A Faith Like Honey

On parish switching, liturgical living, and helping children become disciples

Hi. I’m Emily. Welcome to my Substack, where I write about Jesus, the Catholic Church, and the life of faith. I’ve been writing about the faith as my job for 20 years now. Now, while I’m raising my babies (ages 4, 2, and 2), I write here. What you’re about to read is normally behind a paywall, but this week, as I celebrate my 48th birthday, I’m unlocking some of my favorite essays to share with everyone. I would love it if you joined me here. For the cost of one fancy cup of coffee a month, you’ll receive monthly essays like this one (in print and in audio form), as well as my weekly free newsletters, which are packed with reflections on Church documents and practical catechesis. If you love this essay, but $6 a month isn’t in your budget, then please join me as a free subscriber and consider sharing this post on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter (or just emailing it to some friends). And if nothing else, say a prayer for me—for sleep, for energy, for patience, and for my heart. God bless you for being here.

A year ago, my family joined a new parish, a gorgeous downtown church, filled with young people and families. The Ordinary Form Mass there is beautiful, reverent, and holy. We have a schola that chants the responses in Latin. Our pastor is a gifted and faithful preacher, who offers the Mass ad orientam (facing the altar, not the people). And we receive Holy Communion kneeling at our beautifully intact communion rails. We have incense, statues, and candles galore, but also a coffee shop in the basement that employs the intellectually disabled. Our parish likewise runs a soup kitchen that feeds the homeless and hungry twice daily and recently opened a home to help women escaping prostitution and other abusive situations.

It is a dream parish in almost every way. Even my critical spirit can’t find anything lacking. But the decision to join it was not easy. It meant leaving another parish we loved, one with another good pastor and many good people. It was the parish in which my husband and I were married, and at one point, we thought we could be a part of helping bring it back to life. For it was—it is—a dying parish, a parish where my grey-haired husband and I were considered young by the octagenerians who primarily populated its pews.

Those older parishioners used to tell us stories about the parish as they remember it from their youth, when it was filled with Polish speaking Catholics who had traveled to the United States to make a new life in Pittsburgh. In those days. the church was packed, literally to the rafters, with every pew in both the nave and balconies filled to capacity. All those parishioners lived within a few minutes’ walk of the church. Their children went to the parish school at the end of the block. The mothers made pierogies together in the church basement. The men worked in the factories and warehouses at the bottom of the hill.

For the first fifty years that Polish parish stood, the old Mass, the Latin Mass, was offered in its sanctuary. The old traditions, the ones brought over from Poland, were kept, too. Over one hundred fir trees, bedecked in glass balls, filled the church every Christmas. On Candlemas, the people marched around the perimeter, as the last of the Christmas lights were slowly extinguished. On Holy Thursday, a statue of Christ was imprisoned in a life-sized cage. On Good Friday, another statue, this time of the crucified Christ, was carried high on a stretcher through the aisles. All year long, favorite saints were remembered and favorite dishes cooked. The faith was alive. The parish was alive.

Then, it wasn’t.

In 1969, the old Mass went away. There one week. Gone the next. A decade later, the neighborhood began emptying of the Polish families, and a decade after that, the school finally closed for want of children. A few of the traditions—the Christmas trees, the Candlemas procession, the rose petals dropped from the cupula on St. Therese’s Feast Day—continued, kept alive by stubborn Polish grandmothers who would not let them die. But the days when it was a thriving parish, culturally and spiritually rich, had long passed by the time we joined. Most Sundays, we were the only family with children in the pews.

We hoped that would change. The parish had a wonderful young priest, a group of young missionaries were living in the old rectory, and the old neighborhood was coming back to life, albeit with renovating hipsters, not hardworking Poles. We were there every Sunday, often with friends who we would invite to join us. But no spark ever caught. I don’t know why. Maybe because of Covid, which left the already empty pews even emptier than before. Maybe for reasons too mysterious for me to understand.

Either way, last September, we left too. We didn’t want to. We wanted to stay in that beautiful old church, high on Polish hill, with its rich history and memories. But we needed something more—more for our children and for us.

Boutique Liturgies

One of my husband’s primary complaints about the post-Vatican II Latin Rite Liturgy is that it has become “boutique.” There are so many options, both licit and illicit, and the priest has so much freedom about which options he can choose, that you end up with vastly different liturgies at different parishes. You have parishes with incense and bells, and you have parishes with banners and guitars. Some places, a dozen Extraordinary Ministers distribute Holy Communion. At others, it’s only the priest and deacon. There can be Latin chant or Glory and Praise; Thomas Aquinas or Marty Haugen; Communion lines or Communion rails; Altar boys or Altar servers. The differences, the options, the variety in the particulars of the Mass from one parish to another are almost never ending.

In some places—rural areas, small towns, regions where Catholics are few and far between—you get what you get when you go to Mass. There is one parish within driving distance, and if you want to receive Jesus that Sunday, you have to receive your weekly dose of David Haas along with Him.

But in many other places, you don’t have to just take your David Haas and like it. You can go elsewhere. To the parish with the awesome worship band or Latin schola. To the parish where they don’t make the Congregation awkwardly greet each other before the Mass or shake hands during the Sign of Peace. To the parish with a moms’ group or weekly Bible studies. You can go where your liturgical or musical or catechetical preference takes you.

There is a downside to this. Many of us end up picking our parish like we pick a meal in a restaurant. We consume it. Like we consume just about everything.

It also can mean that smaller, older, and poorer parishes, those without the resources to hire youth ministers or choir directors or adult faith formation leaders, often lose parishioners to larger, wealthier parishes, which do have the resources to do the things which attract new parishioners and help them stay.

Then, there is the instability. In some dioceses, once installed, pastors are pastors of their parishes for life. In other dioceses, pastors change over with more frequency than their parishioners change their tires. As pastors come and go, so do programs, employees, and different styles of worship. There is no guarantee that the parish you join today—with the incense, bells, and Bible studies—will be the same parish tomorrow. The old pastor might be moved, a new pastor might arrive, and all that you loved about your parish can be undone in a blink of an eye.

Which again, is the problem. The very boutiqeuness of Latin Rite Catholicism can leave many of us feeling like we have no choice but to move as well. It is not as it was when our beautiful old Polish parish was built. Then, the Mass was the Mass wherever you went. The hymns might be in Polish at a church on one block and in English at the church on the next block over. But the essentials of the liturgy were the same. So were the people in the pews. Again, some spoke Polish and others spoke German. But there were always young people and old people, single people and married people. There were always children.

Now, there’s not. The liturgy, faith life, and population of one individual parish can be so radically different from the next, that they feel like two different faiths. And when the faith in your territorial parish is dead or dying—or, even worse, contributing to the culture of death—sometimes leaving is the best or only option. It’s not consumeristic parish shopping. It’s responsible stewardship—of your own faith and your children’s. It’s also a situation that has been forced upon the faithful by those who have ignored the rubrics and rules and richness of the past, letting the liturgy become a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience and failing to form and feed the faithful in the pews. The Catholic hierarchy has created the situation, not the believing laity who are trying to navigate the chaos as best they can.

Boutique Culture

It's not just the liturgy, though, in post-Vatican II America that has become boutique. It’s also Catholic culture.

America is not and never has been a Catholic country. Parts of America were Catholic before they became parts of America. But, by and large, America has always been a Protestant country. Secular Protestant now, but Protestant just the same. We have no enduring native Catholic culture. We never have.

Rather, in America, the Catholic immigrants who came here brought their Catholic culture with them, then spent their first decades in this country replicating it with their fellow immigrants. The Irish Catholics continued their Irish traditions in Irish neighborhoods and Irish parishes. The German Catholics, Polish Catholics, and Italian Catholics did the same. They didn’t go to each other’s churches or schools. They didn’t marry each other’s children. For a time, they even advocated for their own bishops.

Eventually, in the decades leading up to Vatican II, Catholics in America came out of their ghettos, both ethnic and religious. The ethnic parish system began to collapse as people married and moved and began caring more about their children assimilating into American culture than they cared about preserving Catholic culture. Then, in the 1970s, when liturgical experimentation was in full force and the Baby Boomer Catholics began starting families of their own, whatever vestiges of Catholic culture existed in America, disappeared, too. The Baby Boomers let it all go. Some because they didn’t care. Others because they were told those old things didn’t matter anymore; they were outdated, ritualistic, and had no place in the new culturally relevant Church that was supposed to rise up after the Council.

Either way, most Boomers didn’t keep the feasts. They didn’t celebrate the saints. They didn’t pray their rosaries or wear their scapulars or sing the songs of their grandparents. And they didn’t raise us, their children, to do it either.

 There were exceptions. There are always, always, always exceptions—individual families, newer immigrant communities, pockets of Catholic life and faith like our old parish on Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill. But, by and large, Generation X Catholics and older Millennial Catholics were raised in an America where Catholic culture meant not eating meat on Fridays in Lent and maybe counting the days to Christmas with an Advent calendar. Almost nobody had Michalmas parties in the 1980s. Almost nobody was making hot cross buns or eating cinnamon rolls on St. Lucy’s Feast Day. Name days, baptismal feast days, Ember Days—it would have been a rare Catholic teenager in the early 1990s who would even know what you were talking about if you had uttered those words.

Boutique Catholics

The result is that Catholics born in the first decades after the Council grew up in a world where the liturgy had been stripped of its richness and where Catholic communities had been stripped of their culture. Then, our parents and grandparents were shocked when so many of us fell away. They didn’t realize that Faith isn’t something that’s just taught with a catechism. It’s also something that’s caught. Catholic schools or CCD or even a really rocking homeschool theology curriculum could never be enough. The faith has to be imbibed continuously. We have to drink deeply of it—at the church and in the home, with friends and with classmates, in music and movies and literature—for it to reach the deepest parts of us. But my generation was not given the strong drink of Catholicism. We were given the flat soda of a post-Conciliar Church that had us singing “Friends are like Flowers,” while Father danced down the aisle in tights.

Those of us who stayed…or who, like me, left and came back, eventually figured this out. We realized people needed more to know their faith and grow in their faith than we had been given. We knew our children needed more than what we had been given. And since so few bishops were trying to make that happen, the laity stepped up and started trying to recreate what we could on our own.

The advent of the Internet helped. Cultivating Catholic culture and living Catholic liturgical life in the home became a cottage industry, with hundreds of blogs and later social media accounts sharing ways to celebrate feast days, holy days, and the liturgical seasons. They share recipes. They share games. They share crafts, devotions, prayers, songs, and works of art. They share ideas from every nation and every culture. They also share more ideas than any one person or family or country can possibly put into practice.

It's beautiful—the abundance of ways we have to live the liturgical life in our homes. But it also can be overwhelming, leaving some of us feeling like failures because in between work and school and babies, we can’t do All The Catholic Things. It also has left the rest of us doing the very same thing we do with the liturgy. Picking and choosing. Consuming. Creating a boutique Catholic culture, lived out exclusively in our home or, if we’re lucky, with a group of friends or neighbors.

But is it enough? Is a boutique Catholic culture really a Catholic culture? Is a boutique Catholic liturgy really a Catholic liturgy? Catholic literally means universal. The Mass is supposed to be the universal Mass of the Latin Rite. And the culture is supposed to be the universal culture—not necessarily the culture of the whole universe. Not in this world. But at least the culture of a whole people, living in a particular time and place.

How, without a liturgy that is unchanging from Latin Rite parish to Latin Rite parish, can we help our children grasp the universal nature of truth, beauty, and goodness. How without a unique, distinct culture that is bigger than the culture in our homeschooling co-op and more far reaching than recipes and crafts, do we help our children grasp that faith isn’t something you do on Sundays, but something that is meant to touch and transform every aspect of every life—that is, as my husband says, like honey, because it gets all over everything?

Uncertain Navigation

I don’t have clear answers to these questions for you. I don’t know if there are answers. This, though, is why many families I know started going to the Latin Mass. Because even if it doesn’t solve the culture piece, at least it gives them a Sunday morning that is connected to the past and rich with tradition and unchanging in at least one way.

It’s also why other families I know homeschool or send their children to more faithful Catholic schools or have moved their families to Steubenville, Charlotte, Denver, or other areas of the country with thriving Catholic communities. We are all, in our way, looking to replicate what the people who built our old Polish parish took for granted: an experience of the Faith that transcends time and place and connects us to the eternal, the universal, the Communion of Saints marching through past, present, and future. And we are all hoping that such an experience–whether in the liturgy or a school or a community—gives our children a fighting chance to have and keep the Faith.

I’m old enough, though, to have watched friends raise children to adulthood—sometimes going to the Latin Mass, sometimes going to Charismatic Masses; sometimes cultivating beautiful liturgical traditions and Catholic culture in their home, sometimes not; sometimes living in thriving Catholic communities, sometimes not. And I know sometimes those decisions seem to have helped children own their faith as they grow and live it. But other times they have not.

The hard truth is that there is no silver bullet. There is no guarantee that the decisions we make—to switch parishes, celebrate Michaelmas, set up a family altar, homeschool our children, practice gentle parenting, or any of it—will help our children to become mature, healthy, joyful disciples of Jesus Christ. Heck, there are no guarantees that any of that will help us become mature, healthy, joyful disciples of Christ. The world we live in is not the world that built our old Polish parish. Things were not perfect then either. Sinners abounded then too. But there were helps in the culture. There was support from the culture. Not anymore. Almost everything in twenty-first century Western culture is working against us. Its gospel is pervasive, strong, and seductive. Plus, we all still have free will and concupiscence. So much concupiscence. Parents and children alike.

So, what do we do?

What we can.

For my family, switching parishes was something we could do. We want our old parish to thrive again. But we wanted more for our children to experience a parish that is alive, that is rich with liturgy, rich with babies, and rich in love for the poor, the lost, and the vulnerable. We wanted them to see other families trying to raise children to love the good, the true, and the beautiful. We also wanted them to see that the Catholic Faith was something lived by people of all colors and all ages, not just elderly white people.

We wanted that for ourselves, too. We wanted a parish where we could linger on Sundays, talking with other families, finding friendship, companionship, solidarity in the journey. We wanted, for our children and ourselves, an experience of Catholic liturgy and faith, that was formative because it was beautiful—not simply in terms of bells and incense—but in terms of people, people who are full of life.

Not everyone can have that. Not everyone has the option to attend a parish like ours. But we do. So, we took it.

We also know, however, that this incarnation of our parish could be gone tomorrow. Again, all it takes is the bishop deciding he wants our pastor elsewhere, and everything could change.

Which is why we aren’t looking to our parish home to do what only our home can.

A Culture of Love

Our home will be the primary place where our children experience the fullness of the faith during their most formative years. Our home will be where they experience the love of God through my love and their father’s love. Our home will be where they receive the formation in character, virtue, and prayer that will lay the foundation for the rest of their life. Our home will be where they feel seen, known, and cherished for who they are. Or not. Or it will be the place where they don’t experience the fullness of the faith, where they don’t experience the love of God, where they don’t receive a formation in virtue, where they don’t feel seen, known, and cherished.

Liturgical living is wonderful. I roasted a chicken and baked a blackberry cobbler last night for Michaelmas. It was delicious, and I was proud of myself for somehow getting it together enough to make the dinner happen. Catholic art is important. We have beautiful images, old and new, of Our Lord and Our Lady and the Saints in every room. The children look at them and talk about them daily. Family prayer is essential. Not a day goes by that my husband and I don’t pray with our children. They hear us pray formal prayers, like the Rosary and the Litany of the Archangels, and they join in on every car ride when we pray the Litany of the Saints. They also hear us pray spontaneously—asking Jesus for help, giving Him thanks, expressing our love for Him. Talking freely to God is a normal part of our family culture.

All these things can help. They give our children a taste of what Catholic culture can and should be. But all the food, all the pictures, all the prayers, are not the essence of Catholic culture; they never have been. And that is maybe one of the reasons why so much of it has fallen apart and why so many have fallen away. Not because of the abundance of heretical, sappy liturgies. Although those do hurt. Not because of a lack of processions on Corpus Christi. Although those do help. But because of a lack of the love of God made manifest in each of us, a love that comes only through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

The essence of Catholic culture, the heartbeat of it, is transforming, joyful, grace-soaked love. And while none of us can “fix” the Church’s liturgical or cultural problems, we can still love. We can love joyfully. We can love in hope. We can love by the power of Christ.

My husband and I talk about the Faith all the time, as we eat and pray, travel and work. We can’t help it; he’s a theology teacher, and I’m a Catholic writer. But along with talking about the Faith with love, we try to live the Faith with love. In how we speak, listen, affirm, encourage, challenge, correct, apologize, hug, kiss, dance, laugh, tease, garden, clean, decorate, give to the poor, drive to museums, and swing on the porch in the evenings. We try, through every conversation and every action, to show our children the Faith doing what it does, covering the world like honey, making it sticky with grace.

We don’t do it perfectly. We won’t ever do it perfectly. Especially this hot-tempered, anxiety-prone, control-freak of a redhead. But the hope is that with enormous help from God, we can make the culture of our home more attractive than the culture of the world, that we can make it rich with transforming love. Our home, after all, is really the only culture we can control. And its rhythm, language, and rituals, are the only liturgy we can shape in full.

It still won’t be enough. I know this. Our children are not ours. They are the Lord’s. And it will be their choice to love Him or reject Him, run towards Him or run away from Him. We can try to stack the deck in His favor, but in the end, their choice to grow in faith will be theirs. Grace can help, though. So we pray for that grace for them and for us. We beg for it. And, as we do, we try to build a culture within these walls and without, where grace can more easily flow.

I don’t know if Catholics in America will ever create a culture, for us or for the nation, that is truly Catholic. I don’t know if the liturgy on earth will ever again just be the liturgy—not the Traditional Liturgy or Contemporary Liturgy or Charismatic Liturgy. I don’t know if the Faith in America will stop being boutique. Can what existed in the parish on Polish Hill and all parishes once like it, exist again? There may not be time left for that. But I can strive every day to love my children in such a way that the heart of all those things forms them still. Or at least I can try.

So can you.

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What I’m Watching

The Rings of Power. About Amazon’s mega-budget Tolkien Extravaganza, I will say two things. It’s not as good as The Lord of the Rings books or extended movie versions. But, I don’t hate it. I know I’m supposed to. I’m trying. But I don’t.

What I’m Reading

Hamnet. I am half way through Maggie O’Farrel’s stunningly written fictionalized tale about William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and their young son Hamnet, and it lives up to all the hype about it. I don’t generally like modern fiction. But this is a must read for the perfect prose alone.

Fry Bread. Becket has this sweet tale about the meaning of Native American fry bread memorized. He actually sleeps with the book. And even though I have to read it multiple times a day to him, I don’t mind. The language is beautiful, like a good wine in your mouth, and it is, in a sense, a pre-Eucharistic book, shining a particular kind of light on the meaning food can take on in a culture and how it connects us to one another.

What I’m Cooking

A lot of Aldi Tortellini. Sorry, it’s been a busy month over here! But here’s one quick weeknight meal that uses it, which I quickly whipped together this past week. It serves 4-5 adults and takes 15 minutes to make,

Ingredients

Aldi Mushroom Tortellini, 2 packages

Prosciutto, 8 ounces, chopped

Parmesan Cheese, one cup, shredded

Bacon Grease (preferably from pastured pork), Two Tablespoons

Butter, 4 Tablespoons

Crushed Red Pepper

Instructions

1.     In a medium pot, bring water to boil; add tortellini and cook according to package instructions; drain and return to pot;

2.     While the water boils, melt bacon grease in a large frying pan; add prosciutto and cook until crisp (3-5 minutes); remove prosciutto from pan, leaving any liquids behind;

3.     To the pan of bacon grease, add butter; cook over medium heat until it begins to foam; remove from heat, and the butter will continue to brown;

4.     Once the butter is brown and nutty; add the tortellini to the butter and toss; add prosciutto and cheese, toss again; check for seasoning, adding sosalt and pepper if desired;

5.     Serve with a little more cheese and a pinch of crushed red pepper. We paired it with roasted peppers and tomatoes from the garden, but any salad or roasted vegetable will go great with this.

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