Church Every Day: Why 1% of Catholics Feel Called to Daily Mass
What really happens at Mass? Why can’t we just watch it on TV?
My father and Officer Richard “Rod” Wedding outlived nearly all the men they worked with. Wedding had one standing request each time they hit the streets together:
Stop at St. Clare Montefalco Catholic Church on Mack Avenue, the dividing line between Detroit’s tough east side and suburban Grosse Pointe Park.
Officer Wedding would go into St. Clare, say quick prayers for guidance, and go back to work. Around 1 percent of Catholics feel called to attend Mass every day, something suddenly unavailable — during Lent — as the coronavirus pandemic forces shutdowns globally.
In my native Michigan, the churches are closed, and the governor banned all public gatherings of 50 or more people. Several non-Catholics were disgusted when the state lifted fines for churches violating her ruling. Why can’t we watch Mass on TV?
The true religious meaning of the Mass follows:
How I wound up at Daily Mass: Why go if you don’t have to?
When I worked at the University of Michigan, we had an intern named Daniel. He mentioned something about going to Mass at St. Mary Student Parish before work. He told me: “I go to Mass every day.’’
I looked at him, puzzled, like he was insane. Who goes to church every day? Did he want to be a priest or something? Fast forward to 2014: My attitude quickly changed as business was crashing, and a partner had the gall to call me a jinx.
I resolved to start a 40-day Novena, stopping at Church each day to pray. About a week into this routine, I decided to pray with the people who were already going to daily Mass. The new habit stuck.
On Day 40, I checked my voicemail and heard a voice from a Catholic ministry tell me she’d been praying, and I’d come to her mind. Would I be willing to meet about taking on a new project?
Daily Mass is a little like taking a shower
You might not feel you need to take a shower or shave every morning, but the one day you skip the habit, you’re likely to notice something feels a little different throughout the rest of your day. Go a second day and a third, and that sense will grow exponentially. It’s how we feel about missing Mass.
Something doesn’t feel right…
Get back to taking your showers, and you feel clean, fresh, and new again. After getting into the habit of showering or attending daily Mass, you don’t want to go back to once a week.
Masstimes.org helps U.S. travelers find the nearest daily or Sunday Mass. If you’re late for one Mass, another is likely to be starting soon after.
Matthew Kelly’s life-changing challenge
Matthew Kelly, the founder of Floyd Consulting and Dynamic Catholic, says there is one way to change your life instantly: For just one week, try going to daily Mass every day.
Your identity and mission: Why daily Mass changes everything
Whatever you do for a living, imagine if you could start your day with a meeting with the ultimate boss and authority on anything and everything you care about.
You sit down face-to-face and have a conversation. Get some guidance.
You ask: What’s the most important thing I can do today? What do you want me to do? Right now? What’s the secret? How will I get the most out of life? Can you please help my family? And can you help resolve my biggest worries and fears?
Sunday Mass is an obligation of being a Catholic. Going to daily Mass is a choice
When you go to Church on a Sunday or Saturday evening, churches are packed with families, many there knowing they are supposed to go. The obligation has been lifted during the Corona Crisis. I used to think I would “look bad’’ if my family wasn’t with me at Mass like something was wrong.
The daily Mass people are a much smaller group. They are more likely to go alone than with a loved one. They aren’t there as a family activity or as something to do with friends.
They’re there to talk to the One...
They’re there to get that face time. To be with Him, to love Him and to literally join with Him through the Eucharist.
“The majority of Catholics in the United States are sacramentalized but not evangelized,’’ author Sherry Weddell explains in Forming Intentional Disciples. “A disciple’s primary motivation comes from within, out of a Holy Spirit-given ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness.’ All things serve and flow from the central thing: the worship and love of the Blessed Trinity with one’s whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and therefore the love of one’s neighbor as oneself.
Pope Benedict XVI stressed: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
On Election Day 2016, I pulled up to St. Patrick Catholic Church and the place was packed: more than 500 people were there that morning praying. Our parish is powerful because we typically have 200 people at daily Mass while many parishes attract just a handful of people to their daily Masses.
Mass is — literally — making love
Catholics join together with Jesus, receiving His Body and Blood at Mass.
Simply watching Mass on your TV or computer is not the same as celebrating it with a community of the faithful.
On Holy Thursday, Catholics around the world will celebrate the anniversary of the Last Supper, when Christ and His Apostles founded the priesthood and the Eucharist, beginning a tradition that is repeated every hour of every day around the world: the Mass. The daily Mass is shorter Monday through Saturday and longer on Sunday but no less powerful or meaningful.
Why a Mass is the world’s most powerful prayer
Why do some Catholics need to go to Mass the way they need to breathe or take a shower every day? What’s the world’s most powerful, most miraculous prayer?
The Catholic Mass, Father Michael Gaitley answers.
Every Mass, made up almost entirely of Divinely-inspired language from the Bible, includes the miraculous gifts of transforming bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. But Father Gaitley explains that each Mass contains a miracle fewer of us notice:
The miracle of uniting us with Christ and to one another.
“Scripture tells us to be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48), but where and how can we possibly be perfect?” Gaitley asks.
“We Catholics have the Mass and that’s where our prayer becomes perfect. In the concluding doxology of the Mass, the priest holds up the transformed presence of Jesus Christ and proclaims: ‘Through Him, and with Him, and in Him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.’
“At your baptism, you share in the priesthood of Christ because you too are able to offer spiritual sacrifices to the Father.
“We can also say the Divine Mercy chaplet is an extension of the most powerful part of the Mass when we say ‘Eternal Father I offer you the body and blood, soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son.’ Jesus told St. Faustina ‘it wounds My heart when people ask for so little ‘cause I want to give much, so very much.’
Well, the perfect sacrifice of Jesus is made present at consecration in Mass. Wine becomes blood, bread becomes flesh. When blood and bread are separated that’s death… the sacrifice on Calvary. And I say on your behalf we are united ‘through Him, with Him in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The perfect sacrifice is offered by all of us as we go to Heaven with Him at that moment and that’s when our prayer becomes perfect because it’s wed to the perfect sacrifice.”
Mary, Father Gaitley notes, gave us the gift of her Son Jesus, our Savior, who gave us the gift of salvation, then Jesus from the cross gave us Mary as our mother.
St. Thomas Aquinas defined salvation as two things:
- Redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. Protestants, Father Gaitley notes, primarily describe salvation as the forgiveness of our sins. We are saved because of salvation.
- Being Glorified. The second great gift of salvation, Father Gaitley adds, is the rarely-discussed gift of Divinization, being glorified via salvation.
Through salvation, God “raises us to His level. The Early Church Fathers used to say, ‘God became man that man might become God.’ The Eastern Church calls this ‘the Great Exchange.’ This aspect that we are divinized really ticked off Satan. We are low, but by grace, we are raised higher than the angels…We are also predestined to become formed to the Image of His Son (we are predestined to be part of something great, yet we have total freedom to accept or reject that call. We are not merely saved from a horrible fate but saved for something great).
“We become sons and daughters in the Son, we ‘Become the Body of Christ.’ When we are Baptized, we are transformed into the Body of Christ. We become, in a certain sense, part of the Trinity, sons and daughters with the Son…
“Concluding the doxology of the Mass, when the Son goes to the Father, we go through Him, with Him and in Him in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Angels are the spectators in awe of what God has done for man through Christ. Do angels get to receive the Eucharist? No…
“God is love and the unity of the Mass brings us into His love. The angels stand in awe of the Divine Mercy given to man… We’re not the head of the Body but we’re part of it. If we are transformed into Jesus, then Mary is our mother because she is the mother of Jesus and the Mother of the Body of Christ, which is the Church, so she is our mother.’’
Pull Over! Did my dad’s daily stops at the church help save lives?
Did those prayers rub off on my dad? In 1970, Dad, then 28, was parked, sitting alone on Kercheval Avenue in his big old Plymouth Fury squad car, waiting for the day shift to end, when a car passed:
It was a man driving with a boy in the passenger seat. Father and son?
No. The boy “shot a look” toward my dad, literally a quick look (not saying a word).
Instantly, an attention-grabbing word describing contemptible men who force themselves on others (a single word of knowledge?) flashed into my dad’s mind. It was a coarse, blunt, and vulgar word, my dad, seldom, if ever, used, so hearing it immediately jolted him into action.
Dad turned on the flashers, hit the siren, and gunned the Fury, pulling them over. Dad got out of his squad car and radioed his position over his portable Motorola Prep Radio.
The driver rushed out of the car as the boy opened the passenger door and rolled onto the ground, shouting “He’s got a gun! He’s gotta gun!”
Everything then clicked perfectly:
Instinctively, Dad shouted the single word he’d just heard to himself. Hearing Dad shout that one word of street language somehow shocked the driver.
Dad threw his prep radio at the advancing driver, hitting him in the face, and stunning him.
Dad grabbed the driver’s gun (a .38 snub-nosed revolver), and handcuffed him. The driver quickly admitted to being a pedophile who had driven up to, kidnapped, and molested at least 27 different boys at gunpoint (one at a time over a long period).
How did my dad know? Why did the driver confess immediately? Everyone wanted to know how Dad knew. For the third and final time, Dad heard that coarse word. Dad just said he wasn’t sure, that it was mainly a feeling, something that shook him into acting.
Catholics unable to attend Mass may pray an Act of Spiritual Communion:
My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.