TBD on Ning
hey jo, this sounds like a good thing
so this is a flash mob for mass..actually quite admirable...you could call it a mass flash....oh wait...that might give people the wrong idea....by the way they have a slideshow of pictures
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/us/at-forlorn-urban-churches-mass...
Catholics Mob Pews of Struggling Churches
CreditMichael F. McElroy for The New York Times
CLEVELAND — The glory days of Holy Ghost Church were years ago, when Catholics packed into the wooden pews, beneath a starry barrel-vaulted ceiling, listening to bells and kissing icons as priests in colorful robes intoned in ancient tongues the liturgies of a faraway land.
The congregation dwindled so much that in 2009 the church was closed, but on a bright Sunday this summer, Holy Ghost was alive again. Mary Matei, visiting from Knoxville, Tenn., snapped pictures on her iPhone as priests sang Mass, while Ann Cogar and Sue Koch, sisters from suburban Cleveland, admired stained glass windows and statuary.
They were taking part in a Mass mob — the latest trend in Rust Belt Catholicism — which is part heritage tour and part mixer (crudités in the fellowship hall followed the service). The movement is bringing thousands of suburban Catholics to visit the struggling, and in some cases closed, urban churches of their parents and grandparents. It is also attracting much-needed donations.
Named after flash mobs — spontaneous gatherings of crowds, often in a public place, to make an artistic or political statement — Mass mobs are spreading around the nation and taking church leaders by surprise. Fueled by social media, they are doing best around Lake Erie: In Detroit, nearly 2,000 people show up to visit churches that normally draw a fraction of that number; hundreds take part in Buffalo, where the movement began; and scores join the events here in Cleveland.
On the afternoon of the Mass mob at Holy Ghost, much of the city was watching a Cleveland Browns football game, which was blaring on the TV sets in the bars of the church’s gentrifying Tremont neighborhood.
But the worshipers fixed their eyes instead on an older kind of screen: a 24-foot-high, hand-carved Hungarian iconostasis, made of wood and gold, displaying recently restored icons. Behind the screen, and at times in front of them, priests in Eastern European vestments, including an eye-catching red and gold robe called a phelonion and a cylindrical black hat called a kalimavkion, celebrated a special Mass partly in sung Slavonic — a liturgical language used by some Eastern Catholic churches.
“It’s like walking back in history,” said Steven Kalas, 55, of Cleveland. “They’re so much more beautiful than the recent ones,” said Ms. Koch, 50, of nearby Medina, Ohio. And Marguerite Tetkowski, 56, of Cleveland, said with relief, “I was afraid it was going to be sold and converted into a bar.”
Mass mobs began last November in Buffalo, where Christopher Byrd, 47, was inspired by an initiative called a cash mob, which sought to support local small businesses by having groups of people patronize the same mom-and-pop shop on a particular day. Similarly, Mass mobs seek to draw large crowds to a single church in a demonstration of support for Catholicism and its most beautiful — and often needy — churches.
“There’s a generational disconnect between when these cities emptied out and got blighted, and the young people who want to rediscover these roots,” Mr. Byrd said.
After an Associated Press article described the Buffalo effort, Mass mobs sprang up in other areas, with varying success. There have been efforts in Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Covington, Ky.; Fairfield County in Connecticut; Kansas City, Mo.; Manchester, N.H.; New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Rochester; and Wilmington, Del. But they seem to be doing best in Rust Belt cities where the long-term decline in attendance at Mass — a national phenomenon — has been worsened by deindustrialization and suburbanization.
“The parishes are still there, but the population isn’t,” said Mark M. Gray, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. “Every bishop is hesitant to close parishes, because for a lot of people their memories are there, but that leaves these empty buildings.”
Although most of the parishes visited by Mass mobs are still open, several dioceses have granted permission to hold special worship services at closed churches, including at Holy Ghost in Cleveland, which was built to serve immigrant Catholics from the Carpathian Mountains and is now a Byzantine Catholic cultural center.
“We want to show that these parishes do have value — to the people within them, to the greater community and to the city itself,” said Stanislav Zadnik, 54, a union electrician from Parma, Ohio, who has organized the Cleveland Mass mob movement. “It’s a grand shame to make them go extinct.”
Several dioceses are now helping to promote Mass mobs through their newspapers and social media, and some bishops are openly welcoming the effort, particularly in Detroit, the metropolitan area that has lost the most Catholics since 1950. A side effect of the Mass mob phenomenon is that people often donate during their visit: An organizer of Detroit Mass Mob, Thom Mann, said participants had given nearly $100,000 to the six churches visited thus far.
Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit has recorded a video celebrating the idea.
“It seems to me there is a real interesting mix of the old and the new,” Archbishop Vigneron said in an interview. “It’s driven by the latest, up-to-date social media, and yet it’s using that to work toward some pre-media goods.”
He added, “It doesn’t bother me that there might be some kind of touristic curiosity, because people through that are led to be in touch with God and with one another.”
The effort is morphing as it matures. The Fairfield County Mass mob campaign in Connecticut is the first in a suburban diocese; organizers note that even in an area known for leafy affluence, there are old, struggling parishes and disconnected Catholics. In another variation, in Louisiana, the Mass Mob of Greater New Orleans, begun by the faculty of Archbishop Chapelle High School in Metairie, has focused on introducing suburban high school students to urban parishes.
Elizabeth Davis, 47, of Harmony, Pa., decided to start a Mass mob in Pittsburgh after hearing about the group in Buffalo. Her first effort, organized via Meetup.com, drew 25 people and the second about 50. Now, by reaching out through a Catholic women’s organization and youth programs, as well as to members of a historic preservation group, she hopes to hit 150 later this month.
“These beautiful old churches were built by our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and to see them close is really sad,” said Ms. Davis, who is also raising six children and finishing a college degree. “We have 2,000 years of tradition, and it’s time we get excited about it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/us/at-forlorn-urban-churches-mass...
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Permalink Reply by crestofwaves on
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I would do this definitely. Maybe I should start one here. The church that I attend when I do attend also has such a dwindling population, maybe God will bestow a few extra prayers on me. This is neat. Instead of a flash mob to pillage and loot, a mass mob is headed in the right direction.
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