Restless Pilgrim

A little while ago, one of my friends suggested that there should be a parish where there is a Young Adult Mass held every week for all members of the Diocese. The idea was that it would be really nice to have a place where the younger members of the Diocese could gather knowing that there would be lots of other young adults present. There would be superb music, excellent preaching and lots of young people.

There was a time in my own journey when I would have enthusiastically embraced this idea. In fact, in our Diocese we have a similar event each year, known as “Mega Mass”, where all the young adults come together and it’s very successful. However, I think that a weekly event would be extremely problematic.

No wrinklies allowed!

Aside from the politics of selecting a parish in the Diocese and personal preferences concerning music, establishing a young adult Mass would be difficult because it’s not like you could stop those who did not fall into the young adult age range from attending. As a consequence, if the young adult Mass were mostly made up of those outside the young adult age range, it is unlikely that it would attract many more young adults.

On the other hand, if the Mass did start to attract more and more young adults, I fear that it would end up depopulating other parishes of their young adults which I think would be disastrous. Something of this dynamic often exists naturally, with one or two parishes of the diocese being known as the “young adult parish”, robbing surrounding parishes of their young adults.  Who will be the next generation in these parishes?

My other serious concern with an idea like this is that it plays into a kind of ecclesial consumerism which we’ve seen very clearly in the Protestant world. Obviously, we want music to be good, preaching to be inspiring and for our churches to be filled with the young, but part of me can’t help but think that to enter into such an initiative would be to start training people to think that these are the primary things which should be used to determine what makes going to Mass important. It also sets up a problem further down the line because what happens if the music takes a bit of a downturn? What if the homilies get a little stale? What if the young adult population dips? There will always be some other church somewhere which does it better and if that’s what we’ve trained people to value most, why would they want to stay in the Catholic Church?

What are you thoughts? Would you ever want to see a Young Adult Mass every week in the Diocese?