I was talking yesterday to a (Catholic) friend of mine in Europe yesterday. She tells me that a “big” sermon has 15-20 people in it. I didn’t even know what to say...

I don’t know what your experience was like, but growing up, my (Catholic) services always included singing. By the congregation even...

Man, you want uneven singing, you should have been at my wedding. English (English don't sing) Catholic (Catholics don't sing) me getting hitched to Welsh (Welsh sing) Protestant (Protestants sing) husband. And one of the hymns he chose was in Welsh. Listening to my side of the church trying to stumble through Y'chryw'drr yn llaf Chwgmwm Ffloffeoel or something like that must have made him wonder what he was getting into.

Andrew, that's interesting. Have you had experience with Protestant churches you can compare with? And was your church mostly of some particlular ethnic group? Knowing your real name I assume you are of Italian extraction...

Natalie, that's funny. I think here the problem is mostly because American Catholicism is so heavily Irish, and instinctively does the opposite of the hymn-singing English Protestants. American Protestants all SING!

And I gather that with Vatican II came encouragement to add music and hymns to services, but our Catholics were not about to just go to the Protestants and ask how it's done! And since that era was a musical nadir they seem to have ended up with some execrable stuff, embarrassing folk-musicy slop that makes me cringe...

I was raised Baptist, and Charlene was Catholic, and so we compromised with Episcopal (Anglican). Which turned out to be REALLY building our house upon the sand! So we are a bit up in the air...

When I was growing up, I thought it strange that people though Catholics didn't sing. And then I went to a different church.

Turns out that when I go visit a church and sing from the congregation, I'll be singing into a pool of silence. Doesn't faze me; I'm an attention-hog. Then I'll get comments on how nice my voice is. But I figure it's a group thing; people don't like to stand out. They only feel okay singing if everybody's singing and it's a self-reinforcing cycle.

It doesn't help that a lot of churches have choirs that pick performance music instead of congregation music. (The choir I'm currently in has that fault.) Most people can't follow along if they don't have the music or have never heard it before.

What really gets me is even in the congregations that sing, it's like pulling teeth to get people in the choir. The choir I'm currently in has most of its members from its initial forming, 25 years ago... aside from one guy from the Ivory Coast, I'm the youngest by a good thirty years. There have been public requests to get people to join but nobody comes... yet I can look out during Mass and see a sizeable number singing along. It's getting critical, especially since we have no strong sopranos and only middling tenors. A choir should not be dominated by the altos and basses!