Loading ...
It’s a common refrain among new parents or the parents of young children. “Before I had kids, I used to get so annoyed with other people who let their children… (fill in the blank.) Now I understand more, and I feel bad for being so uncharitable.” I’d like to think that I’ve been more charitable with respect to children’s behavior. But I figured it might be an interesting experiment to record my thoughts on this matter now, so I can check back later and see if I have anything to regret.
I like to think I’ve always been pretty sympathetic to the needs of young families. When I’m on a plane and I hear a baby howling, I mainly feel sympathy for both parent and child. A break from routine is often upsetting for a baby. And what’s the poor mother supposed to do – take the kid outside? As far as the rest of the passengers go, well, that’s what headphones are for. In a hotel room, similarly, I don’t get too irritated if the sound of a crying child comes seeping through the wall. A blaring television or radio is a legitimate source of annoyance, but I understand that sometimes kids cry, and the parents are probably doing the best they can to restore calm.
There are certain settings in which annoyance at kid noise is justified. Nobody of any age should be brought to the symphony unless they are mature enough to sit still and absolutely quiet at all times when music is being played. (This would obviously exclude young children, but would also, unfortunately, exclude quite a few adults who seem unable to control the urge to whisper back and forth in the middle of a movement.) And since symphony-going is a treat, not a necessity, it’s reasonable to expect that young children (who wouldn’t enjoy it anyway) not be brought. The same rule mostly applies to movies, though a bit less strictly; some kinds of noise (primarily laughter, as well as popcorn-crunching) can be appropriate during movies, and particularly in movies intended for children, one has to be a bit more tolerant of kid noise. Even so, a small baby will not appreciate a movie, and if he starts howling, he should be carried out.
What about children at Mass? Technically, of course, young children don’t have to be at Mass; they don’t have a Mass obligation until age 7, and by that time they should be able to stay quiet for an hour a week. Still, few people leave their children at home until age 7, and there are plenty of good reasons for this. For one thing, the parents still have an obligation even if the children don’t, and it’s not reasonable to expect that parents should find a babysitter for every single Sunday and Holy Day. Conceivably parents could trade off childcare duties, with one going to an earlier Mass while the other goes to a later one. But this is troublesome (particularly if the distance to Mass is considerable), and people naturally tend to prefer that churchgoing be a family affair.
But finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of wanting to initiate one’s child into the parish and the faith through early exposure to liturgy. Being a convert myself, I obviously don’t have early memories of going to Mass, but I do have old memories of being brought to (Mormon) church, such that I can readily appreciate what an impression this can leave on a child’s mind. Mass is the primary way that we appreciate the liturgical year, and also the main thing that brings the parish together. We want our children to experience this early, so that their sensibilities are well-formed, and liturgy becomes like second nature to them.
Let me just say right now that, even granting the importance of this early-initiation, I don’t think there’s much wrong with leaving babies at home so long as this is practicable. A 3-month-old probably isn’t profiting much from being at Mass, and if there happens to be a relative at home who prefers to go to a different Mass anyway, and who is willing to tend the baby while you fill your obligation… accept the offer. Everyone will be happier for it. Most people, however, do not have this luxury. The bottom line is that, unlike the symphony, Mass is a place where we should legitimately expect to find people of all ages. And since, as Catholics, we obviously want to support families and welcome children (Our Lord seemed rather partial to them, after all!) we have reason to want Mass to be family-friendly.
In addition to this, though, some other considerations need to be mentioned:
1) Mass is a place for prayer and worship. Extraneous noise from the congregation is legitimately bothersome, and can diminish people’s ability to pray. I think too that parents sometimes underestimate the amount of disturbance their child is causing because they are so used to child noise that it doesn’t bother them all that much. For those who aren’t used to child noise, the distraction can be much greater.
2) It would be unreasonable to expect very small children to behave perfectly at Mass. However, reverent and prayerful attitudes towards Mass are presumably the ultimate goal, and that goal will never be reached if there aren’t some intermediate steps. Although I’m easily forgiving when I see a toddler struggling to be reverent in Mass, it’s hard not to feel some disgust when the same difficulty is exhibited by an eight or nine-year-old. (This is something, I should say, that I pretty much never see in a Latin Mass, in either form. But I certainly have seen it in some of the more, err, Spirit of Vatican II-happy parishes that I’ve occasionally had reason to visit.) Bringing children to Mass, but not troubling about their behavior there, is an excellent way to form their sensibilities wrongly.
My suggested compromise is that parents and non-parents both try to be reasonable, and as charitable as possible. Don’t be too quick to roll your eyes every time you hear a baby babbling or a whispered, “Mom!” Try to give the parents the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. On the other hand, parents should not go overboard with the “love me, love my child’s noise” stance that I sometimes hear from them. They don’t need to hang their heads in shame every time Junior makes a noise in Mass, but they should really be trying their best to minimize the disturbance. And they should be making an effort to instill the right kind of attitude by insisting that children not run, play, or converse in the sanctuary, and by refusing to carry on conversations (even whispered ones) while in church. (This is occasionally a difficult point for me, because I really feel it best to avoid chit-chat in the sanctuary even when Mass is not going on, but when a person engages me in conversation at the back of the church it can be hard to say, “can we step into the vestibule?” without sounding insufferably self-righteous. The problem is further compounded when my interlocutor can’t really step outside… because they are nominally supervising a child who is running through the sanctuary or climbing on the pews. Awkward.)
As an example of the wrong kind of attitude: the Doctor and I went to a lovely All Souls Mass this year, of the sort where all the stops had been pulled. The choir sang Mozart’s Requiem, there were scores of altar boys, and I’d never seen so many black vestments… you get the idea. It was quite an event. And, as sometimes happens for such events, it got an excellent turnout. The church was packed, with well over a thousand in the congregation. About the time the choir got to the Rex Coelestis a baby started howling. And howled. And howled. That child must have gone on screaming for a good fifteen minutes. It was a large church and the music was pretty loud, but I doubt that any of those thousand-plus people were unaware of the little darling’s unhappiness. Now, why in the world didn’t the caretaker of this child carry it outside? I can only imagine that this was one of the set of people who like to argue that children should be accepted as they are, etc etc, and maybe even thought that some salutary lesson was being learned by the annoyed people who kept glancing around to see what the problem was. Sorry, but I think that’s rather selfish. Why diminish the experience for hundreds of people when you could so easily just take the baby out for a little while, comfort her, and then (hopefully) come back again when calm has been restored? (Or, if the child is really inconsolable, it might be best to take her home anyway, or at least to take her downstairs for a bit more personal attention.) Like I say, I try to give parents the benefit of the doubt, to screen out most child noise, and to assume that parents are generally trying their best. It’s very rare that I leave Mass feeling annoyed about the behavior of the children. But parents… don’t push it. People will naturally get exasperated when it’s clear that you aren’t particularly interested in sparing others from the joys of your children’s antics while they are trying to pray.
Well, those are my non-parent views on children’s behavior at Mass. We’ll see if they change at all once I’ve had the pleasure of trying to quiet my own little ones through a Sunday liturgy. :)
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
It’s very rare that I leave a Clara article feeling annoyed. Whyever the “gender-careful” PC “caretaker” and “her” in the penultimate paragraph, when “mother” and “him” would have been the natural thing to say?
Funny, I usually am acutely sensitive to real or imagined causes of annoyance in Clara’s articles, and I noticed not a thing wrong with this one. So, Londiniensis, if this austere, curmudgeonly critic gives the post a pass, I can only conclude that your critique is baseless. Good article, Clara. Keep it up. :)
For some reason that particular baby was fixed in my mind as female, though I couldn’t actually tell you for certain. As for “caretaker”, well, it being a specific case, I didn’t want to assume that the mother was the one to bring the baby to Mass, when it might have been somebody else. Perhaps I’m particularly inclined to think this way since I still harbor hope that my husband
might at some point be entrusted with tending our children during Mass, so that I can sing with the choir. :)
Bonifacius, I commend you for your chivalry. I suppose that you have had longer in the States with PC-speak, so elements of it have crept under the skin of even cultured people. And this is the pernicious aspect of the zeitgeist. We can intellectually take stands against it, but bits if it make their imperceptible home in our subconscious minds, and when they surface we rationalise them away. Perhaps I am hypersensitive. Apologies if I have offended.
Post scriptum. Perhaps I am still seething over a fairly serious article I was reading recently. Every time one would have expected a gender-neutral “him”, the author (or his editor) had put “her”. I am but flesh and blood and it was more than flesh and blood could bear …
That may be a little diffcult, when the parish priest insists that parents who want their infants baptised must bring their children to mass, not only before the baptism but after wards. And when baptisms are performed after the 12noon mass to which the family must attend, including the infant.
What might be difficult? Leaving the baby at home sometimes? I can’t imagine many priests would be very bothered about it. When they ask parents to commit to bringing the child to Mass, it doesn’t mean they’re taking attendance every week; they mean that the parents should undertake in a more general way the obligation of raising the child in the faith. Obviously that means bringing him to Mass at some point, but I don’t think most priests would regard it as a breach of promise if the child was not consistently brought over the course of his very first year.
It does seem a little silly to me to to insist that the family attend the 12 noon Mass specifically in order to have the baby baptized afterwards. In our parish, baptisms are done after the noon Mass, but the Latin Mass, at which we normally assist, is at 10. I don’t know if Father would insist that we must be at the NOON Mass before a baptism, but he seems a sensible man, so it’s hard to imagine him getting too bothered about it.
For Londoniensis,
I generally do use the masculine pronoun for a gender-neutral case, but considered in the abstract it becomes a slightly complicated question, because I don’t think the rule you reference is even recognized anymore in significant portions of the population. In most parts of academia, they wouldn’t even regard the masculine as being gender-neutral, and most writers either use the feminine or else mix them up randomly. I can’t say that I approve of this alteration, but there is an extent to which grammatical rules depend on being widely recognized – if the audience for whom you’re writing doesn’t know or acknowledge the rule, how can you say that it’s a rule anymore? Grammar is an ever-fluctuating beast.
Regardless, I normally follow the older custom even in my academic writing, but not without exception. In this case, as I said, I for some reason had the child in question mentally fixed as female, which is why I unthinkingly used the feminine pronoun. And if I’m working a hypothetical example that involves two people, I’ll use the masculine for one and the feminine for the other, which only seems commonsensical. But I also occasionally encounter an oddity… sometimes when one is writing a “hypothetical” example, it’s pretty clear that it is actually oneself that one has in mind, as in, “Suppose a person desperately wants the last piece of chocolate cake, but knows that his doctor would advise him not to eat it.” Now, if in my mind I’m strongly identifying myself with the hypothetical person, it feels very odd to use a masculine pronoun, even recognizing that, at least at one time and in some circles, this would be seen as gender-neutral. So in cases such as this, I sometimes find myself slipping into the use of feminine pronouns.
A scholar that I know once suggested that, if we can no longer agree to use the masculine as the gender-neutral, perhaps it would be best to ask each writer to use the pronoun that would be appropriate for himself as the gender-neutral case. Men could default to masculine pronouns, women to feminine ones. That doesn’t strike me as such a bad compromise, to tell the truth, though I doubt we’ll ever get people to agree to that either.
Fascinating post, Clara. I can’t wait for the five-year update! (You see I want at least two kids included in a later analysis.)
By the way, as for the babe at your All Souls’ Mass, you just never know the situation. Maybe Mom took the toddler to the bathroom, leaving Dad with a wheel-chair bound five year old and the baby who just decided it was time for a feeding (even though she or he JUST nursed right before the service! – and what about a post on breastfeeding at Mass? I’m dying to know.) and Dad’s not sure how to negotiate steering the wheelchair and holding the crying baby in a packed crowd…and which bathroom did they go to anyway? (I know a family who was in a similar situation at a packed service at the Newark Cathedral.) Anyway, my point is just, when in doubt, caritas.
p.s. Was that hypothetical baby feminine because you’re picturing my little Eva?
Theologian Mom-you might have had a point in your former post, but your latter post made the argument too personal. No good discussion can take place on those grounds.
Clara-As always, an interesting post. What are your thoughts disabled-physically or mentally-and Mass attendance? Especially the mentally challenged-as a point of information-are they held to the same Sunday obligations as everyone else?
Oh, Bridget, thanks for your vigilance, but in this case you needn’t be concerned. Theologian Mom is just teasing a little. She’s an old friend so I can tell. But, while I wasn’t specifically picturing Eva (who I’m sure is MUCH too sweet to fuss at Mass ;)) the fact is that among my friends with babies, there seem to be far more girls than boys. So that’s probably why. Also though, when you look at baby or parenting books, the overwhelming trend seems to be to use feminine pronouns for babies. Not my choice, but it does make the default-use of the masculine feel much less natural than it would for Londoniensis.
As for the other questions… you are ingenious, Theologian Mom, and coming up with legitimate-sounding excuses, though in this case it’s pretty hard not to stretch. For one thing, that would have to be a looooong bathroom trip. I realize that toddlers can dawdle sometimes in the bathroom (or perhaps the older child wet his pants or somesuch minor crisis), but if a longer trip was anticipated, then maybe she could take the baby with her? I mean, even if the child wasn’t fussing before she left, it’s not as though crying is such a rare thing for a baby.
Anyway, I’ll grant that it’s just possible that some family encountered a rare, crisis situation that made it impossible to bring the baby out, but if the parents were just some of these people who insist that everyone should delight in their children’s presence at Mass regardless of mood or behavior (and I know that there are such people, because I’ve met quite a few), they need to realize that the loss to other people present was not insignificant. No doubt I’m particularly sensitive in this case because, while I wasn’t actually singing with the choir, it was actually my choir (that is, I’ve sung with them in the past and hope to again though various circumstances made it difficult to do so this particular season), and I know as an insider that they fought very hard in order to have this Mass, and worked hard to prepare for it. And as a member of the congregation, it was clear that the crying was detracting from the Mass to a significant extent. I won’t get all melodramatic and say that the whole thing was ruined – it was still a lovely event overall – but for those 15-20 minutes the level of unease and irritation was obviously steadily growing, and I wasn’t even sitting on the same side of the chapel as the upset child. Overall it was a deeply unfortunate occurrence, and this is why I felt like the story was worth telling, because I think it’s important to distinguish that there are times and places in which child noise really isn’t that big of a deal and people just need to get over it… and there are other times in which it actually is a pretty big deal. Parents and non-parents alike need to exercise some discernment, so that in some cases the non-parent can say, “well, yes, I was hoping for a quiet nap in the sun, but we are at a beach so I suppose some screaming and splashing is not out of line,” and sometimes the parent can admit, “my child is posing a significant burden on others and I should really exert myself to alleviate that.” And I’ve met plenty on both sides of the line who seem unwilling to make these kinds of concessions!
As for Bridget’s question… on face it’s a fairly easy question. No, the disabled aren’t subject to the same obligations as everyone else; insofar as their disabilities make it particularly hard for them to get to Mass regularly (or hard for the congregation to accommodate their particular needs) they can sometimes be excused from their regular obligation. But obviously it’s still good for all Catholics of age to come to Mass as often as circumstances reasonably allow, and I suppose your real interest is more in the question of how much disturbance a congregation should be prepared to endure for the sake of including a disabled person at Mass. And I suppose once again I’d have to say that there’s no easy or quick answer. I’m not willing to absolutely take one side or another, saying that, “Mass should be quiet and a person who can’t comply with that shouldn’t be there,” or on the other hand that, “everybody needs to be made welcome so whatever disturbance has to be endured, so be it.” If certain people are so disturbed that they can’t be prevented from shrieking, or running around, or possibly endangering others, then maybe they really can’t assist at community Masses. Perhaps a priest would be willing to say Mass for such a person privately from time to time, or something of that sort. If the distraction is comparatively minor, then the congregation should probably be willing to endure it for the sake of including a fellow Catholic at Mass. Or sometimes there might be middle-ground solutions (asking someone to tend the disabled person at Mass and gently take them out if they get particularly agitated, making sure they take their medications in the morning before Mass, etc etc.) But as in the case of young children, what’s needed is prudence and discernment.
The more evidence presented, the more inclined I am to concur with you that the baby in question here is a she. However, she will likely atone for her behavior some day by joining the choir.
The more evidence presented, the more inclined I am to concur with you that the baby in question here is a she. However, she will likely atone for her behavior some day by joining the choir.
What does this even mean? I’ll charitably assume you’re trying to make a light joke, although it’s often hard to tell here.
Discipule,
You had better mean a choir in a nunnery reciting the Office; women are not to be heard in church.
Good point, Bonifaci. How could I forget such a basic tenet!
Also, I was probably being a little hard on the child even according to my own logic because there usually is an uncommon cause to incline any child to cry for 15 to 20 minutes. In this case the caretaker, i.e. Dad, no doubt clumsily tied the baby’s Sunday bonnet way too tight. Elementary.
Is everything I write going to be deleted?
See this link about women in Catholic choirs at Mass:
http://books.google.com/books?id=PaonJV9NlKsC&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=women church choir catholic&source=bl&ots=DwhG_9ia9e&sig=HpHk5GIFi3Nr41tD9eSQiwKuNNk&hl=en&ei=s88ES8HEEs_ElAfd-tCqDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CA0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=women church choir catholic&f=false
Huh? When have I ever deleted anything you’ve written?
If you’re trying to post things with enormous links, the spam filter may be getting them.
Oh, sorry, Clara. I didn’t think you were doing it — I was trying to see whether a post without a ginormous link would manage to be posted. And it did manage to get posted. And then suddenly the ginormous link works. Go figure.
Well, all I can say is this: getting adequate liturgical music in ordinary parishes is enough of a struggle without excluding women. I don’t know quite what the argument is, but I don’t think it would be worth it. You would need a lot of musically trained boys to make such a thing work (because men have a lot more volume, the number of boys would need to exceed the number of men by a good margin in order to achieve the appropriate balance between the voice parts), and available boys are perhaps the scarcest resource at traditional parishes since they are also wanted to serve at the altar.
In out parish, there is a men’s choir that sings the propers while the mixed choir sings the ordinary. I’ve never heard anyone express displeasure at this arrangement.
“I’ve never heard anyone express displeasure at this arrangement.”
. . . until now. Long accustomed to breaking grade curves, I also delight in ruining absolute statements like, “I’ve never heard anyone actually say/defend/claim/argue/object, etc.” :)
Ah, but I’m afraid you don’t count, because you’ve never heard the goodness of our parish choirs! :P
But seriously. I have no objection to the resurrection of cathedral boys’ choirs or whatever, but this isn’t like eucharistic ministers (who really aren’t needed at all in 99.9% of situations) or altar girls (who again, aren’t needed the vast majority of the time because boys and men can fulfill those functions) – traditional parishes didn’t start including female musicians just as a concession to make women feel included in the Mass. They are needed. Getting enough competent singers to have nice music is a real effort for the great majority of parishes, and excluding women would, in all but the rarest cases, make decent 4-part singing effectively impossible.
But also, singing is not a quasi-sacerdotal contribution to Mass in the way that serving at the altar is. I think there’s a reason why even traditional parishes don’t seem very concerned about this.
I forget which saint it was, maybe Robert Bellarmine, but his mother would take him to church when there was no Mass. She trained him then to sit quiet while she prayed or did thee stations. Not everyone is so close to a church, as this saint was, to be able to do this, but it is one way to “train” the child to be silent.
Yes, you’re right, Clara, my example was a bit of a stretch… I just know that judging these things is an area where I’ve grown a lot. I always got annoyed with people who left Mass before the final blessing; but with our verbose pastor, I’ve had to do this at daily Mass a couple of times in order to get home so I can take my daughter to preschool on time. I hate doing it, but I think it’s better than foregoing daily Mass altogether.
Mike has a good idea though, and this is kind of what I’ve been doing with my elder daughter. When I leave for Mass in the morning she begs to go with, mostly just to get out of the house, I think. I let her come with me on Fridays, and the 25 minute Mass is a good training for Sunday Mass. It’s not that hard for her to sit quietly for 25 minutes. And her reward for doing so is to light a candle after Mass, so she takes it seriously.
Also, I was going to add that I am worried about our kids distracting people at Mass, and, unlike the situation you mentioned, I wouldn’t keep a kid at Mass who was obviously detracting from the liturgy. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that many people take delight in being distracted by my kids. And it’s kind of hard to teach them to sit quietly when ten different old ladies are making eyes at them, playing peek-a-boo with hymnals, and so on. I appreciate them entertaining my children in terms of the intention behind it, and it often keeps the girls quiet longer. But, on the other hand, then I feel like my kids will think the point of Church is to be cute for everyone in attendance. (Although, frankly, I prefer peek-a-boo to dirty looks.)
One other thing is that I’ve often had people tell me (sometimes after a VERY difficult Mass) “You know, your child’s noises might sound loud to you, but I hardly even noticed them.” or “It’s so joyful to hear your baby making little noises.” or “Parents are always more distracted by their kids than the people around them.” Perhaps these are just parents of grown-up kids trying to make me feel better. And perhaps they are a very small percentage of the congregation. Who knows – just thought I’d throw that out there.
All fair points, Theologian Mom. And in fact, I too have had people apologize to me after Mass for the behavior of their children, when I was honestly able to say, “Were they misbehaving? I didn’t notice.” I’ve also heard people complain about what seem to me to be very minor distractions (a baby’s soft cooing or gurgling, say), and wanted to tell them, “Oh, lighten up. It wasn’t a big deal.”
I don’t want parents to go around constantly feeling guilty because their kids’ behavior isn’t perfect. It’s one of those cases of, “if you’re genuinely trying, that’s good enough.” But I basically just wanted to make two points. The first is that the best answer to this sometimes-contentious topic is for everyone to try their best to be reasonable. That means canning the dirty looks, but there are also people who seem to feel that anyone who isn’t delighted with their children’s noise during Mass must be anti-family. That’s not fair. And that’s the only reason I wanted to tell the story from this All Souls Mass – not to be judgmental, but just to make the point that sometimes, the disturbance really is significant.
The other thing, though, is that it does a real disservice to the children themselves when parents are too laid-back about Mass behavior. I sometimes see very well-meaning parents who nonetheless seem to feel that it’s okay to carry on conversations with their children (whispered, but still very much audible) about what’s going on in the Mass. I get that it’s important to teach them about liturgy, but perhaps you could do that while watching a televised Mass at home? Because in addition to bothering people around you, this method also teaches them that it’s okay to talk through a Mass. Again, I sometimes see parents who seem to feel that it’s fine to let their kids romp around in the pews right after Mass playing with other children. These parents don’t mean to teach their kids disrespect, I’m sure, but the children obviously are not learning to regard the chapel as a sacred space when they’re playing hide-and-seek there. And how difficult would it be to suggest that the game should be taken into the vestibule, or downstairs, or outside? Like I say, I don’t want parents to feel bad about the fact that there’s a learning curve… but their kids do need to be learning the curve, because it won’t just come automatically. This is also a reason why the “children’s” Masses that I’ve occasionally encountered seem like a very bad idea to me. Mostly these just seem to be Masses in which it’s understood that the children aren’t going to be expected to be quiet or behave… with the result being, of course, that they don’t, and that they consequently learn not to take liturgy too seriously.
The suggestion about taking children to (shorter) daily Mass, or to pray in the chapel when there isn’t a Mass, seems very good to me. That’s a nice way to break worship into child-sized increments.
A cradle Catholic myself who has never stopped going to Mass I used to boast to my friends about screaming babies at church. Protestant churches always struck as dead places full of old people quite as the grave they were no doubt anticipating whereas Catholic churches always seems to have some kid going off at some stage or other. It was as if to me the Mass wasn’t valid unless there was a screaming baby at hand. It never worried me, distracted me or upset me. It struck me as healthy and I was proud of it. Now that was when I was in my teens and then my twenties at university. Now I am a middle age man with a young family of my own. I had been keen for my two girls to experience the fullness of tradition and bring them up in the traditional rite. My wife and I were married in the traditional rite and the girls were baptized the same. Regrettably dramas ensued when my wife and I took the girls to the one place where Mass is celebrated in the extraordinary form in our city. We haven’t really felt comfortable since. Net result we go to the parish down the road. It’s the missal of Paul VI which doesn’t really float my boat but they are orthodox and there are plenty of families. In other words a healthy parish that is preparing the Church for the future. People it’s not rocket science. No children, no future. I seem to remember Our Lord saying something about children more than once but I guess that a whole other post.
Latin Mass communities have zillions of children. They are, I grant you, unusually quiet children, but I’m pretty sure quiet children can still give us a future.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience at a traditional Mass, but please don’t be unfair to Latin Mass Catholics — they are far from anti-family, as their own rather large families prove. Liking children doesn’t necessarily mean liking to hear them throw tantrums in the middle of Sunday liturgy.
Wouldn’t having young children at mass depend more on the disposition of the pastor rather than members of the congregation
In a small church, where every sound was amplified an 18 month old started to fuss and make some noise.
Fearing she would disturb the liturgy, the father picked up the little girl and proceeded to walk out of the church (there was no narthex, or vestibule), lest she disturb the parishioners or the pastor’s homily.
As he(the dad) walked to the back the pastor, interrupted his homily and said to the father:
“Excuse me, where are you going?”
“Wha- I was taking her out so she wouldn’t disturb…”
“Is she baptized?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is your daughter baptized?”
“Yes”
“Then sit back down, she has the right to be here.”
I think if parents don’t know what to do, they should take there cue from the pastor.
Then there’s the story about the baby who started crying during Mass, and as his mother was carrying him out, the pastor said to her, “Please, don’t feel you have to leave. The baby isn’t bothering me.”
She shot back, “You’re bothering the baby!”
It seems to me very foolish for the pastor to make it an issue of “rights.” This is about prudence and consideration, not entitlement. Also… the sound of a child laughing or a baby babbling is one thing, but crying is another. By its nature it makes people agitated, seeming to signal that something is wrong. This is by design, so to speak… it’s the baby’s signal that attention is needed. But if you’re not the baby’s caretaker, hearing that sound (particularly if it goes on and on) can hardly help but cause a bit of anxiety. It’s not actually your job to do anything about it, but, like a siren or a ringing phone, it pushes a “something needs to be done” alarm in your brain and makes you feel anxious.
For the parent to step out and tend to the child privately seems entirely sensible.
I agree – either my husband or I always slipped out of Mass when our babies were fussing or crying. I wanted to leave because I felt so awkward I couldn’t concentrate anyway. We would sneak back in as soon as we could. We wouldn’t let our babies cry in restaurants, etc., either.
Last year at our FSSP parish, which is filled with huge families and lots of babies, we were told from the pulpit in no uncertain terms that crying babies were to be taken outside! Must have become an issue.
Responding to early portion of the blog post:
Today, parenting is as challenging as it ever has been. Perhaps some technology or health areas have become easier while social acceptance is becoming a greater challenge.
In public settings, such as airports, I have taken to providing encouraging words to loving parents traveling with small children. Particularly at the end of a flight that has a family with a fussy little one, I try to remark to the parent(s), once we are in the terminal, that their child is a treasure and that their parenting is a service to all of humanity.
Most are pleasantly surprised at these kinds of comments, particularly coming from a forty-something manly man. In my experience, their responses indicate that a few little words can be very helpful in easing the embarrassment or uneasiness that parents may have and also validate their positive decisions in building families.
To those who are annoyed by the public disruptions caused by our youngest people, I would like to say that one’s life cannot be complete, nor can one grow into a true wholeness and maturity in life, without having been a parent. I exercise this comment much less frequently!
On this day of Thanksgiving, I am most thankful for the privilege to be “Pa” to two young men and I am thankful for the growing and learning that has occurred in me as the result of my recognition of the awesome responsibilities of “Parent.”