Sunday Liturgy Observation

Observation of a Sunday Liturgy On Sunday, November 9 at 10:00am, I went to a Sunday Eucharistic Liturgy at Canadian Martyrs Catholic Church on Main Street. This is the parish that I go to on a weekly basis and at this mass I usually sing in the choir. This particular liturgy was different because there were two baptisms and it was the feast day of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica. The majority of the parishioners in this parish are older. There is a mix of elderly people as well as young families. To be honest, I am one of the youngest members of the community; there are often very few other university or high school students present. However, this means that there is an abundance of children at this parish. This is nice because these children give some life to the liturgies and parish events. On this day in particular there was a few difficulties that I felt needed to be addressed. The most noticeable for me was that our piano player was missing. This caused problems because we had to find a replacement piano player in a limited amount of time. We only found a pianist 15 minutes before mass started, which made practising difficult. It wasn’t much of a problem because some of the songs we

The closing song was “City of God”. Along with this song we had the children participate in percussion. With the addition of percussion, I found that many more of the adults participated in the song. Also, even if they were not singing, I saw that a lot of the adults stayed until the end of the song, rather than leaving early. Although some had to wait because their children were in the percussion, many of the adults who stayed did not. The song was inviting enough (with the addition of the children) to make people want to stay until the end. Evidently, the addition of a more approachable songs were needed to get the congregation to