Okay, first off, I didn’t take any pictures of the interior of the church. I have put up photos I have taken of church interiors while traveling before, but whenever I am in a place that is a certified tourist spot, the sort where regulars might have a distracting problem of people taking pictures during worship services all the time, I don’t want to add to it. So here’s a photo of the handout with a variety of hymn lyrics.
We went at 11 am to the church building physically closest to our apartment, not the picturesque basilica at the top of the hill.
Based on the bulletin and the website, it seems that all the Catholic churches in town plus some from a neighboring town are encompassed by one parish called Notre Dame des Rencontres.
The church in the neighborhood—if I walk by later on the way to the store I’ll take an exterior shot—was a good deal smaller but roomy and with a fairly full house. There was a kind of fine net suspended about 9-10 feet high above the heads of us pewsitters, obscuring the ceiling; as it already had caught a few small chunks of ceiling material (plaster, I am guessing) we surmise that is its purpose. The pews were wooden movable benches without kneelers and our 11yo had to be cautioned not to accidentally scoot ours around by, e.g., flopping into the pew too hard at sitting time.
The stained glass windows illustrated parables and events in the life of Christ and were bright and almost new-looking, with short explanatory panels (e.g., Christ the shepherd finding the lost sheep was labeled something like Jésus cherche le pecheur).
On that morning they had a baptism, of a wiggly (I guess) 9-10-month old baby named Lya. Something I hadn’t seen before: the introductory par of the baptismal rite took place outside the church on the steps, so everyone in the pews waiting for the start of Mass turned around and looked back out the front door as les parents and la marraine et le parrain stated their readiness.
Then they were welcomed across the threshold of the parish church and the procession began. I liked it, it sort of made the fact that the rite has us kind of do this twice make more physical sense.
More observations: casual summertime dress on everyone, including the baptismal party, dad and godfather looking fairly dashing in sunglasses while standing outside on the steps. It’s hot here and brightly sunny, and numerous people in the only slightly cooler church fanned themselves with folding fans—not bulletins, they came prepared.
I kept up okay with the mass parts thanks to a worship aid that has the responses and Credo and things in French, and with the readings thanks to iBreviary’s French-language option on my phone. But I am afraid I couldn’t catch the homily at all, a combination of sitting too far back to really watch the speakers’ lips and reverb from the microphone, plis of course the speed of ordinary speech. The most I could grasp was context: now he’s talking about the first reading, now he’s talking about the Gospel.
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About that Gospel. In the English translation we hear at Mass Jesus says:
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
And in the French translation that French people hear:
« Si quelqu’un vient à moi
sans me préférer à son père, sa mère, sa femme,
ses enfants, ses frères et sœurs,
et même à sa propre vie,
il ne peut pas être mon disciple. »
That is: “If someone comes to me without preferring me to his father, his mother, his wife, his children, his brothers and sisters, and even to his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
Now, we’ve all heard exegesis that essentially says that what we hear in our English Gospel doesn’t actually mean “hate” and it really means “must be ready to choose Jesus over those other attachments” or whatever, no? It would be absurd if “hate” really meant “hate” here the way modern English speakers use the term so the strong language must be for emphasis, etc.? Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that French Mass-goers have that already built in.
(This has been one of your humble blogger’s tangents on the topic of Catholic English Speakers Get A Different Gospel And It Might Be King James’s Fault.)
(Brought to you by the same folks who brought you: “What Does ‘The Meek’ Really Mean, I Mean Really? And Why Is It les débonnaires in French?”)
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Anyway, I was sorry I could not really follow the homily, especially because the priest made several apparently funny jokes. But I had pretty windows to look at and a handful of bulletins and worship aids to examine.
Oh one more interesting thing. They had the usual thing where if people aren’t receiving communion for whatever reason, they come up with their arms crossed to receive a blessing. I saw this about three people ahead of me in the other communion line, and the person dropped to a knee on the hard floor for the blessing and then the priest blessed her by making the sign of the cross and them touching the base of the ciborium to the top of her head. Like he set it on her head for a second. I’ve never seen that one before.
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Simon was hot and hungry when Mass got out—the baptism made it long—so we stopped at the grocery store on the way back for a snack. Then lunch in the apartment, then I returned to the grocery store for real shopping for dinner. No local specialties or counsel about wine pairings, since all the little shops, fruiterers and wines and fish markets, are closed on Sunday. But times have changed and the big grocery store chains will sell me potatoes and Spanish lemons and Barents Sea vacuum-packed fish filets and fat Peruvian blueberries just like the ones we buy at home.
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