A desperate countryside search for Sunday Mass

When my mother invited me on a bus tour of the English countryside, I was delighted. But I had a troubling thought: How would we get to Sunday Mass? It is a law of the Church that Catholics attend Mass on Sunday, so if I can, I do. Some may call this legalism. I call it Canon 1247.

Besides, I love the Mass. And because I love the Mass, I don’t like going to just any Mass. I dislike extraneous matter inserted into the liturgy, like a celebrant’s warm-up remarks, too often reminiscent of the patter of a dentist. I don’t like bad music, or the palpable embarrassment of congregations forced to sing unfamiliar tunes. And I don’t like homilists trying to elicit answers from their congregations, as if we were children in a Sunday school class. Eighty-eight per cent of working-age Canadians have graduated from high school; we deserve better than that.

Because I love the Mass, I go to great lengths to avoid Masses with warm-up patter, bad music, awkwardness and question-and-answer sessions. For example, most Sundays I travel an hour by bus to get to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. However, there is a limit: I will not go to the beautiful Masses offered by the Society of St. Pius X, for Benedict XVI has stated that this Society has no canonical status in the Church. And I will not leave my Sunday obligation unfulfilled. Canon 1247 gets me through the door if nothing else does.

Still, it can be difficult to get to any Sunday Mass when you are on holiday. Mainstream tour companies no longer leave room in their itineraries for Christians to attend Sunday services. In my younger days I went on a Contiki tour of Italy, and although I spent Sunday afternoon and evening in Assisi, I had no opportunity whatsoever to get to Mass.

That was very sad, and what made it even sadder was that I had announced to the whole bus that I was going to try and find Sunday Mass and anyone who wished could join me, an announcement that greatly embarrassed us all. I decided that on future tours I would find Mass first and keep the news to myself.

Therefore, before meeting mom in England this year, I looked up the online Sunday Mass schedule for the church nearest our hotel. It so violently conflicted with the tour’s itinerary that I invoked Canon 1248, which permits Saturday vigil Masses. I found one in a village where we had “free time,” only to discover later that the “free time” promised would end when that Mass began.

This led to two secret walking pilgrimages, as we sneaked away from our group to find churches and their Mass schedules, and to private talks with our tour director and bus driver. To the mild surprise of 12 other Canadians, the bus made an unscheduled stop outside a church on Saturday afternoon, dropping off mom, me and a delighted third Catholic, who had also been secretly wondering how he would get to Mass on Sunday.

It was a lovely day. We waited an hour in the sunshine for the church to open. I basked in our victory over the historical and social forces that make it difficult for Catholics on bus tours to get to Sunday Mass.

I wish I could tell you that this Mass gave me an hour-long opportunity for thanksgiving and worship in the presence of our Lord. But I’m afraid the priest got rather in the way, with his warm-up patter about himself, his insistence that the congregation sing, however awkwardly, without hymn books or accompaniment, and his question-and-answer homily, which strongly hinted that he was in favour of women’s ordination and we could be, too.

I wonder if my face, as ever too expressive, and now all too visible among only 27 other faces, showed what I thought about that, for he suddenly changed tack. The size of Catholic congregations in England, he said with real sadness, was dropping even faster than the rate of priestly ordinations, and among other difficulties, this was creating financial problems.

Priests worrying about money, a perennial in the life of the Church, are less demoralizing than priests doubting Church teaching or treating adults like a backward music class. My irritation eased to sadness. So many babies brought to the font, yet so many Catholics living without the Mass. Whatever the absent Catholics are looking for, it’s not Mass as said in that village church. Evidently Canon 1247, even helped by 1248, is not enough to get them in the door.

(Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer and author of Seraphic Singles.)