A Penny for the Guy

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Within two weeks of his return from Rome in 1586, Father Robert Garnet had been selected to be the superior of the Jesuit mission in England. For twenty years he persisted: traveling, hiding, celebrating the sacraments, and coordinating the movements of his brother priests. By 1606, however, Garnet stood on a scaffold outside St. Paul’s cathedral. Refusing to recant, he was hanged—executed for his purported role in the treasonous conspiracy called the Gunpowder Plot.

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“Why Go to Mass?”

Sat, 01 Aug 1998 00:00:00 -0400

It wasn’t in my contract, but I really think it should have been.

Because I spend a good part of my day as a theology teacher in a Catholic high school answering one question, endlessly, day after day, year after year: Why go to Mass?

They could at least have warned me. All it would have taken was one little clause: “Employee agrees to dedicate from one-half to three-quarters of her teaching time discussing why sitting in one’s room and thinking vague thoughts about God while watching a tape of Dawson’s Creek is not an adequate alternative for attending Mass.”

And I don’t mind, really I don’t. After eight years of doing this and now dealing with two teenagers living under my very own roof who ask the same question, I’ve got the answers down pat and can dismiss my students at the bell confident that they have at least a hazy sense that maybe going to church next Sunday wouldn’t be a complete waste of their time.

I only wish the Church could give me a little help here. For no matter how hard I try, however eloquent, dynamic, or (at desperate moments) guilt-inducing I may be on Friday afternoon, on Monday morning my arguments have fallen flat and sunk into the muck, idealistic words overwhelmed by a depressingly powerful reality: Sunday Mass at the parish.

There are, I understand from what I read in cheery features in the Catholic press, parishes that are “alive” and “vibrant,” mythic places where the pews are spilling over with youthful joyous faces of the Future of the Church. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re not just making it all up. Because by the time my Catholic high school students in my little part of the world reach me as seniors, if I take a poll on any given Monday, out of a class of twenty, perhaps five have attended Mass the previous weekend.

There are a lot of reasons, much studied by the “experts” in pastoral ministry. Adolescents are marginalized in parishes. Catholic churches don’t put enough resources into youth ministry. Homilies are over their heads. The poor babies feel (gulp) left out. They’re rebelling. They’re busy.

There is something to all of that. But underlying teenagers’ complaints about how they “don’t get anything out of going to Mass” is the same experience that drives adults away in droves—including many friends of mine, most of whom have gone through periods of being very “active” in faith, but now, well out of that emotional, post-conversion, post-Cursillo or whatever high, find themselves barely able to drag themselves to church on Sunday.

The Latin Rite Roman Catholic liturgy as it is offered in most American parishes at the end of the twentieth century is so stunningly, astonishingly trivialized that it is indeed, taken on the surface, a stultifying, uninspiring, and even faith-sapping experience.

This was Easter Sunday Mass at my parish this year. The setting is a beautiful new church—barely a year old. The environment is spare, but flawless. There’s no excuse for anything less than a prayerful, joyous liturgy here, even if it is 7:30 in the morning. The church is packed with the usual Easter crowds along with the normal padding of snowbirds who’ve been here in Florida since after Thanksgiving and will fly back up to Michigan and New Jersey next week.

I have no doubt that even those of us who’ve come out of no more than a sense of obligation and fulfillment of the Easter Duty have brought hearts open and ready to be touched by God. We’ve come with our joys. We carry new babies and stand with people we love. We’re filled with gratitude for health and love and life itself. We’ve carried our sorrows with us here as well. We are alone because of divorce and death. We grieve for children on self-destructive paths. We struggle with alcohol or live with those who do. We watch our own health slip away and death approach. With Jesus, we have confronted death, and we are wondering, hoping—is there resurrection for us too, beyond our sorrows, beyond this darkness?

And we are ready to have someone point to what is in our midst and say, There it is, the peace you yearn for: everlasting Love given to you in what looks to be but mere bread and wine—gift, pure gift, questions answered, wounds healed, loneliness vanished, and death of every sort conquered.

But what is it we hear on this day?

A priest stands up to preach. He reminds us that it is Easter. That Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead. He asks us if we believe in Jesus. Yes, the congregation answers wanly. He asks if we accept him as our personal savior. Yes, we respond a bit more strongly. Do you love him? Yes, again. I wonder if at any moment Tinkerbell is going to rise, revived and twinkling from behind his robes.

It being Easter, we’re now ready to renew our baptismal vows. At the end, the priest thrusts the missalette he has been using as his reference in leading us in the vows high in the air. “This is our faith,” he says, waving the missalette like he’s bidding at an auction. I am struck by the symbolic power of the book in his hands—it is red and flimsy and flops weakly in his grasp. This is our faith . . . we are proud to profess it.

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A Penny for the Guy

“Why Go to Mass?”