A Faith Like Honey
On parish switching, liturgical living, and helping children become disciples
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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.
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