Last Word

Thank you, Sergeant Roper

On the decline in Catholics' recognition of an obligation to attend Sunday Mass.

It is odd how we do not always recognize certain really significant moments in our lives until much later. Come back with me to 1953. It is quarter to eleven on a Sunday morning at an RAF station in East Anglia. I am still in bed. For the first time in my life, from a mixture of low spirits and that special sort of boredom that institutions engender, I decide to turn over and not bother to go to Mass.

Then comes a rap on the door. Sergeant Don Roper pours in, all anxious alarm: "Kevin, it's nearly ten to eleven, you'll miss Mass." I spring up, pretending I'd forgotten, splash my face and clamber into clothes. "Thanks, Don." Moments after eleven and two air gunners, one a bit disheveled, arrive breathless in the station chapel for Mass.

Every year in England figures come out, detailing Mass attendance among Catholics one time and attendance at Anglican churches another, and of late the figures have been pretty close--despite the fact that nominal Church of England members are much more numerous than Catholics.

Clifford Longley, doyen of the corps of religious-affairs correspondents in the serious papers, has been intelligently unpacking the Mass-attendance figures in the Tablet, and has been surprised to realize that the 1.2 million Catholics who go to Mass on Sunday (out of the estimated total of 4.4 million adherents) are obviously not the same people every week but a rotating proportion of them. Just like the Anglicans, who are not bound under pain of sin to attend divine service, the Catholics can be divided into those who go every week, those who go nearly every week and those who turn up at various other intervals.

Longley rightly dismisses the fancy that perhaps all the 4.4 million turn up occasionally; that's as unlikely as that the 1.2 million are always the same individuals. It's a distribution curve, in other words. Longley ought not to have been so surprised. I remember facing this phenomenon back in 1977 when Gordon Heald of the Gallup Poll persuaded us at the Catholic Herald to do the biggest survey of Catholic beliefs and practice ever done up until that time; even that far back we found precisely the same phenomenon.

My recollections of Catholic life in the 1940s and 1950s, especially of the clarity of pastoral teaching on going to Mass, make it hard to suppose that many people missed odd Sundays in those days. But not everyone went to Communion then either; it was almost frowned on at later Masses, it was so unusual.

Clifford Longley delicately scrutinizes today's forty-times-a-year attender and speculates on whether this theoretical individual, who comes forward for Communion, has been to confession to cover the gaps. Probably not. Longley discerns a wholesale "private renegotiation of the terms of church membership." I concede from observation that he is right about that. But he is not right when he says that almost no one has noticed. Bishops and parish priests everywhere are aware of this pattern. Still, whatever it is that they are saying to penitents who admit missing Mass, few apparently are repeating it in their homilies. I cannot remember a mention of the Sunday obligation, except routinely in the notices, for twenty years.

Do the new books differ from the old books? Yes, they do, and the answer to our question may lie here. My penny catechism, never discarded, asks at question 232 whether it is a mortal sin to neglect to hear Mass on Sundays and Holy days of Obligation. It is, comes the answer. But the Code of Canon Law (1247) is gentler, with no mention of serious sin: "On Sundays and other Holy days of Obligation, the faithful are obliged to assist at Mass." And the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 2180, simply quotes the words of the Codex.

It is better to be consoled by new mercies than to pine for old punishments. The new Catechism is wonderfully positive about keeping Sunday holy. It speaks of the joy proper to the Lord's Day and cautions us to be mindful of those who have the same needs and rights as ourselves but who cannot rest from work because of poverty and misery.

All the commandments are protections of our happiness if we reflect upon them. I often wonder why God took only four or five words to steer us away from murder, stealing, and adultery but a hundred to guard the Sabbath. There is a great mystery here, to do with the boundaries between this world and the next. I believe that on Sunday we are invited to return to Paradise, to step by the cherubs and pass unscorched by the flame of the flashing sword.

Why do I believe such an awesome thing? Because when the horrors, torments, and griefs of the world--mirrored in my own soul--seem overwhelming, I know that in the Mass there is wrought a final and everlasting triumph over them all. The most perfect thing I can do is to attend Mass, surpassing all other works of charity or prayer.

After that Sunday in 1953 I was never again tempted to miss Sunday Mass. Even a sergeant may come as an angel, though he fly with a single-wing brevet. Than you, Sergeant Roper.

Kevin Grant is the editorial coordinator for Catholic World Report in Great Britain. Diogenes is expected to resume his work in this space next month.