This one is an old one, but a good one.
Conveniently, my roommate, who I shared a room with during my study abroad in Sevilla, is Catholic and was also interested in going to a Spanish Catholic mass.
We chose to go to a Catholic church on the other side of town, and after getting lost because its exact location was on a cobblestone side street and not on the map, we finally arrived. The mass started in 10 minutes, and the church doors were open, so we walked in, expecting to see people already filing into the pews.
Well, we quickly realized that the service hours on the website were wrong. We REALLY knew there was no mass being offered when some random passerby came into the church and yelled at us (that to this day, we still don’t know what about) in very fast Spanish. We assumed he was telling us to get out, so we said we were mistaken and sorry, and quickly headed out the doors.
So, we pulled up the location of another church on our phones. Thank the Lord (no pun intended) because when we arrived, there were already a bunch of people sitting and waiting for mass to begin.
Here comes the comical part: I understand Spanish very well, and Cara and I are both regular Catholics, but we found ourselves barely participating in the responses and side-eyeing each other every few minutes to make sure we were both mutually lost and confused. Other than cognates and common words/phrases, we left that church not knowing what the heck the priest or lectors were saying. We did absorb our beautiful surroundings and just embrace the goodness of being there, though.
Once we got back home, and our host mom asked us how church was, she laughed and told us that she was not surprised we didn’t get much out of it. She said second language learners usually understand a lot more if they go to the children’s masses (LOL, oh cool), but it’s not for the reason you probably think (that second language learners don’t understand enough). Rather, in Sevilla, los sevillanos talk very fast, pronounce the /s/ sound as a /th/ sound and combine/drop the endings of some of their words, making it more difficult for second language learners to understand than trying to understand a madrileño, for example, who doesn’t have the thick, Southern accent of the Andalusia region.
Please enjoy this video of me asking Cara how mass was and her response (and of course, the glistening sweat on our faces because we weren’t allowed to keep the AC on :-) ).