Experiencing Catholic Mass

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Experiencing Catholic Mass The experience that I have chosen to write about is my recent visit to my boyfriend’s Catholic Church Service, which is called Mass, the people who attend are called parishioners and they refer to the church as a parish. St. Patrick Catholic Church is located in downtown Memphis, TN and is a Catholic church that believes in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I am a Baptist Christian, so this was quite a different experience from the church services that I am used to attending. With this paper, I will provide the details of my experience at a Catholic church, discuss my preconceived notions and explain how my notions were affected by group influence, describe the reactions of individuals to my presence and the effect these reactions had on my behavior and how the experience affected me. The Experience As I walked into St. Patrick Catholic Church with my boyfriend’s family on Sunday morning I realized right away that I was in a church very different from my own. The church itself was much larger than my own and had very beautiful stained glass windows. The service began with all the parishioners seated but then they stood and started singing as a precession of people came in and Father Tim, the priest, was the last to walk in the procession to the Alter. I did not know most of the songs throughout the service, so I just stood while my boyfriend and his family sang. My boyfriend is African American and I am Caucasian, so I assumed the Catholic Church he attended would be primarily African American, so I was a little nervous about how people would perceive me and my boyfriend. However, as they were all singing I looked around the congregation and noticed that at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church there were a number of different people that varied across many different cultures and there we other interracial couples as well, which is very

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