Last night I went to Mass at a local Catholic Church other than my usual parish. It’s a good parish, where a friend of mine who is a priest often says Mass. This priest is an excellent homilist, and I was delighted when he came out to do the homily last night.
Unfortunately, I basically heard none of his homily. The priest himself was heroically battling with the sound system, which was misbehaving, but that wasn’t the major problem.
The major problem was that there was a father with a young baby walking up and down in the world-class echo chamber that serves as a vestibule for this parish, and the baby was exercizing the full capacity of its lungs.
It was also crying so loudly that it occasionally threatened to set off rounds of sympathetic crying among other babies in the congregation.
I was sitting in the back, and the baby positively destroyed my ability to hear anything that the priest was saying. I suspect he did so for much of the congregation–perhaps all of it.
Now, I don’t mind a little bit of baby tearfulness in the congregation, because it signifies two good things: (1) there are babies in the congregation and (2) their parents are religiously active. Those are two wonderful things, and I normally smile and remind myself of them when I hear a baby sounding off during church services.
But when a baby is totally out of control, his parents need to do something, because they do have some responsibility not to allow their child to ruin everybody else’s ability to hear.
Taking the wailing infant into a large, tiled echo chamber is not among the most responsible things I can think of to do in such a situation.
The ushers were quite useless in this situation. Indeed, though they were standing right in front of the doors of the nave, they didn’t even close the doors to the echo chamber for several minutes, lest the young father feel excluded, which made it impossible for the congregation (or much of it) to hear the priest’s Christmas Eve homily. Finally, they did close the doors–which are quite thin and so provided next to no relief from the sound.
"Perhaps the person minding the baby would like to know that there is a cry room," I suggested to one of the ushers.
"I think he knows," the usher replied, indicating that he would do nothing to alleviate the situation. "It’s too cold to go outside."
"Oh yeah," I thought to myself. "This is Southern California. It’s in the 50s outside and there is a think blanket of Christmas FOG in the parking lot. I didn’t even have to turn on the heater in my truck on the way over. That baby will really get sick and die if the father takes it outside for twenty seconds so that he can take the face-saving route to the cry room instead of having to walk in front of part of the congregation."
The ushers having determined to be useless and the baby continuing to destroy everyone’s ability to hear the homily, I *almost* took matters into my own hands to kindly and politely and warmly and helpfully inform in the young father that there was a cry room on the premises, but the homily ended (meaning that we were now in a part of the Mass where the congregation could at least roughly follow what was going on by memory) and the child seemed to settle down anyway.
I admired the priest for being able to soldier on with his homily under these conditions, beset as he was on two fronts (the baby in the echo chamber and the sound system’s refusal to behave). I was a little surprised that he didn’t pause the homily to gently invite the use of the cry room to help with one of these, but he soldiered on anyway. (And, yes, I know the reasons he might not want to.)
Yet I was disappointed that I didn’t get to hear the Christmas Eve homily of a particularly good homilist.
But I was able to read one!
This morning I discovered that the folks who do the Vatican web site have (mirabile dictu) put THE POPE’S Christmas Eve homily online–and he’s a good homilist, too!
HERE’S THE LINK.
I was interested to compare what the pope actually said with the highly political reading given to his homily in THIS REPORTAGE (which is better than most you get). The pope’s homily wasn’t just about stopping war and abortion. It was much more focused on Christ and the spiritual meaning of Christmas than the political stuff the press is interested in.
Which is as it should be.
So all seems right in the world: There are good homilies out there for Christmas Eve. There are babies with excellent lung capacity. There are echo chambers for those who need them. And there is a surplus of cry room space for those who wish to use it.
YEE-HAW!
