KILROY M. writes:

 A commenter at VFR had this to say about the behaviour of people at a solemn ceremony: 

Laura writes:

I have witnessed many instances of clapping in mainstream Catholic churches, typically when a special visitor is on the altar or when the priest or someone else uses the altar to make community announcements. This only occurs when the sacred atmosphere of a church has already been seriously compromised.

Applause is incompatible with awe. It is intolerable, unbearable even, near true sorrow.

                                                                                                                    — Comments —

Mabel Le Beau writes:

I am a member of both a campus congregation and my more ‘sedate’ local parish. I have witnessed clapping at each, never during Mass, but at the end during rather informal occasions when Father is introducing the new class of catechumens, or welcoming a new Bishop as a person, or other less auspicious, but entirely appropriate occasions. I have never witnessed clapping during the Solemnity of Mass. But, the occasion in Tucson was a memorial service, not a funeral Mass. A dead body was not there per se, and her friends and classmates were trying to make memories they’d retain long after the image of her splattered brains. The memorial was also for friends and family of the others deceased, focused on their lives and not the horrific man-made contrivance of how they died.

Perhaps social rules about funerals and wakes are evolving with each situation and the people involved. I was talking with a technician where I work who’d attended a funeral in another Christian denomination, Baptist, I believe, and she was a little shocked about the sense of joviality on the occasion, but someone else remarked that it might have been approved in that setting by the deceased.

The memorial service in Tucson was unlike the occasion of the official State Funeral one might have observed publicly as in TV footage at Gerald Ford’s or Ronald Reagan’s national ceremony, attended by various heads of state; we wouldn’t have seen nor heard clapping as it was an official State Funeral. When my son was in orchestra I observed the foot rumble of approval, and I think the clapping was a variation of common assent in emotion at the violent turnabout of life for the six who’d died so suddenly.

Lydia Sherman writes:

It is because of the ball game mentality. Throngs of people attend games where they clap and cheer loudly. They want to church to be cozy like that, too.

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