What Will It Take to Encourage a Return to Mass?

I'm writing this essay on Thursday, July 1, the day on which the Archdiocese of St. Louis, where I serve as a Catholic priest, restores our Sunday obligation to attend Mass. This means that, in a few days, we'll have weekend Masses with the obligation restored. I, for one, am thrilled. Others, not so much. The complaints are numerous. I won't belabor them because you pretty much know their substance and have already made up your mind if they're valid or not. The real questions on my mind are Who is actually going to return to Mass? Everyone?

The Archdiocese of Saint Louis has been publicizing the return of the obligation with a series of encouraging videos and social media posts. One of the videos is from the OSV Institute for Catholic Innovation, a talk by Dan Cellucci titled, "What If They Don't Come Back?"

The talk starts out with some serious truth-telling. “Do you think they're coming back?” Celucci asks, “I don't.”

Although it sounds cynical, the insight is probably, on the whole, accurate. To date, my experience is that the segment of our parish that I would describe as sacramentalized but non-catechized haven't been returning. These are the ones who attended a few times per month or less, always made a point of having baptisms, weddings, and funerals in the parish, but never got much involved beyond that. Their Catholicism, while good-hearted, lacked depth, meaning that their church attendance was rooted in habitual behavior and inculturation. At least, far more so than in any deeply rooted, theological concept of religious duty, mortal sin, etc. Once the habit of church attendance is broken, it's gone.

The Church in the United States, with all her naive assumptions about evangelization in the early, heady, technological days of the new millennium, can no longer maintain the illusion. Do you think they're coming back? They've already been disappearing for years and years and years now. The question is existential.

Ask the question again, “Why aren't they coming back?”

Ask it out loud and reflect.

The answer isn't programmatic. We can't scapegoat a flaw in advertising, as if a few billboards by the highway and a social media campaign will fix it. It isn't a lack of relevance to pop culture. Many parishes have tried that, updating their music to popular forms, trying to be trendy in different ways. It doesn't work. I also don't think it has anything to do with technology – better websites, livestreams, apps.

Here's what we don't want to admit. The exodus was already happening in slow motion for decades and decades. The pandemic was an excuse but the disaster was already well underway. Disengagement was already a catastrophe.

This past year, I have definitely noticed attendance issues in my parish, and some parishioners are undoubtedly gone forever. On the flip side, however, large new families have taken the empty space in the pews and, at this point, our attendance is strong and back on the trajectory we had been on a few years ago – adding Masses, lots of children, lots of positive energy. One of our Masses in particular is better attended than ever.

I'm not particularly good at preaching (introvert problems). I'm not clever at advertising the parish. I'm not good at planning and executing slick programs and big events. I'm not a strong personality who draws people in with personal charisma. I'm just a priest like any other priest. The parish, though, is thriving.

So here's an interrogative with a different, more positive context – Why?

This is an important question to sort out as we ask ourselves what will motivate lost sheep to return to the flock. For me, at least, these questions became pressing long ago as I realized that church attendance and Catholic engagement in the parish was an ongoing disaster. I'd already confronted these questions of decline before that with the even more extreme collapse of the Anglican Communion, in which I was a pastor before entering full communion with the Catholic Church. Attending to this question years ago is why this past year my parish hasn't noticed much difference in attendance other than a temporary blip. I was treating the situation as an emergency well before the pandemic. We made changes a long time ago.

The changes, I am told, were risky. We began using incense at Mass. We formed a schola to plainchant. We introduced a smattering of Latin. We brought in beautiful vestments. A brand new Mass in the Extraordinary Form was created and offered on our regular schedule. We started a parish school of religion for the children and taught them about virtues and saints and how to participate in Mass. We taught them devotions like Stations of the Cross and how to keep silence before the Lord in Adoration. We started a summer camp for kids to learn to chant extremely difficult Mass parts.

No videos and advertising campaigns. No planning committees and expensive programs. No sneaky shortcuts. We simply decided to be unabashedly, unashamedly Catholic. It was always important to me that the experiment take place on a positive basis, by which I mean that we weren't recovering a museum piece from the past for the sake of conservatism or because we disliked the modern Church. It has nothing to do with what we didn't like or had rejected. It was all about love. We were recovering the living beauty of the Church as it had developed all the way through the Second Vatican Council, seeking authenticity and humbling ourselves to be tutored by the generous and faithful teachings of the Church.

Acting like Catholics, believe it or not, initially caused a minor stir in the parish. This, I suppose, is why it was a risky experiment. It's easier to continue on in maintenance mode offering uninspiring-but-familiar Masses and quick-fix programmatic efforts that proceed by the logic of the lowest common denominator. No changes. No risks. This, of course, results in mediocrity, low engagement, and lack of commitment. It's an aesthetic of the minimum, which is no aesthetic at all.

The Rorate Caeli at Epiphany

Catholicism is about greatness. In every way. It's about the greatness of the arts, the saints, the human soul, culture, family, and most of all, the greatness and majesty of God. Catholicism doesn't settle. It risks everything for God.

When I ask myself the question of who is going to come back and what I might do about it, I don't focus on trying to perfect my sales pitch for why they should return. All I can do is humble myself before the greatness of the Church and do my small part to reveal a glimpse of the beauty I've seen.

Charles Peguy talks about the importance of making tradition alive again, making it human. It's impossible to do so by turning to the past. The world is changed. We are changed. Attempts to return to a golden age - which never existed, anyways - are immediately rendered anachronistic. But here's the catch. In the Church, the dead are still alive. The dead are still gathered around our altars worshiping with us. They hear us. They care about us. They are wise, gentle, and kind. Yes, the Church always moves forward, but we move forward together.

The past, in one way of speaking is dead and gone, but in another, far more fundamentally important reality, it is very much with us. The Church is alive. She has a bright future.

What is that future? It is the authentic beauty of the Church, in her doctrine, the lives of her saints, and her liturgical life. Beauty is a revelation of divine love. Love, of course, is the very principle of life, the way in which friendships and families and, dare I say it, parish families take risks together to thrive and grow and march on together towards the fullness that is our inheritance.