Let us now hear it for quiet time at mass. Shhhh. There. That’s better. No “big mouth” priest with mike attached, whose every syllable reverberates, to use worship expert Thomas Day’s expression, or major-league baritone giving us both barrels in a so-called leading but actual dominating of song. Instead, peace and quiet, so we can somehow, sometimes, actually experience God in church or at least give it a try.

It’s not this way at most Catholic masses. Instead there is handholding and handshaking, talking to each other even at the moment of receiving communion, various commotions from The Man Up Front who looks back at us and (I swear!) Knows What We Are Thinking.

From years of churchgoing, I have learned never to look at anyone who wants to engage my attention during mass, because the response, the engagement, the recognizing of another interferes with what I am there for – somehow to make contact with God, to feel his presence, to commune with him and let his presence shine back on me so as to shake, disturb, console, remind me of eternal verities, by definition the only ones that count in the long run.

It’s a matter of trying to find the experience of God where we usually find all the peace and quiet of a picnic or school board meeting. Once there was such peace and quiet. But then came the revolution, in the wake of which we Catholics have largely shifted from interior life to social awareness. There is little talk of direct relationship with God. It's with each other, in whom we are to find God and what the poet Henry Vaughan called the "deep but dazzling darkness" within him.

Your garden-variety mass has become the last place to initiate this search. There is another place, which for obvious reasons I hesitate to mention – your neighborhood illegal Latin mass congregation. In Oak Park it’s in an ex-Presbyterian church converted by hammer, nail, and saw, where reverence is palpable, as opposed to the too often happy-go-lucky mainstream Catholic service, starring priest as Jay Leno, full of smiles because we're HAPPY to be alive! This one is all business. People come to pray, not to meet and greet except after mass, when there is plenty of that.

I find myself drawn there every few months in spite of its Presbyterian background, which has required the shoe-horning of kneelers between pews and resultant kneeling as exercise in back control. I go for the overall seriousness of the operation, the assurance that I will never be asked to get social when I’m trying to pray. That’s what I find too often missing in Catholic worship.

So does Thomas Day, church music expert and author mentioned above, who speaks of "severe forms of agitation" he has suffered at mass. Day, author of Where Have you gone, Michelangelo? The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture, notes that in the beginning there were Latin masses. Vatican 2 had not forbade them but had permitted vernacular. When some remaining Latin masses outdrew the others in enough places, pastors complained about unfair competition, and Latin mass had to go.

With them went a formality – considered stilted in some quarters – which guarantees a certain limit on improvisation. In its place we have what Day calls "the liturgical equivalent of McDonald's.” A musician, he focuses on music meant to "act as stimulant . . . of the tent-revival variety” unless "contemporary" Catholic "hits” are available.

Old-country keening becomes funeral-service crooning. At Christmas mass we are implored by a chanteuse to help her ask God to give rest to merry gentlemen. A pianist bangs the ivories in excellent honky-tonk fashion. In each case attention is directed to the performer up front. If you look closely, you can see the gospel-choir leader munching something between sets.

These performers have competition from the celebrant, however. Day cites "glorification of the priest's throne . .. the royal seat,” in marked contrast with how it used to be, when priest and people faced in the same direction. Not priest with back to people, he says, but a triangle with priest at wedge point. People were once led forward by the priest. Now the priest is outside the triangle, which points at him. He’s a performer too.

Chicago’s Catholic New World columnist Dolores Madlener found it "comfortable to have the celebrant's back to [her]," she wrote after attending a (legal) old-style Latin mass on Chicago's South Side. "He was doing his and our thing at the altar, and the whole church was heading in the same direction." As she knelt for communion, old style, she experienced an "overwhelming sense of church.”

Funny. Those two factors – priest facing people and people standing for communion – were supposed to do just that for us.

The priest-as-performer issue was foreseen. Turn the priest around and you ask more than most can deliver, said my opponent in an early ‘50s debate at a Jesuit seminary, implying a widespread skills deficit. They will just have to learn how to do it, I responded, with youthful assurance brushing off the problem. I was right, and in varying degrees it has happened. The liturgical presider has become a showman, aider and abettor of our mass-time chatter.

On receiving communion, for instance, we exchange words, often with friendly glances and name-giving by the distributor – at a moment of peak communion with the Almighty. So much for sacred time and space, when you count on being left alone. We are expected to hold hands at the Our Father, at risk of violating true brotherhood and sisterhood. And the handclasp of peace, yes!

It comes just when we may have managed to get meditative and may be looking forward to communion, when we can commune with the Almighty. Forget it. Pow, it’s time to meet and greet, press the flesh to your right, your left, to the fore, to the aft. And some of those folks squeeze hard and look you in the eye, as if closing a sale.

Handclasping got out of hand, as we know, and the Vatican said cool it. That was a waste of ukase. No diminution of the practice has occurred in my limited experience. Indeed, I have seen a full-court press of running all over church at handclasp time, when the mass becomes Sunday-go-to-meetin’ with a vengeance. Some go out of their way to howdy up, leaping across aisles, seeking whom they may devour with gushing kindness.

It’s like seeing someone reading in a library and slapping him on the back and asking, “How the heck are you?” But this is in church! And it happens to one who did not come to scoff and stayed to pray but one who came to pray in the first place, arriving with good will toward God and fellow creatures here below, some of whom ignore body language – head down, looking straight ahead – which broadly hints that another is not in the game.

To pray or not to pray, that is the question. Or is it? Maybe instead it’s participation. Or “diversity” or creating “a hunger to return” to a given church, as urged by one mainstream parish consulting group.

Or getting people to leave mass saying, "Wow, I want to come back!" as urged by a California parish whose "greeters" learn how to greet worshipers with the help of an instructional video.

No wonder mass is usually the nicest Kiwanis or Rotary club meeting you will ever attend, or anyhow the nicest prayer breakfast.

Maybe also the most enthusiastic. The California parish’s Gay and Lesbian Outreach asks on its web site, in upper case, “ARE YOU FABULOUS?” and promises to “channel your fabulousness into tasks necessary to keep this Ministry alive and running.” Kiwanis and Rotary, take note.