The Wonderful and the Wlatsome

A Community-Created Listing of the Best and Worst of America's Catholic Parishes

This blog is a place for readers like YOU to help everyone out by donating entries to an online archive of descriptions of Catholic Parishes with which you have experience, so that your fellow Catholics will have a way -- when travelling, moving, or vacationing -- to find a good, solid, and orthodox parish.

Wlatsome is a grand middle-english word that means disgusting or highly unpleasant. I believe that its an excellent descriptor for much of the liturgical garbage that goes on today.

All Submissions Will Remain Anonymous!!

Donate your parish descriptions here!!!
(follow this template.)
(or send email to mcw28 -at- cornell.edu)

Disclaimer: Per St. Thomas Aquinas: Since, however, one's conscience should be preferred to a good name, Our Lord wished that we should publicly denounce our brother and so deliver his conscience from sin, even though he should forfeit his good name. Therefore it is evident that the precept requires a secret admonition to precede public denunciation.
So, please, talk with your pastor / bishop about abuses before sharing them here! Better to correct them than merely to complain. Furthermore, comments will be most helpful if they restrict themselves to indisputable, objective matters -- the existence and enumeration of liturgical abuses, for instance, and a simple discription (i.e., reformed-folk, traditional, Chant, Jazz..) of the musical style rather than focusing on personal tastes and opinions. Submissions will be edited for content and tone.

Archives
08/01/2003 - 09/01/2003
09/01/2003 - 10/01/2003
10/01/2003 - 11/01/2003
11/01/2003 - 12/01/2003
06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004

Sunday, August 31, 2003

Name of Parish:St. James the Apostle
Location: Trumansburg, NY
Date and Time:5 PM Saturday Vigil Mass, 8/30/03

The Wonderful: The Pastor, a Capuchin named Fr. Eugene, is solidly orthodox and gives solid, thoughtful homilies without any nonsense. The music is traditional, if simple (two hymns, plus an offertory Organ piece) and generally the people are participative. The congregation is reasonably pious in attitude, and the Mass is said quite reverently -- it's also the only rubrically accurate Mass said within a 30 mile radius.

The Wlatsome: The organist is somewhat inexperienced, sometimes killing congregational singing though errors. The people have a tendency to dress down quite severely -- you see lots of t-shirts, tight blouses, and shorts at this Mass, during the warm months. There's a lot of talking in the Church immediately after Mass.
- posted by Ambrosius @ 1:13 PM --

Submission Template

Name of Parish: St. Anonymous the Vague
Location: Anytown, ST
Date and Time: 11 PM Sunday Mass, Month / Day / Year

The Wonderful: (here follows your enumeration of what's great about this parish -- is the music heavenly? Are the homilies brilliant? The marble sparkling? Put all that here)

The Wlatsome: (here, you tell us why we might want to avoid this parish. Are the homilies heterodox? The choir a former inquisitorial torture instrument? The liturgy ad-libbed beyond all recognition? Let us know here)
- posted by Ambrosius @ 12:53 PM --

Welcome to the blog for all of us!

I have for some time pondered the possibility of building a website to complement www.masstimes.org, which is a great resource, but which does not distinguish Our Lady of the Spirit of Vatican II from St. Stanislas the Stern. I take as my rough model The Mystery Worshipper, an ecumenical effort of similar style. I had a couple of abortive attempts to design such a page, attempts that failed chiefly because I didn't know then how to reach enough Catholics to get a decent-sized database formed; now, thanks to you blog readers, reaching such an audience is now a snap!

I chose the name of the blog to make for easy browsing; wlatsome is a sufficiently obscure word that searching on, say, st. james AND wlatsome should turn up only hits from this site. I also really like that word.

This is very much a work in progress, by design -- so in addition to describing your parishes, please send in advice, suggestions, and offers of help freely.

Now, start contributing!
- posted by Ambrosius @ 12:48 PM --