Church Review: St. Mary, Mother of God

The evening after the rally I thought I might spend out on the town, but I soon realized that the downtown was still a madhouse (even though the rally ended at 3), that I was far too tired, and that it was cold - fall has finally arrived, more than a month after it arrives in the North, but it gets cold at night now!  Nevertheless, I walked up to Chinatown with K & R because they had to deliver a coat to a visiting mutual of ours who had left it at their apartment.  I figured I might as well go to church while I was out and then sleep late the next morning (this morning), but I wasn't sure when we would get to Chinatown from our base in Waterfront, since the Mall was such a madhouse.  So I made a sort of wager with myself - if we made it by 5:00, I would go to Mass at a new church, St. Mary Mother of God.  If we didn't make it, I would go to the 5:30 at St. Patrick.

If you have two brain cells to rub together, you've probably figured out (from the title of this post) that we made it up in time for the 5:00 Mass.  Ergo, another church review:

St. Mary, Mother of God
727 5th St. NW
Website 

St. Mary, Mother of God, is nestled in a nook carved out of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which takes up the rest of the city block (not kidding - check it on the map).  It is a relatively short walk - a trifle shorter than it takes to get to St. Patrick, since it's just as far north but not as far west.  I don't have a good time estimate since I started out from K & R's and had to dodge rallygoers (and the Burning Man Dragon), but I suspect that on a normal day, coming from my apartment, I could walk to St. Mary in about 35-40 minutes.  A 4 for location.

It is an unassuming church from the outside, rather standard-issue Gothic revival, although the stone is luscious.  Its most prominent feature is its tower:

Imagine for a moment that you're in England.  This tower would fit quite nicely (at least in the England I carry around in my mind - I don't know about yours).  But even so, nice as this tower is, it doesn't hint much about what's inside.  Perhaps similar gothic-revival architecture - lots of bare stone, pointed arches, and so on?

Well, inside is a church which escaped the renovations of the post-Vatican II era (which so unhappily emasculated St. Dominic) almost entirely unscathed.  From the moment I entered the vestibule and saw the worn swinging wooden doors, painted which with wavering glass in the windows, I knew something was going to be different.  And it is - St. Mary, Mother of God appears not only to have escaped Vatican II, but time itself.

If you were to remove the [rather unobstrusive] sound system, ignore the vent in the wall for the HVAC, and turned off the electric lights, this might well be the original church (I don't know about the padded kneelers, though).  The floor is tile, but the pews stand on a wooden platform a few inches above aisle-level, much like the old churches I've seen in historically-preserved places like Colonial Williamsburg.  The wood of the platforms is smooth, polished by the shoes of long-dead parishioners.

The windows are tall and narrow, and their subtle patterns make them feel delicate, almost as though they were made out of paper, or spun sugar.  Spindly yellow marbles columns rise up to support the vaulted ceiling, painted heavily in blue (the color traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary) and maroon, the panels broken up by creamy plasterwork that reminds me more of cake icing than anything else, or by golden medallions, and festooned with patterns and wispy golden tracery.

On either side of the altar, which would be perfectly comfortable in a pre-Vatican II church, marble angels gaze adoringly upwards towards the stained glass windows in the apse which proclaim "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei."  Beneath Mary's feet is the altar itself, golden door of the tabernacle shimmering, flanked by golden candlesticks and the flags of the United States and the Vatican.  To call it a feast for the eyes is insufficient, but will have to do.  An uncontested 5 for Aesthetics.

Nothing distracts you from all this beauty, because the church is silent.  Although located on the edge of Chinatown, outside noises barely penetrate, and the sparse attendance of this Mass (Saturday, before dinner) generated little noise inside.  So much silence can be a bit intimidating (especially when one is foreign to a particular church and feels a bit like an interloper), but I expected the somewhat disconcerting silence to be broken soon enough by an organ prelude or something, but nothing came.  The 5:00 Mass is supposed to have a cantor, but none ever presented him- or herself.  In fact, this Mass had no music whatsoever!  I can hardly give a 0/5 for Music if there wasn't any, so I'll just have to leave it out of the score.  Intriguingly, I noticed that I felt much less engaged simply speaking the Mass parts rather than singing them.  Perhaps music is more than simply a nice bonus...

The priest was a plump elder man of East Asian descent (most likely Chinese, since this is the church that does a Cantonese Mass every week, and I'd be willing to bet, going from his accent, that this is the priest who says it).  He had broken his knee a few days earlier and so moved very little, but it seems to have affected his preaching as well, for between his languidness, his accent, and a few fits of temper on the part of the sound system, I understood only portions of what he said, and have forgotten it entirely.  3 for Liturgy, since I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Summary
Location:  4
Aesthetics: 5
Music: -
Liturgy: 3
12/15 (4) or 12/20 (3)

If we remove the Music category entirely, St. Mary, Mother of God gets a 4; with Music in (and scored 0), a 3.  Obviously, I'll have to return at some later date to do further research, take more pictures, and see (hear) what the music's like.  But aesthetically, this is one for the record books.