Seven churches deprived of the Sunday Mass: the Sacrifice going out for want of priests

In an American diocese, the Sunday Mass is being discontinued in seven churches. Declining attendance and a shortage of priests are cited. Seven bell towers where, on the Lord's day, the altar will henceforth stay silent.

The third commandment does not say: « Attend Mass if a priest remains. » It says: « Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day. » And the way the Church has always kept that day holy is the Holy Sacrifice, source and summit of all Christian life, where Calvary is made present upon the altar. To deprive a people of the Sunday Mass is not to close a hall: it is to put out, in one place, the very fire around which Christians have gathered since the catacombs.

We do not judge the shepherd who faces the dearth; we name the fact and its cause. Where faith grows lukewarm, the pews empty; where the pews empty, vocations fall silent; and where vocations fall silent, the altar in the end falls silent too. The remedy is not resignation, but the one the Lord Himself prescribed: « Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth labourers into his harvest. » One does not fill a church again by lowering its demands, but by giving back to the faithful what they had ceased to receive: the sense of the sacred, the beauty of worship, the certainty that there, truly, God gives Himself. Save the Mass, and souls will come back to seek it.

Sources. Exodus, XX, 8, on the third commandment; Gospel according to Saint Matthew, IX, 38; Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.