Through a glass, really, really darkly

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zippy2006

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Haha, well, I do have downtime. Especially when I pick stupid hours for trains and end up stuck in the station for hours with nothing to do but wait. Like right now. ^_^ And I like the whole pseudo-backpacking trip, but it gets exhausting really quickly. I say I'll never do it again, and then I always change my mind and have to remember why I said I'd never do it again in the first place. One more city in Italy, where at least I have a friend I can let take charge, assuming she hasn't gallivanted off for the day, and then it's on to Greece. (Where I only speak about 20 words of Greek, so we'll see how well that works out. You're supposed to be able to get by in English in these countries, but that doesn't always work out.)

Ha, yeah, I know what you mean. I have a cousin who just spent a few weeks traveling in Europe and she was exhausted by the end. If I travel abroad I usually have a steady home base to return to, even if I would spend a few days or a week elsewhere.

My Italian is not great. I can handle the grammar because it's similar to French, and I can muddle my way through a conversation, but whenever I tend to automatically switch to Spanish whenever I'm surprised. ^_^

It's actually an effective tactic! :)

I would not be able to tell if someone were speaking a different dialect, though--I don't have anywhere near the listening comprehension skills for that. That's odd about ecclesial Italian, though. Do curial officials not come from all over Italy? I wouldn't expect them to have their very own special dialect. But Italy is a bit weird linguistically, so who knows.

Nah, I wouldn't call it a dialect. They come from all over the world so it's more a version of Italian that has been dumbed down by practical necessity, lol.

Re: French Catholicism, I honestly am not sure what was going on. I had sat down before the service began, and some woman approached me and asked me in bullet fast French if I wanted to... something... with the Eucharist. I assume it was bringing up the gifts or something along those lines, but she realized I wasn't French and moved on. I got the impression that she was asking me to do something ritualistic, but I didn't know enough about Catholic ritual to have the context to figure out what she was talking about. It was a very deer in headlights moment, haha.

Oh okay, gotcha. That sounds innocent enough. It seems we're more apt to talk past each other when it comes to ritual than philosophy and theology, which is completely backwards from what I'm used to. :smile:

I only went to two services in France... that one in a more traditional looking church, and then a more modernist thing. I remember at least one of them having a very Social Gospel feel--not in a bad way, but the sermon was definitely about topical issues like unemployment. I have trouble figuring out where different churches are on the spectrum, though, since I don't have much context to go by. (Amusingly, we stumbled across what looked like an Evangelical service last night... doors wide open, hands held high, music blasting, even though the church itself was as typically Italian as any. Unless charismatic Catholicism looks like that too?)

Hmm, I'm not exactly sure what charismatic Catholicism looks like, especially in Italy. In my neck of the woods it's on that spectrum but not as intense as what you are describing.

I actually think the Episcopal services are closer to Orthodox ones than to Catholic ones, in substance if not form. The liturgy looks more Catholic, but the prayers themselves and the way the ceremony is ordered seems to be ripped out of Orthodoxy. At least there's a number of similarities I've noticed between both liturgies, but perhaps American Catholicism matches up to them more than European Catholicism seemed to.

Well now I'm curious. I met an Episcopalian a few days ago and she said just the opposite, but I think her context is different from yours. Ashamedly I'm not altogether familiar with Episcopalianism. How is the ordering of the ceremony like Orthodoxy? And is there a particular Orthodox Church you have in mind?

...Okay, so I scrubbed through this video of an Episcopalian liturgy and it is identical to a Catholic Mass. It is more traditional than what you would usually get, but you could find a Catholic Mass that is literally identical to that. Most Catholic cathedrals would have something like that. The other side of the coin is that there are vast similarities between Catholic and Orthodox liturgies, especially to someone who isn't overly familiar with either. But I've probably only been to a half-dozen Orthodox liturgies in various rites so I wouldn't be great at making unilateral comparisons. Etiologically High Anglicanism is just traditional Catholicism, and the traditional Catholicism inevitably mediated Orthodox elements since Catholics and Orthodox have a common root. Modern Catholicism may look slightly different from Episcopalianism but I think if you went to Mass in the old form (now called the Extraordinary Form) you would see a much more direct ancestor of Anglicanism (albeit in Latin rather than English).
 
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mnorian

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