My mother walks five miles each Sunday to attend church

Catholic Campus Ministry
Stockton College
Pomona, New Jersey
October 7, 2007


Tonight I am attending a Sunday evening mass at my husband’s workplace – after he left the Presbyterian ministry to become Catholic, he was offered a job at the campus ministry center at Stockton College. He facilitates a Newman Club on campus, and assists the priest assigned to the center, who presides at a mass on Sunday evenings.

The Catholic Campus Ministry is housed in a very attractive new building on the outskirts of the Stockton campus. When Neil first came to work there, the priest was an older man who had multiple health issues and was in a wheelchair. Not, you might think, the most obvious choice for campus ministry. He was quite energetic in spite of his physical limitations, though, and was especially interested in redecorating the building. Even though it was almost new, he had lots of stuff done – repainting, new furniture, and quite a bit of new art on the walls. The services are held in a largish room with folding chairs, seating about 50-75 people. Father Pat ordered lots of framed pictures of the Virgin and Child for this room, in addition to a good bit of other religious art. The interesting thing about the Virgin pictures is that each depicts Mary as of a different nationality – there’s a Vietnamese Virgin, an African Virgin, a Mexican Virgin, a Native American Virgin, etc. There’s a Jewish Virgin fleeing World War II concentration camps, attempting to save a little endangered Holy Child from the ovens.

I think these pictures are really interesting, and most of them are quite lovely. The Vietnamese Mary is stunning. Neil doesn’t like them as much as I do, because he says that they make it seem as though Mary is just a general idea of Motherhood rather than a particular, real person of a particular place and time. Actually, this seems to me like another version of the common tension between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of people’s actual experience.

At any rate, Father Pat eventually became too ill to continue, and the Diocese of South Jersey brought in an African priest, Father Grace, to take over his duties. This is another thing I’ve been noticing a lot about the American Catholic Church. In many of the churches I have attended the priest is a foreigner – often Vietnamese, Filipino, or African. It seems as though the Catholic Church in this country has at least one thing in common with some other employers – they have to bring in foreigners to do the work Americans don’t want to do.

Father Grace is Ugandan, and very, very nice. He tells me about his mother, who walks five hours each Sunday to attend mass – two and a half hours each way. It seems there is a shortage of priests in Uganda, too. (Do you know of any Americans who would walk five hours each Sunday if that were the only way they could attend mass? There must be some, but I bet there aren’t very many.) Father Grace is eager to see snow for the first time, and I think he will get his wish this winter.

The mass is attended by some local folks, a few faculty members, and a small number of students. It’s very quick; the sermon is good but quite brief (about 5 minutes), and it doesn’t take long to administer the sacraments to 70-75 people.

Later Father Grace loaned me a videotape of a service in Uganda. It was a big gathering – I think for the installation of a bishop. The service took hours – much longer than the three hours or so they got on videotape, and included lots and lots of singing and dancing. The participants seem to be having an absolutely fantastic time.

I’m sure it’s not a typical African service, but even if normal African masses are just one-sixteenth as enthusiastic as the one on the tape, Father Grace must think that we Americans are the dullest people on earth.