A quick note on hospitality.
I have been hearing from some families that it is beginning to be difficult to find a seat at Mass. On the one hand, this is great news! A full church means more people in relationship with Jesus, as well as a more dynamic, more worshipful experience. One the other hand, we are not at capacity: our church can seat 465 if every seat downstairs is taken (assuming 8 people per long pew and 6 per short pew, which itself is conservative), and our largest Sunday Mass never breaks 300. Which means the problem is with how we seat ourselves. We are not making room for the people coming into our church.
Trust me, I do get it. Everyone’s ideal 13 ft. pew arrangement looks like this:
| Empty/Jackets (1 ft.) | My Group (4.5 ft.) | No Touching Zone (2 ft.) | Another Group (4.5 ft.) | Empty/Jackets (1 ft.) |
Our ideal 10 ft. pew is similar, but with smaller group sizes. Notice how almost 1/3 of the pew is empty space! Taking away 1/3 of our pew capacity means our church can only seat 300, and now we can see where the problem lies. (Fun fact about jackets: my best guess is that the usher room in the old narthex was originally built a coat room.)
The other problem we run into is that families with children (we are joyful to have them!!) often require the most space, but (because children are chaotic) face the most barriers to arriving at Mass on time. So when a family, frazzled after having tried to make sure everyone at least has shoes on, shows up at 9:55 and sees that there is only 1 ft. here or 2 ft. there, you can see how they might become distressed with church seating.
I want everyone to pay attention to this because the easiest way to turn someone off from going to church is if it is difficult and inconvenient. Yes, the preaching, the music, the overall presentation of the Mass matter. But all of that comes after you are able to find a seat. If a person or a family has done all the work to overcome whatever transportation or family barriers might be keeping them from Mass, only to find the Mass inhospitable, then all of our evangelical efforts are going to be thwarted by something as milquetoast as personal space!
So what to do about this? First, can we make a community effort to trip over ourselves trying to scoot together when we see someone walking down the aisle who needs a place to sit? That little gesture goes a long way. Second, because the 10:00 a.m. is our most well attended Mass and the 12:30 has a lot of families with kids, we are going to get rid of the distanced/masked pews at those Masses. We still want cautious people to feel safe at our church (!), but I need to ask them to focus on the 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. Masses going forward. Thank you!
Fr. Moore 