Filled Pews (with What, one wonders)

The following article is from NCR.  [My comments are in parenthesis].


Filled Pews [with What, one wonders]
By Joe Ferullo

My 23-year-old cousin from Italy has been staying with us for three months. A lot of things have surprised him about Los Angeles -- the wide streets, old buildings that were only built forty years ago, and that fact that people actually fill the churches around here.

My cousin is a business graduate student back at home, and is staying with us while doing a corporate internship in town for his master's thesis. He's gone to Disneyland and downtown, to Hollywood and Malibu -- but our local parish has made a real impression. [Hopefully, he still can differentiate between Disneyland, downtown, Hollywood, Malibu, and his local parish.  It doesn't appear to be a challenge in Italy.]

Usually the place is pretty full on Sundays [with only 30% of Catholics attending Mass every Sunday, I guess that still adds up to big numbers in the few churches still open in the big city.  I wonder how the American church would fare with a church on every corner, as in Italy? Where would we put the taverns?] , which is not the case in Italy. Not even in the small town outside of Naples where my cousin grew up and still lives. There, a scattered dozen or so old ladies in traditional black still bother to make church-going a steady habit. [TRANSLATION: The Catholic Church has ceased teaching that missing Mass on Sunday is a mortal sin.] An ancient organ heaves out traditional tunes, but no one sings along.

And the priests, my cousin says, are as ancient as everything else -- preaching an Italian version of fire-and-brimstone homilies to the few in the pews. He was stunned to meet our pastor, who is a youthful 50 years old and sometimes wears Hawaiian shirts on his days off.[neat - Fr. Beach Boy!] His homilies are humorous, thoughtful and straightforward, [Unless you have Jay Leno in a nightclub setting, no one will come] speaking to everyday life and tying that to the gospel. Same thing when our bishop came recently to deliver the sacrament of Confirmation to my daughter and forty other teenagers her age. He didn't speak over the heads of kids, nor did he condescend to them -- he was simple and direct and genuine.[Sounds like he makes them feel real good without burdening them with any unnecessary Commandments and such.]

My cousin said he understood why the church was full, and why the ones back home were not. [The church was full because it was a Catholic "Community" formed by closing and consolidating five other churches.]

Pope Benedict has made re-Christianizing Europe a central theme of his papacy -- but if he has lost even the traditionally devout people in small Italian towns, his job is tougher than I thought. [The traditionally devout people have defected to the TLM]. And does he have a plan to bring them back? Does that plan include a different approach to the congregation, a more American approach? [God forbid!] Not that I have heard -- the American approach does not seem to be his favorite.

To be sure, we have our problems here, too. A lot of them, and the list seems to grow. The priests are not get any younger nor any larger in number. [Traditional seminaries are bursting at the seams] In our big cities, parishes and schools continue to close. But we should know that - -to at least one smart kid from a country that is home to the Vatican -- we are doing most things right. [Have the smart kid check back in ten years and this Novus Ordo parish will be closed and consolidated with the local Presbyterian Parish]