Is it a church or a country club with a cross on top?

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Irishmom2 said:
Would you give up receiving the Eucharist because you couldn’t stand the music?
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Actually I stopped going to the 9am mass at my church because the drum and piano music is so loud it literally hurts my ears. Thankfully they offer a 7:30am mass with no music. Heavenly for me. But if my church only offered the loud drum/piano/guitar mass I would be switching churches. And if every church on planet earth only offered the loud drum/piano/guitar mass I would give up on receiving the Eucharist (my ears just wouldn’t be able to take it). So yes, music can affect some people’s church attendance.
 
KJW5551 said:
an otherwise well-reasoned article and dismissing it out of hand.
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A complaint about how female altar servers are leading to the downfall of American Catholicism is worthy of being dismissed out of hand because it’s absurd.
 
Yes, but you would not stop going to mass altogether as many have. You would find a different mass or church. Which is what you did. 🙂
 
SeriousQuestion said:
Those contemporary hymns are a torment.
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I try to look for the good in each song. It’s not always easy, but it is possible. Also I’ve observed that good musicians and cantors can make them better. The next time you feel tormented by a contemporary hymn, inhale deeply, praise God, and be at peace.
 
In Germany you have good beer. I really don’t think you want to drink any USA swill.
Reminds me of the time I was in Amsterdam and happened upon an American beer store selling stuff like Miller Lite 🤮
 
Just about every day I speak to people who have left the Catholic Church. It is part of my job.

I’ve heard the reasons that they left. Never, in over a decade of this work, speaking to many people, no one has ever left because of Altar Girls, Communion in the Hand or EMHCs. Not one.
 
Not to be nosy – could you give a rough percentage of the main reasons why people have left? Now I’m puzzling over what your job is… Are these people wanting to come back to the Church? If so, then they aren’t necessarily a representative sample of all the people who have left the Church, right?
 
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You would be amazed how many people call/come in a parish office to talk, vent, ask questions. I also help with some on-line groups.

In all of the years I have met one person who left because he could not bring himself to believe in the Trinity.

The rest are divided into two groups (and if you would diagram it, the groups have overlap)
  • Someone hurt them in a profound way.
  • They were sacramentalized but never evangelized, they did not know Jesus, no one modeled discipleship to them. Of this group, many of them found another group who introduced them to a real, living relationship with Christ, others were simply led into agnosticism/atheism.
I’ve met people who knew the apologetics left and right, yet, they walked away because with only head knowledge, there is not a relationship.
 
Probably will come in handy between now and then, though.
 
I love his section on Catholic education!!!

The quote “there are more black Baptists in our schools than Hispanic Catholics” is very telling and from what I can see, very true.
Which leads us to the financial question. In too many places, tuition is beyond the reach of the average, middle-class Catholic family. The maintenance of our schools is not the responsibility of parents who use the schools, or of parishes that have a school on their property; it is the responsibility of the entire diocesan community. Hence, Catholic elementary and secondary schools ought to be tuition-free—as was largely the case up to the 1950s. I love to ask a very embarrassing question: How is it that most of our Catholic institutions were built by penniless immigrants but cannot be maintained by the most affluent Catholic population in the history of the Church? Our problem is not financial; it is faith—actually, the lack thereof. Even though the financial issue can be a block for some parents, we must also observe that all too many families have priorities that are out of whack. And so, once again, where is the bishop or priest who challenges parental priorities? The silence is deafening.
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Very true…
If the relatively small Diocese of Wichita can sponsor tuition-free schools, what is the problem with everyone else? What is stopping priests or bishops from adopting the stewardship model that has been so successful there? Is it worth pointing out that one of the effects of the Wichita school system is priestly ordinations in abundance—ten men for several years in a row? Conversely, three contiguous dioceses in the Northeast with a combined Catholic population of nearly seven million had only twelve ordinations among them this year.
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Yes, why can’t we look into this? I wonder if we were to end ever single DRE salary and took that money to pay for Catholic School tuition, what the impact would be?
 
Catholic school tuition is very high nowadays because there are a lot fewer nuns.

Nuns really didn’t get paid, and that reduced the costs considerably. Further, nuns also owned a lot of hospitals, they could be treated at no extra cost in their own facilities.

Further, in the modern day, parents expect the schools to have a lot of educational options for the children. A lot of public school districts really offer a lot more that a little parish high school with 150 students could ever do.
 
Augustinian said:
Catholic school tuition is very high nowadays because there are a lot fewer nuns.

Nuns really didn’t get paid, and that reduced the costs considerably. Further, nuns also owned a lot of hospitals, they could be treated at no extra cost in their own facilities.

Further, in the modern day, parents expect the schools to have a lot of educational options for the children. A lot of public school districts really offer a lot more that a little parish high school with 150 students could ever do.
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I’m aware of this.

However, I’m curious if there is a way to duplicate the free tuition that the Diocese of Wichita is offering.

The article mentions Wichita, but doesn’t go into specifics regarding how it’s funded
 
Very little.

Church employees work for low wages, they do it out of love.

You will still have kids who need a parish Faith Formation/R E program. Do you think that people will do that monumental task for free?
 
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My daughter is starting kindergarten at our Parish elementary school soon. When I took her in for her evaluation, we ran into a lady who lives on our street and I found out she works there at the school. Just recently we ran into their family after Mass. She seems quite happy.
 
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