Europe in These Times - Alone In the Gray City

Stuttgart, Germany, 02 October 2021

I am walking by myself through downtown Stuttgart, the clouds of the city’s seemingly ever-gray sky blunting the last of the day’s sunlight. It’s just past seven and the Saturday night Mass at the St. Maria Kirche has concluded. It is a church that is dark inside and out, old brown stone covered by a wood ceiling, the windows set high, with deeply-colored stained glass panes that admit few rays of what little light can be found outdoors. But what gives the plain church its distinct feel are the installed interior lights, hanging down by a thin cord or rod some twenty or thirty feet from the ceiling above, spaced out and with a single bulb each, creating an effect in which there is only visibility in the fifteen or so lowest feet of the space. Everything above, all of the space extending up to the ceiling, remains unlit. The resulting sense of isolation is magnified by the necessary COVID precautions that have been taken: with the pews removed and the floor covered in unfinished plywood, the parishioners sit in single chairs, spaced six feet apart. COVID, too, has dis-incentivized social interaction, and so when mass concludes, we step away from our sequestered chairs and stride silently from the gloom of the interior to the gloom of the exterior.

This is the only English-language Mass in the city proper, attracting the three-dozen or so non-German-speaking residents that have no other option for their weekly Communion. It is a diverse group; judging by accents and passing bits of conversation, we are from Pakistan and Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands, India and Indonesia. Of the two ladies who lead the singing, one is Filipina and the other English. A priest who presides occasionally is also unmistakably English, while the one who does so most often is West African (by his own description, although he has not specified which country). I suspect that I am at times, but certainly not always, the only American at the Mass.

As I walk through downtown I am thinking that this is the first time in my life that the regular Mass I attend is, in no uncertain terms, a Mass for foreigners. I’ve known of and attended services in multiple languages, and I’m certainly aware of Masses held especially for given immigrant communities. But I wonder about the prevalence of catch-all Masses like the one I now regularly attend, designed not for a community with a common background, but rather for all those who simply don’t fit in. I’ve lived in Boston, where at St. Leonard of Port Maurice in the North End, the main Sunday Mass is still offered in Italian; but (as those familiar with the North End would well know) that Mass exists because it caters to the interests of longtime residents. The same was true for the Spanish-language Masses at my church in Miami. While living in Panama, I simply attended Mass in the Spanish, as there were no English services to be found in my city. It is only here, in Germany, that I have ever known of or had to attend a service designed not for a specific community, but simply for outsiders like me.

It is not at all a sad thought, despite the dimness of the setting and the lack of interaction amongst the parishioners. We, the English-speakers of Stuttgart, are indeed all foreigners—the priest, the singers, the lectors, me and every other parishioner in our little chairs dutifully spaced six feet apart. But there are motivations that brought us, and continue to bring us, here, even if the pandemic keeps us isolated from, and strangers to, each other. Just as we each made a choice to come to this place from some other corner of the world, we each make a weekly choice to be here in the same place, masks on and socially distant in the near-dark. There is indeed a tinge of loneliness in that setting, albeit one that produces gratitude rather than sadness—for there I find, in a quiet and dim church, in a cold and gray city, in the midst of a global pandemic, a consolation that I imagine has sustained many throughout millennia, that must indeed sustain my fellow parishioners each week: the Mass goes on.