by Francis X. Bolton
In my mid-20s, I realized I should live alone for a while. It was a different time then, and getting my own apartment just off the Grand Concourse — 10 blocks north of Yankee Stadium — wasn’t going to cost much more than the apartment I shared a short walk from the stadium.
I sanded the floors, acquired some furniture, and settled in. The neighbors were nice but elderly. A few of them would sit in folding chairs in the long, shadowy walkway to the building’s entrance when I returned from Greenwich, Connecticut, where I taught high school. I’d occasionally sit and chat with them. Mrs. Goodman lived directly below me. She brought me half a chicken and chicken soup when I was home with the flu. I lived there for two years before I got married and moved.
I discovered, to paraphrase Genesis (2:18), “It is not good for [this] man to be alone.” My colleagues mostly lived 22 miles away in Greenwich, so we didn’t socialize. My fellow grad students mostly lived in the Bronx but were full-time students who did not work. Many of the people from my church community, including a number of long-time friends, lived in Manhattan.
NYU’s Catholic Center had a weekly coffee hour after the Sunday noontime artists’ Mass. That provided me with a social network. It is where my wife and I met, became friends, and eventually became a couple.
In his Nov. 3, 2023 “Letter to the Faithful,” Bishop Brennan spoke of the 40% decline in Mass attendance over the preceding five years “due to demographic changes as well as the overall national trend of fewer Catholics attending Sunday Mass regularly.”
I know of many young and middle-aged couples with families who have left Brooklyn because of unaffordable housing, and there are other likely causes for dwindling attendance — the pandemic had its own. Simply by looking around, I can see that Mass attendance is down.
A month or two after we resumed attending Mass in person, I called a friend from a parish in a different deanery — a 35-minute walk from our house. He told me that Mass attendance there was the same, or perhaps higher, as before COVID-19, and they gather at least monthly to converse and socialize after liturgy. So, it seems dwindling Mass attendance isn’t universal.
When my wife and I arrived in Brooklyn 50 years ago with our 1-month-old son, we walked down the hill to attend Mass in shifts at a church where our son was ultimately baptized. I was working on the top floor of our new house to prepare it for renting.
One Sunday, I walked up the hill to a different church because their Mass was half an hour earlier and half an hour before I needed to work on the house. I was greeted at the door and welcomed. The uphill church became our church.
These days, if we talk with people we don’t recognize at the back of the church after Mass, they are usually delighted. It often comes up in conversation that they don’t really know anyone. This is often true even for those attending our church for a few years.
Many years ago, I read an essay in “Theological Studies” in which the author said faith is transmitted from person to person, often through story. Jesus regularly taught through stories, which we call parables. He taught in other ways as well, like when he sat on a hillside and gave the people the Sermon on the Mount. Afterward, he gave them bread and fish. He socialized with them just like he ate dinner with Zacchaeus, the tax collector (who climbed a tree to see him), and with Martha and Mary in Bethany.
