How Catholic a church is tends to be inversely proportional to its name; for example, my parish is not really called Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety but instead has a name so generic that people are always thinking it's a Lutheran church. However, upon entering it you would see a tabernacle in the middle of the reredos, numerous candles burning for the souls of the departed, lots of statues of Mary and other saints, people praying the rosary, and sometimes even the old Tridentine Mass. Downstairs there is a Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration chapel, or PEA. (They are always looking for someone to PEA in the 3:00 am time slot, if you aren't busy. I personally am sleeping at that time and cannot take a PEA in the middle of the night.)
On the other hand, in my town there is a church with one of those names like Our Holy Mother, Queen of Penitents, or QOP for short. (Pronounced "kwopp.") It is a typical ugly suburban parish that has - I'm not making this up - a blueprint in the "gathering area" with each area labeled. So instead of a narthex, a nave, a sanctuary, etc., it has a gathering space and a worship space. The tabernacle is relegated to a little chapel off the gathering space. Yes, Jesus has been sent to his room! The music is hideous and the theology is generic feel-good nonsense. I once taught Catechism at QOP, where I took no prisoners (see my post on Catechism Captive), and more than once I thought, "Why would anybody be this religion, the way they teach it here?" Jesus was just some nice guy who wandered around healing people. Eventually I gave up on the textbook and just taught the basics: you know, the Trinity, Original Sin, the Passion and Resurrection, little things like that. I have used this parish as a benchmark to measure all other bad parishes against, so we will discuss the level of Qopitude in a given parish. Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety has almost no Qopitude, though there are certainly those trying to change that!
Because of its odd setup (being round, having carpeted pews, etc.), QOP has lousy acoustics, as opposed to the wonderful acoustics at OLPS. Once I sang there with the Lutherans in a joint Catholic/Lutheran service, and we could barely hear each other so it was difficult to stick together. (Because QOP has no choir loft, we were sitting in the pews on one end of the arena-shaped worship space.) Years ago, an acquaintance of mine died at a tragically young age, and they brought in a bagpiper for his funeral at OLPS. We wondered how that would work out, since the acoustics there are so good, and bagpipes are built to be heard five miles away, but it turned out to be wonderful, and very moving. So that got me thinking... if you had bagpipes in QOP, would you be able to hear them, or would the building's squishy acoustics manage to suck five miles' worth of sound away to a barely audible whisper? Maybe you'd have to mic the bagpipes! I've always wondered who would take this smackdown, but so far as I know, it has never occurred.
Famous Hat
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