(Formatting will be uneven for the next few posts. I’m using a friend’s computer, and apparently Safari can’t handle Typepad’s formatting functions.)
Over the weekend I used http://www.masstimes.org to find the nearest parish that offers Saturday morning Mass. I found one, quite close, and drove there at 8 AM Saturday. What I found interesting: The church has a sign out front that says, “Mass Times: 5 PM Saturday/10 AM Sunday.” That is, it advertises the Sunday services — but there’s no mention of the daily Mass offered there.
Now why is that? There’s plenty of room on the sign. And the daily mass schedule is perhaps even more useful than the Sunday services on a church’s front sign, where the people who, you know, drive by regularly can see it. I’d wager that people who attend weekday masses tend more often to attend at a place and time that’s convenient to work into their schedule: it’s on the way to work and offers Mass during rush hour, or it’s near work and offers Mass at noon, or it’s near the children’s school and offers Mass at nine-thirty, or something like that. And the easiest way to know is to see the daily mass schedule posted on the sign outside the churches that you actually pass every day. Besides, not every parish does offer daily Mass, so it’s good to know which ones do.
I just don’t know why they wouldn’t advertise it. The same argument goes for scheduled Confessions, by the way.
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