“One Easy Trick!” for a better Sunday mass

Fun fact:  Catholicism and me go way back.  True, I didn’t make an RCIA profession of faith until graduate school, but Dad was Catholic (Mom Lutheran), so they were married in a Catholic church (St. Louis’s Old Cathedral, in 1966, in that in-between time, when the Tridentine mass had been translated into English, but not revised into the Novus Ordo), my siblings and I were baptized in a Catholic church (the now-closed St. Bede’s in Southfield), and, growing up, we alternated between Catholic and Lutheran services on Sunday, with greater weight given to Lutheran services and Catholic mass coming into play when we had something going on that necessitated convenience.

So I am certainly used to the Catholic practice of high-tailing it out of church the instant the closing song starts, or maybe after the priest walks past.  But that doesn’t mean I like it.

And, to be sure, the Catholic church we attended was particularly bad, and Catholics in general have improved — at my home church, for instance, at my husband’s behest, some years ago, the prior pastor began to linger at the altar so that he’d only start the outbound procession towards the end of the closing song.  But it drives me batty when we’re at a church where the pews have emptied out before the first verse is over, and, truth be told, there is still a fair degree to which I don’t feel myself to be “one of them” when it comes to my fellow Catholics, and this is a part of why.

But this is the answer:  a postlude.  A little bit of organ or piano or other instrumental music after the closing song.

That’s it.

It cues the congregation that “church isn’t over” until the postlude starts.  Protestant churches do this as a general practice.  The Catholic church we attended in Grand Haven had a postlude.  And the church by my parent’s house that we attended this past weekend, not the one I attended growing up but a different one roughly the same distance in the opposite direction, had a postlude.

And  everyone waited until the postlude began (in this case just a bit of organ music) to begin before leaving.

Now, if this was just the “best vacation church” (as I called the Grand Haven parish) I’d say this isn’t proof that the postlude is the “easy trick” because the priest was energetic and the congregation was enthusiastic in general.  But this weekend’s church?  They’d had to reinvent themselves a couple years ago when two parishes were obliged to merge, and the congregation that Sunday at 9:30 was relatively old, with only a few younger families.

So there you go:  spread the word.  Add a postlude.

(Oh, and I’ve been trying to add pictures for visual interest.  But “Catholics high-tailing it out of mass after the first notes of the closing song” as a search term doesn’t yield any good results.)