Today I worshiped at Saint Matthew Catholic Church in Charlotte. This is my third Catholic Mass in this spiritual pivot and I have attended a total of five Masses in my life. If the Catholic Church had a mega-church phenomenon, this place would be the center of it. It is a gigantic place. I took many pictures to help show the scale.
I believe this is one of the largest Catholic Churches in the world. These pictures include multiple churches and chapels, an outdoor columbarium, a forest chapel, stations of the cross in the woods, a lake with a fountain, a day care and school, as well as flamingos (Breast Cancer Awareness?):
I wandered the grounds. It was vast, filled with so many things to look at. Really an impressive place.
There were people taking communion outside in a distanced fashion. Additionally, people were giving confession on the sidewalk, one-on-one with a Priest.
After wandering around for a half hour, I joined the Mass inside. Thischurch that can seat thousands of people. More than 10,000 families are part of the Saint Matthews parish. Plus, the place has six Priests!
Here are some pictures and a video:
I am not familiar with the process of going through a Catholic Mass and I am at peace with that. I will say that it does make for a slightly less meaningful church experience if you aren't sure of the ceremonial decorum in a highly ceremonial place. But, there was one thing that was deeply touching during today's Mass. A couple renewed their wedding vows on their 50th anniversary.
Very moving, congrats to the couple.
The homily (sermon) was given by a Priest from the greater Boston area, a fellow Yankee transplant. I enjoyed his accent, as well as his stories about a retired Priest from around Boston who had made an impression on him - "Father Joe." His homily about Father Joe reiterated the importance of community.
I don't recall that the sermon was especially interesting in a theological sense. Or even that the ideas themselves were terribly engaging, although it was delivered well and very clearly.
Ok. Community...
Catholic Community.
The world over.
While Saint Matthew's is a church dominate by the white and affluent parishioners who live in that part of the city, there were also people from elsewhere.
As I walked around Saint Matthew's campus, I heard multiple languages. Being reasonably proficient in languages, I can often tell what language I am hearing. I heard Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese and (I believe) Albanian today. I also heard accented English from the Caribbean, which makes me think I heard Trinidadian English (most Christian Trinnies are Catholic).
As I sat through the Mass, my mind wandered as I thought of the Catholic faithful that appeared to be from other lands.
I saw an older woman coming in with a Vietnamese family, her hand held by her grandson. As a young woman, had she dodged the pain of war in her land to be able to pray at a Catholic Church in the Vietnamese countryside? I pictured her as a young woman walking barefoot through the Vietnamese monsoon to her local Catholic Church. Would attending Mass perhaps have been a seditious act for her at the time? Christianity had been brought into her Buddhist country by French colonialists, something that the Viet Cong viciously resented.
I saw Albanians near my age. This is a country split between Ottoman-era Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. I recalled that Mother Teresa was Albanian. During the Cold War, that country was one of the most repressive and secretive in the world, virtually a North Korea of the West. How had the light of faith shone through the oppression of the Iron Curtain to sustain these people? Were there secretive Masses held in the dark, by candlelight? I pictured people quietly talking in hushed tones to build an illegal faith community in the atheistic dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Such was the grim reality of life in Albania during the 1960s and 1970s.
I heard Tagalog and saw a Filipino family walk into the Mass. The Philippine islands are so deeply Catholic that there are still people who submit their bodies to physical crucifixion during Holy Week every year. This land has also felt the pain of an Islamist insurgency in Mindanao, where Catholics need to fight the Abu Sayyaf movement to survive the attempted imposition of one more outpost of the global khalifa. Had the older members of the family seen these crucifixions? Had they fled the Islamist insurgency?
And on and on, I pondered who these particular Catholics were that ended up in the affluent and comfortable setting of Saint Matthew Catholic Church. While most of my conjecture qualified as daydreaming, I could surmise a little bit based on using age and language. I made reasonable approximations of what they might have experienced and seen and lived through.
I took a fair amount of literary license, to be sure.
Still... who knows which of my pondering might have been accurate?
It made me immeasurably happy that I could share space with these people from around the world. I am most happy when I am the foreigner in a land that is not my own. Conversely, I love meeting people from elsewhere, people who departed from their homeland in search of a better life in America.
The word Catholic comes from the Greek word καθολικός (katholikos), which translates to "universal." I enjoyed pondering that cross-national nature of the Catholic Church today.
