I'm a TRAD and I have NEVER heard of this behavior from any Catholic Church. Usually the Priest was at the Family's residence, trying to help. Visiting the sick and physically impaired. Just another way to destroy what's left of the Catholic Church and their belief in God.
I'm very happy that I attend a Traditional Catholic Church. Our church "Our Lady of Fatima" in Carnegie, PA has grown. We don't have enough pews! We have to put chairs in the isle's and sometimes there is standing room only!!!
Never been to or want to go back to the Traditional Catholic Church, click on SSPX Chapels in the menue on the left, and follow the instructions:
http://www.sspx.org/
That's a pretty inaccurate attendance-tracking method on which to base such a serious punishment. Methinks the priest did not think this one through.
Isn't this really explusing the kids who's parents don't put cash in the collection plate?
And....they attended together as a family.
However, I DO NOT agree with the arrogance of the leader of this parish to DARE to punish children and keep them from making Holy Communion becuase their parents do not attend church. Who does he think he is? Perhaps the pedophile priests should have been dealt with as severely as these families are being dealt with and then maybe children would not have been assaulted.
Personally, I would find me another Catholic Church with a real leader and not this pompous you know what!
Idiot priest. What if they regularly attended Mass at another Parish (maybe because they didn't like Fr. Cichon's homilies)? What if they didn't use the envelopes but instead put in cash? What if the parents used checkless banking and had the parish contribution automatically mailed to the rectory?
Lamebrained tactics like this really frost me. Fr. Cichon is nothing but a control freak. I hope the parishoners who fall into one of my categories above vote with their feet and enroll their kids somewhere else next year!
Pretty diabolical.
Out of the 100 or so parishioners who showed up for Sunday Mass this past week, I counted 2 who were under 30 years old.
My father was a pretty serious Catholic for whom missing Mass was indeed a mortal sin. However, he HATED the practice of using coded envelopes for donations (no bar codes in those days -- they had your name on them). His philosophy was that it was nobody's business what he gave or didn't give. He usually tossed a $20 bill into the basket, which I suspect was a pretty big donation in our middle class parish in the 1950s, but he would never use one of the envelopes. I guess by the standards of this priest, my Dad would have been a non-attender, and I would have gotten kicked out of Catholic school.
Well, "attendance" ultimately translates into dollars. There is also, I think, an element of "control" that enters in with some preachers or pastors. I found myself being shoved out by a preacher who preached several sermons within a two month period consisting of about one Bible verse and then the bulk of the sermon blazing away about how we ought to be attending all the classes offered up there. It is a very small church, my husband is in a leadership position (unpaid position). All well and good, but I have been very ill in the last few years with a heart attack, a TIA stroke, numerous hospitalizations for high blood pressure and then angioplasty, and also have chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia neuropathy and other symptoms that hits out of the blue.
I am almost sixty years old. I spent several years of my life in school. When I graduated from high school (with all due respect to those with multiple college degrees) I promised myself I would spend no more time with my legs stuck under a desk in classes. I had attended the preacher's night study classes for two years with my husband before I got really sick, and had also gone to the Sunday School lecture classes. His wife also had a "class" during the week that was more or less a lecture class and I think they both got their noses out of joint that I didn't continue attending after the first few months. (I tried to explain to her that I worked, that I did our statements and that if I didn't do the narrative statements, WE DIDN'T GET PAID, but it seemed to not be understood. My work was piling up and my house was getting to be a mess and I was walking out and leaving it to go to "classes". I finally decided doing my work was also "holy and sacred", as much as being their little pupil was!
At any rate, the last sermon of his that I attended that was short on Bible and long on orders to bring notebooks so that we could "take notes on his sermons", I just didn't go back except for a couple of special activities that my husband was involved in. I just have taken it as God's will. My husband still goes up there and I am going to a different church with no musical "performances and entertainment" which are big at the other church, and I am thankful!
I wonder what Jesus thinks about this...?
Might help end the Sunday School / Mass as free daycare mentality.
Welcoming and sensitive? It's not a club. It's one thing when parents have to work weekends and can't attend Mass, but another when Sunday is sleep in day. I've just finished my 8th year as a rel ed teacher. I teach 2nd grade. Which means we prepare kids for their First Confession. When I started, about 1/2 of the kids families attended Mass regularly or at least a few times a month. Now, most don't attend with any regularity except for maybe Christmas and Easter. And funerals. And for some of the most surprising reasons. The kids are young and may not have attended regularly up to that point anyway, but their parents? It is a real dilemma, teaching about Mass and it's importance and following the 10 Commandments and finding most parents aren't going to Church. As an aside, it's not surprise that many of the kids are unfamiliar with most things Catholic and many of the Bible stories and prayers we heard as kids. And the sacrament of Reconciliation is a whole other matter, most parents apparently aren't even going once a year by their own account. It does create a huge discrepancy and there is debate on how to handle it. I don't know what the short answer is, but I can certainly see where the Pastor is coming from.
Then the parents don't ever live the Christian life so all that teaching becomes in essences for naught. I think that more strictness like this should go on. Entirely to much laziness in our country, IMHO
Priorities. Seems to be a problem with Catolics.
Okay, I've thought this through now, and I think the pastor should let the children continue to attend R.E. classes if they have paid for them. However, he should not give First Communion to children whose families are not regularly attending Mass.
I really don't like the idea of keeping track of donations with bar-coded envelopes. I had no idea that was happening!
That's just wrong!
Also, the parents shouldn't be surprised that their kids were kicked out. Doesn't seem like they were setting a good example for their kids anyway. How can they expect the kids to take their religion seriously when they obviously don't.
While I recognize the good motivation here, it seems like the children are being punished for the sins of the parents.
I don't think that we need to re-invent the wheel, but cleaning up the priesthood, offering a greater variety of better music, and delivering a message (which is the same message that has touched Christians for 2000 years) in a way that touches people living in the 21st century is the way to get people back to mass.