Yesterday, I attended a Catholic mass.
I am not considering becoming Catholic (it doesn’t take attending a mass to convince me that Catholicism is not for me). I went because I wanted to experience a mass in St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna’s city center.
Several of my friends here are Catholic, including my friend and bunkmate Scott. When the idea of attending mass on Sunday was brought up in conversation, I was initially turned off. However, the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became. A Catholic mass in a cathedral in Vienna. It occurred to me that it did not necessarily have to be a religious experience—at least not in the way it was meant to be.
One thing about Catholicism that interests me is its diminutive nature. Catholicism to me is basically one big self-imposed guilt trip. You are taught to feel small and inconsequential. God is all-powerful, God knows all the answers; man is fallible by his intrinsic nature, and responsible for the death of God’s only son. Why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to such degradation and humiliation is quite beyond me. When you enter St. Stephan’s, whether you’re sightseeing or attending mass, the message is quite clear. Walking humbly down the nave, flanked by soaring columns and arches, one feels quite small. It is also dark.
The mass is a fine-tuned ritual, having been performed thousands of times by hundreds of different priests over the past nine centuries. Much sitting, then standing, then sitting, then kneeling, then standing, then sitting. There was something to be said about sitting through mass in a church that perhaps Mozart or Beethoven had once attended. And the art—if there is one redeeming quality of Catholicism and organized religion in general, it is that it has contributed incalculably to the art world. However, in the end, mass is still mass, and I walked out feeling small and relieved to see sunlight again.
I am not considering becoming Catholic (it doesn’t take attending a mass to convince me that Catholicism is not for me). I went because I wanted to experience a mass in St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna’s city center.
Several of my friends here are Catholic, including my friend and bunkmate Scott. When the idea of attending mass on Sunday was brought up in conversation, I was initially turned off. However, the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became. A Catholic mass in a cathedral in Vienna. It occurred to me that it did not necessarily have to be a religious experience—at least not in the way it was meant to be.
One thing about Catholicism that interests me is its diminutive nature. Catholicism to me is basically one big self-imposed guilt trip. You are taught to feel small and inconsequential. God is all-powerful, God knows all the answers; man is fallible by his intrinsic nature, and responsible for the death of God’s only son. Why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to such degradation and humiliation is quite beyond me. When you enter St. Stephan’s, whether you’re sightseeing or attending mass, the message is quite clear. Walking humbly down the nave, flanked by soaring columns and arches, one feels quite small. It is also dark.
The mass is a fine-tuned ritual, having been performed thousands of times by hundreds of different priests over the past nine centuries. Much sitting, then standing, then sitting, then kneeling, then standing, then sitting. There was something to be said about sitting through mass in a church that perhaps Mozart or Beethoven had once attended. And the art—if there is one redeeming quality of Catholicism and organized religion in general, it is that it has contributed incalculably to the art world. However, in the end, mass is still mass, and I walked out feeling small and relieved to see sunlight again.
Comments
And then of course, there's the awe-inspiring cathedrals. (Which can be linked back to the politics...)
Anyway, really enjoying your journal. You're experience right now certainly beats the craptastic office I'm hanging out in these days.