Gaudete

Ryan wanted to go to church with us again Sunday, but he hated the huggy-kissy liturgy and the bad contemporary Catholic music at St. Matthew's Cathedral last week, so he acquiesced to going with us to St. Stephen's, even though he hates the 1960 period architecture (for a recovering Baptist, Ryan is very opinionated as to Roman Catholic worship). As Ryan doesn't do mornings, he, Laurent, and I went to the 5:30 on Sunday evening.

The 5:30 at St. Stephen's is rather unique. In contrast to the cathedral's dreadful contemporary evening Mass, St. Stephen's does the Mass setting (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, etc.) in Gregorian chant. It's not a Tridentine Mass, alas, and the rest of the liturgy is in English, but at least those portions are sung in Latin. The service is fully cantored, but, thus far, they are doing all the music a capella. That works fine for the chants and traditional hymns, but it's usually a train wreck for more contemporary responsorial songs. They might have better luck if they picked music specifically for the service, instead of trying to do the same Mass with the same songs at every single Sunday Mass.

Anyway, it was Gaudete Sunday, the "joyful" break in the season of Advent, in preparation for the soon-to-come Christmas season. It's one of only two days in the liturgical year when the priests wear pink. The Mass setting was all Latin chant, with the Memorial Acclamation and Great Amen in English to Proulx's Mass for the City (I wish they'd get plainsong for those, too). Hymns were Veni, Veni Emmanuel for the processional, Truro for the offertory, and King of Glory for the recessional. As usual, no one sang the responsorial during communion.

I was proud of Ryan. He was being very charitable Sunday, and took a huge bag of his old clothes and coats (it's not as cold in D.C. as it is in New Hampshire) to contribute to the parish winter clothing drive.

On our way home after church, we were walking down the street when some strange female walking in front of us turned around, interrupted our conversation, and asked Laurent, "What's wrong with you?" I was aghast. Laurent says he's used to it, though. For those of you unaware, Laurent has cerebral palsy, wears leg braces, uses a cane to keep his balance, and has a bit of a struggling gait, yet he gets around fine and sometimes wants to walk faster than me. This isn't the first time I've witnessed this sort of thing happen. We were standing in line at a store cash register one day, and some older woman in the line turned and asked, "What do you have?" Now, when small children do things like that, that's one thing, as they are curious and non-judgmental about everything, but I expect grown women to have better manners.