Sarah Finnegan went to the microphone at the end of the St. Giles Family Mass on March 1 and announced, “I have some good news. A new pastor has been appointed to follow Father Dore when he retires this summer. His name is Father Carl Morello.” She was relaying what Fr. Dore, the pastor of St. Giles, had told those attending a soup supper the Wednesday before.
None of the 250 people sitting on folding chairs in the St. Giles School gym responded. They were waiting to hear more. “He is now the pastor of St. Paul’s in Park Ridge,” she continued, “where he has encouraged the parish to start a family Mass and to be a PADS site.”
Some then felt free to applaud. Others heaved a sigh of relief. Finnegan’s announcement seemed to mark the end of what, for many in the community, were six years of uncertainty and occasional tension. The sources of the tension were complex but, as it turned out, no bad guys harboring harmful intentions.
A long tradition
Creativity and experimentation in the church often happen on the margins, under the radar, at some distance from centers of authority and control. Certainly one precipitating factor of the tension many felt is that the very existence of the Family Mass Community continues to test how much diversity the Roman Catholic Church is willing to tolerate.
“Why would you want to have a Mass in a smelly gym?” asked Monsignor Gleeson in 1971, when a group of eight families asked permission to hold an alternative Mass in the St. Giles School gym. The good monsignor apparently hadn’t noticed that the times were a ‘changin’.
Tesse Donnelly, who has been with the St. Giles Family Mass Community from its inception, explained that, at the time, currents in the culture and the Church inspired the founding families to try worshiping in a new way. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) empowered lay people to participate more fully in leadership roles in the Catholic Church, defining the Church not as a strict hierarchy but as the people of God. The culture at large also emphasized alternatives – for example, Montessori in education and Lamaze in childbirthing.
Besides, said Donnelly, “I was at the end of my tether with people turning around and staring at me when my child was noisy in church.”
And so the St. Giles Family Mass was born. They created a worship space in the gym every Sunday morning, setting up folding chairs in a semi-circle, pulling out their guitars, finding a priest wherever they could to celebrate, providing their own chalice, wine and sacramental bread … and bringing along their young children.
Building relationships
Not all creative experiments in the church survive. This one thrived, with Sunday attendance after 37 years averaging around 250. It flourished, proponents say, because the Family Mass became the Family Mass Community.
A key to the vitality of the community, said Richard White, chair of the coordinating board, is its small size. While attendance of 250 might sound quite large to some Protestant congregations, compared to St. Giles Church, which holds six Masses on a weekend, attended by more than 1,500 worshipers, it is small enough to allow for real relationship building.
“If you want to know the Family Mass Community,” said Will Nostvick, a member of the pastoral team, “listen to the prayers of petition during the liturgy.” Instead of the lector praying in generalities, one by one, community members approach a mic and briefly state what they want their community to pray for – a sister just diagnosed with cancer, a friend who lost a job, an end to violence in the Middle East.
“This is a community that wants to live the Catholic faith in an intimate and communal style,” Nostvick said. “We feel it’s easier to live Christ’s message in the close proximity of a fairly small group of families. I’ve watched my friends’ children grow up, as they’ve watched mine. There’s the potential to share each other’s lives. The modeling I’ve seen of a Christian man has been within the Family Mass Community.”
Sarah Amandes, a young adult, wrote in the The Vineyard, the community’s newsletter, “The St. Giles Family Mass Community is my home. Though I’ve lived in New York for several years … the Family Mass is the only church where I can say I belong. The community is the most nurturing, yet challenging environment I’ve witnessed.”
Internal and external tension
The community has not been without critical times of tension. Donnelly recalled a time in the late 1970s when a conflict surfaced between what she called the “cosmics” and the “charismatics,” two factions with quite different ways of worshiping and living out the faith. It took 18 months, she recalled, to resolve the tension and blend the two forms of spirituality.
In that case, the tension was internal. In contrast, the most recent anxieties were sparked by the cardinal himself becoming aware enough of this faith community experiment to begin asking questions.
Pastor Dore said that in the late ’90s, both Cardinal Bernardin and Bishop Thomas Paprocki, Cardinal Bernardin’s vicar for this area, seemed satisfied with his answers to their inquiries about what was happening in the Family Mass Community and its relationship to the larger St. Giles Parish.
“Cardinal George,” said Dore, “had a little different approach to things.” The cardinal asked for clarification on five specific areas in the life of the Family Mass Community: 1) liturgical practices, 2) catechetical methods, 3) financial arrangements, 4) how priests are assigned/recruited, and 5) how the community celebrates the Triduum (ie. Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter).
Community Mass members reacted to the cardinal’s questions in a variety of ways. Some thought that at least some of Cardinal George’s inquiries were reasonable. Many of the leaders, for example, admitted that the community’s mode of handling money was not up to best accounting practices.
Others saw the cardinal’s desire to have the community’s finances become integrated with those of the larger St. Giles Parish as taking away too much of their autonomy. Nostvick acknowledged that some people in the group fear the archdiocese is “the big bad church.” Their attitude, he said, is “just leave us alone.”
“There still are issues of power,” said Sam Whalen, a member of the coordinating board and the music ministry. Although lay people have a much greater role in parishes since Vatican II, Whalen’s comment points to the reality that the community’s mode of decision-making is something of an anomaly in the Church.
In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church’s episcopal polity, which is hierarchical with ultimate authority at the top, the Family Mass Community is egalitarian, democratic and participatory. Important decisions are made at “town hall meetings” in which every voice is heard and a vote is taken.
“There is a very long tradition in the Family Mass,” said Finnegan, “of respect for process and for diversity of opinion.”
“It feels like being an adult within the Roman Catholic Church,” said Donnelly. “We take responsibility for our liturgical lives and our fiscal lives and our decision-making.”
Paul Moroney wrote a piece in The Vineyard in which he stated there has always been an “ongoing push and pull between the monarchical hierarchy and those who would seek to re-establish a more open, communal church.” He ends his article saying, “Now, girls and boys, does that sound familiar or does that sound familiar?”
Integrating
“The fact is we felt pretty anxious,” Whalen admitted about how many in the community felt when they first heard about Cardinal George’s questions. Some worried his agenda was to close the Family Mass down. A few, in fact, even explored the possibility of the community trying to become a non-territorial parish, if push came to shove.
Nostvick, who participated on the committee that sought to answer the Cardinal’s questions and work toward integrating more fully the traditions and practices of the Family Mass Community into the rest of the St. Giles parish, talked about how his attitude changed as the process moved forward.
“When I began serving on the committee,” he said, “in my mind, my job was to protect the community. As I participated, I realized I had pretty much dismissed the larger church. I began to see my job as working toward how to be the church together.
“I think there was a certain adolescent phase where it was ‘us against them.’ I think we at one point were dealing with who’s in charge. I think, to some degree, that’s what precipitated the tension.
“Fr. Tony Gittens, who spoke at one of our Search Days, really changed my thinking. His whole message was inclusive. He said people have a tendency to not want to change, but you have to. You’re always going to be opening up to Christ’s call. It’s human nature to protect the community you love when you think it’s being challenged. It’s natural, but it’s not what Christ calls us to.”
Nostvick sees no inconsistency in belonging to an authoritarian church and being able to think for himself.
“I think one of the strengths of the Catholic Church is its unified teaching,” he noted. “People like parts or don’t, but the church gives a push back to individual opinions. Do I always agree with them? No, but if we don’t have that, then I become God.”
Frank Hulefeld, who works with the pastoral team, pointed out there have always been people who have participated in the Family Mass Community as well as in the larger St. Giles Parish. For example, some Family Mass parents have sent their children to the parish school and have participated side by side with St. Giles members in the Appalachian Service Project.
No bad guys
Family Mass leaders gave unanimous kudos to Tom Dore for the way he managed the process of responding to the Cardinal and more fully integrating the Family Mass Community into the parish without destroying the community’s distinct identity.
“It’s never been a question of ending this experiment of 37 years,” Dore said, “but of making sure they are part of the larger Catholic community. It’s not been easy. It’s been a struggle all the way around, but I’m very pleased with what we have come up with.”
As it turned out, Cardinal George had no hidden agenda for closing down this community experiment. The questions he gave to the Family Mass Community were designed to help the community maintain best practices, foster full participation in the greater Church and, perhaps most importantly, help him appoint a pastor who would be a good fit for both St. Giles and the Family Mass Community.
At the end of one of the family masses at which he presided during a time when tensions were high, Fr. Dore commented that “the Church is big enough to include everyone.”
Or as Mary Susan Chen put it more poetically in a piece printed in The Vineyard:
Us
And them
Left
And right
Liberal and conservative
Right
And wrong
Who are “they?”
Over there.
So different from us.
And why do they always get it wrong?
How big is our church? …
How expansive can our church become
If we un-bind the Divine?
When the fear lifts like a fog,
The vastness can be seen.
