Toddlers & Mass

I'm someone who actually enjoys going to church. I like the spiritual fuel, I like the community feeling, I like the tradition, I like the routine, I like all of it. Granted, I like it a whole lot more now that we're back in Milwaukee and going to our old church where I enjoy listening to the priests and feel good about what they're saying. However, I honestly do like it.

Unfortunately, that's changing. Bringing our son Philo to church has made it more of a chore than it was before. He's fourteen months old and is a highly active, high-energy, extremely curious kid. He doesn't stop moving and exploring when he's at home, and he doesn't see any reason to stop once we enter the church. Our church has a small crying room and we just sit in there, and usually Mass is hectic, but do-able.

Today the crying room was extra-crowded and there were a few little babies who were at the crawling stage. Philo was being nice, but at fourteen months he isn't capable of understanding how to be careful or avoid stepping on a baby's hands. Mike and I left the crying room before he could trample one of the babies. After it became clear that he couldn't sit still in the pews or confine his explorations solely to the church foyer, Mike took him out to "God's crying room" (a nearby park). I followed them soon after.

I was frustrated. Other parents, including some of my friends, get their kids to sit through Mass and they piously tell me that it's necessary to get kids out there in the pews so they can get used to sitting there. But those kids, I think, can be bribed to sit still with food or toys. Philo doesn't care about food or toys. He cares about RUNNING. I suppose I could force him to sit, just hold him down until he stops crying, but that wouldn't be pleasant for the other parishioners or for Philo. And it wouldn't be fair to him, either. He's not bad, or undisciplined, he's just energetic. As I walked to the park I mulled over how unfair it was for Catholicism to expect us to have a bunch of kids and then make it so freaking difficult to get through Mass with them.

I talked with Mike about what might be going wrong. Were we bad parents? Was Philo a bad kid? Why didn't we see other kids like him, kids who wanted to run and shout during Mass? Even the kids in the crying room were pretty quiet and content to sit. Was something wrong with him?

My mom called after church and I asked her how on earth she kept us contained in church when we were Philo's age. She confessed that when we were toddlers our family just didn't go to church - in fact, we took a church hiatus until my youngest sibling was about two or three years old. She said that sitting through Mass with toddlers was just impossible. She then said that my grandparents, the two most hardcore Catholics I know, didn't take their kids to church during the toddler years either. Instead one parent would attend the early Mass and one would attend the later Mass, leaving the other parent at home to care for the kids.

I began to suspect that I knew where the kids like Philo were - they were at home.

I don't know what to do to fix the problem. Actually, I do have one idea. One of the parish churches has a big hall downstairs, and the few times I've been there with Philo I've thought about how nice it would be to have a PA system down in the hall so I could hear the Mass while watching Philo dash from one end of the hall to the other.

No amount of discipline is going to make it pleasant for a highly active toddler or the toddler's parents to sit through an hour-long Mass. The church should find a way to make it easier on the parents, otherwise parents with active toddlers will just keep staying home.

Getting to church

I was home sick today, which meant spending some quality time with Comedy Central. I watched a comedian named Richard Jeni who was brought up Catholic. One of his jokes involved getting the audience to indicate via applause how many believed in God, how many were Catholic, and how many attended church every Sunday.

Guess which category got MUCH less applause than the other two.

"So you all believe that there's a man with a big white beard standing outside some pearly gates, and his friends are all people with wings, and his arch-enemy is this guy who wears a red suit. And the part you can't believe is that you have to get up early on a weekend," he said.

Now, Jeni isn't a practicing Catholic. But he does have a good point. Out of all the things Catholics believe in that others don't - Papal infallibility, praying to patron saints, receiving indulgences, and other things - the idea that I really, really have to be there every weekend is the one thing I have trouble with.

Before we had Philo we were excellent about making it to church. Even when my morning sickness forced us to attend a 7 PM Mass at another parish because I was vomiting too much to attend the morning Masses at our church, we were at church every Sunday. And even after we had the baby and still lived in Milwaukee we made it to church consistently, even though sitting in the crying room was more like sitting in the stands at a football game than attending a church service. But since we moved here we've had trouble finding a good church to attend. We nixed one because there was no crying room, and Philo was at an age where he was as likely to scream as sleep. We're currently attending a church that I'm not crazy about because the congregation seems cold and the priest likes to talk about suffering and sin. That's important, sure, but I'd rather be inspired to be a better Catholic than bullied into it. So we haven't been as diligent about it lately.

That doesn't mean that we haven't been gettin' our churchin' at all. There's actually a televised Mass put on by the Milwaukee Archdiocese on Sunday mornings. We love the priest and we actually look forward to hearing his sermon every Sunday.

Which only makes it all the more heartbreaking to go to actual church on the Sundays where I feel too guilty to watch Mass on TV.

We need to find a new church.