub that comes up at the end can get pretty intense. We’re also the clapping, Sign-Language-ing type. I find that it doesn’t distract from my worship, it adds to it–but I was never raised with the idea of church as a Very Solemn Event, so it isn’t for me. With great <i>importance</i>, yes, and sometimes great weight, but not a time for silence. Different strokes for different folks <img decoding=” title=”Wink” /> it works for some of us.

Although in some of my research on social conditions in the Middle Ages, I came across fourteenth-century letters from harried bishops informing abbots that their monks could only recieve the Eucharist once a week because they got so excited (and rowdy) in the process that they disturbed the other worshippers. So I gather a lack of quietude at Mass isn’t a particularly recent phenomenon.