Vatican II and M / F seating

[umamibella]

Where I am Pre Vat II masses people sat in family groups, with children, just as they do now.

 

[ralfyman]

Were Genders Ever Separated at Catholic Mass? | Catholic Answers Q&A

 

[Minks]

Imagine trying to do that right now though! Fitting everyone in on a socially distanced seating plan that was also segregated by gender

Lol! At least, with the Catholic Church, we’d only need two seating areas!

 

[HomeschoolDad]

Cry rooms were a pre-Vatican II invention. It was actually the modern-built or “wreckovated” churches that tended to not have them, since the post-VII Mass was encouraging everyone, even little kids, to be part of the liturgy and there was less emphasis on sitting silently while the priest said Mass. Cry rooms, in the form of all-purpose glass walled rooms that could be used for a lot of different purposes, started coming back in churches built in the 90s or so. I also don’t think the old-fashioned kind were as spacious or nice as the ones today.

My mother was not happy with our parish because it did not have one. Apparently she was used to there being one in the 40s and 50s.

I’m not surprised by that. I had never seen a cry room before I came to Catholicism, but then again, I had never been to any kind of church more than a couple dozen times in my life (and that’s being generous, we just weren’t a church-going family). Protestant churches tend to have nurseries and separate Sunday School for children, or at least the ones I went to did.

Now that I think of it, when I first became familiar with the concept of a “cry room”, I reasoned “that makes sense, after all, there is the Sunday Mass obligation, and even though babies and small children don’t have that obligation, the parents do, and besides, children should surely be exposed to Mass from their very earliest days, so that they’ll understand the significance of it, and it will be part of their experience of ‘that’s just what we do’ as Catholics”.

Personal note: I’m reminded here of the first time I ever took my son to the TLM. He couldn’t have been three weeks old. It was a small church, more like a chapel, and I sat his baby bucket in the center aisle. Talk about a ringside seat! (Obviously I picked it up and got it out of the way for the processional, communion, and recessional.)

 

[HomeschoolDad]

Nik:

Imagine trying to do that right now though! Fitting everyone in on a socially distanced seating plan that was also segregated by gender

Lol! At least, with the Catholic Church, we’d only need two seating areas!

I thought of that — wondered how that would be handled with all this “non-binary” business going on these days.

Though my heart goes out to all the people who suffer from “gender dysphoria”, and of course true intersex conditions that are so “mixed” as to be a case of “not quite one, but not really the other”, God forbid that the present “non-binary”, cis-versus-trans thing is anything but a sick fad.