In a recent post, the famous blogger, Fr. Z, commented on the importance of silence in church. HERE

What is it like in your parish church before and after Mass?  Is it still, recollected, decorous?  It is agitated, busy, undignified?  Is it silent?  Is it noisy?

Can we separate our identity as Catholics from our decorum in our churches?

His Eminence Robert Card. Sarah discusses the role of silence in an interview. HERE

Saint John Paul II warns us: a human being enters into participation in the divine presence “above all by letting himself be educated in an adoring silence, because at the summit of the knowledge and experience of God there is His absolute transcendence.”

Sacred silence is the good of the faithful, and the clerics must not deprive them of it!

Silence is the cloth from which our liturgies ought to be cut out. Nothing in them should interrupt the silent atmosphere that is their natural climate.

Another blogger, Fr. Ray Blake, comments on silence HERE. Enjoy this excerpt:

Why do attacks on the Church always begin with attacks on contemplatives? It was the Carthusians the French masonic government first attacked in 1903, just as bloody Henry had begun his English Reformation with the martyrdom of St John Houghton and his Carthusian companions.

The silent Church is always a greater threat than the chattering Church. The chattering Church is easily manipulated, it depends on its own resources, its own wisdom and insights, it is receptive to novelties and eager for change. The silent Church is close to Christ, it contemplates the essential mysteries of the faith, it is in the World but not of it, it depends not on its own resources but the Power of God. It is united to an unbroken Tradition.

[…]

Patricia Snow addresses how church architecture provides silence:

For centuries, the Catholic Church has been a place of prayer and recollection, deep reading and peaceful communion. It has been a place of limited social interaction, where the mind can wander and the nerves relax; a quiet place, far from the noise and incessant demands of the world. It has been a place where the poor have had access to certain luxury goods of the rich: great art and music, spaciousness and silence. If the rich have always taken expensive, unplugged vacations in remote, unspoiled places, in our churches the poor, too, have had a place of retreat from the world. The church’s thick walls and subdued lighting, her “precisely-paced” liturgies and the narrowing sight lines of her nave, drawing the eye to the altar and the tabernacle behind it-everything in the church is designed to ward off distractions and render man “still and listening.” Everything is there to draw him into the Church’s maternal embrace, so she can fill him with God.

– “Look at Me” First Things, 263 (May 2016), 23-30, here 28.

 

And, for another point of view, here is what the devil thinks of silence (according to CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters).