Dai Li - Church Visit #1

Church Name: St. Michael Catholic Church

Church Address:  310 S Wheaton Ave, Wheaton, IL 60187

Date Attended: Divine Mercy Sunday(4 April 2016)

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

I went to Bethel Presbyterian Church for a year and a half before converting to Catholicism, so I will here compare these two churches. Bethel Presbyterian, inheriting an iconoclastic ethos, keeps religious decorations to a bare minimum. There were no statutes, paintings nor robes for the pastors. St. Michael, on the other hand, has the statues of Mary, Joseph, and a Saint whose name I forgot; in addition, the church was decorated by stained glasses and the stations of the Cross paintings. In the service itself, St. Michael engages many forms of “call and response”: the priest calls and the people respond with a prayer or a song; the priest prays, and the people responded with a prayer as well. There are a dozen prayers and tunes I have to master to better engage the service. In contrast, external interactions between the pastors and the people are very rare.

What aspects of Roman Catholic theology did you notice expressed in the service?

While the mass is saturated with theology, here I only mention a couple that have caught my attention during my visit: First, Catholics believe the priest acts “in persona Christi” or in the person of Christ; this is shown by the priest’s eucharistic prayer. Quoting the Scripture, the priest transforms from the third person to the first person, from “At the time he was betrayed and entered willingly into his passion…” to: “Take this all of you and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.” The shift signals that the Jesus, in the eucharistic prayer, himself is present and speaks to us through the priest. Second, Catholics believe that the angels, the saints (especially Mary) and even regular believers have an intercessory role between us and God. This is evident in the Confiteor, a confessional prayer that includes the following lines: “therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels, and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.”

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

First, the liturgy of the Word in the mass helps me appreciate intra-scriptural connections. Today the readings focus on “divine mercy”. The different passages for me really bring home the idea that God is eternally merciful: he was merciful in the past to both the Israelites and the early church, he is merciful to us at the present by sending us the Holy Spirit, and, as described by Apostle John’s mystical vision, he will be merciful to in heaven. In contrast, Bethel Presbyterian often focuses on only one passage of the scripture. Second, the mass uses the physical through its numeral visual, auditory, olfactory aids; I believe this organization illustrates the point that the body ought to be seen as something that needs to be celebrated and utilized as an instrument for a better spiritual instruction.