“What I learned from 46 consecutive days in church”

Last updated on: May 25, 2015 at 11:57 am by Deacon Greg Kandra

“What I learned from 46 consecutive days in church” 2015-05-25T11:57:35-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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Catholic broadcaster Adrian Chiles recently set himself a challenge for Lent: to go to church every day for more than a month, and never the same one twice.

Some of what he found, from the BBC:

Wherever I went in the country, and most of my Masses were in London, Birmingham, Swansea and Manchester, it was striking how similar the congregations were at weekday Masses. There’s no getting away from it: the average age must be somewhere in the seventies. At 48, I spent most of this spring feeling like a spring chicken. But there was also invariably a young family of Asian origin, usually with young children. And at the 7am Masses in Central London there was the odd go-getter, who strode out after Mass was ended as if they had hedge funds to run. They probably did.

So, a mixed bag, as were the priests. A third of them I found to be great, with a handful quite life-changingly brilliant. Another third were sort of OK. The rest were pretty hopeless, not least because I often couldn’t actually hear what they were saying. And a handful were grumpy to the point of malevolence.

Spiritually, if I’m to really “connect” at Mass, I need a good priest to help me. And by good I mean, first and foremost, that they should look pleased to be there and pleased that we’re there. Often they speak of great “joy” while looking as bored as swimming pool attendants.

Secondly, with the liturgy – essentially the same script which they do day in, day out – the best of them find a way of making it sound fresh. As the inestimable Father Paul Addison of Our Lady of Delours in Kersal put it to me: “The clue’s in the word; communion is all about communicating.” And the same is obviously true of the sermon. One of the beauties of daily Mass is, frankly, its brevity – invariably less than half an hour. Sometimes the sermon is dispensed with altogether, but often it just takes the form of a thought or two, which I find much easier to get my head round than one of Sunday’s lengthy orations.

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