When I was real young chicagopol, we had to go to the 8:00 “Children’s Mass” on Sunday and sit with our class. Our parish (St. Gertrude, Edgewater) dropped the practice about the time I was in second grade but they had another ruse to check on attendance. At the beginning of the school year they passed out boxes of little “Sunday Offering” envelopes. Each set of envelopes was numbered and the nun would record your number in a book next to your name. You dropped the envelope in the collection basket (typically with a nickel in it) and after they were opened and emptied, they sent the little envelopes over to the convent so the nuns could rummage through them to see who was at Mass and who wasn’t.

My grandparents grew up in St. Dominic’s parish just across the river from St. John Cantius. The church is still standing but it’s been shuddered since 1991. The old neighborhood (Swedish then Irish then Italian) was razed after WWII to make way for Cabrini-Green which in turn was razed to make way for gentrification (which seems to be on hold pending the end of the current economic crisis). If all goes well, St. Dominic may well serve a whole new class of people someday.

Midnight Mass at St. John’s is indeed a dramatic event. I’ve sang in the parish schola for over twenty years and leaving the church at 2:30 on Christmas morning is not unusual. Music has always been a major priority with us and skimping is out of the question. We have six choirs and all of them thrive to be the best at what they do. For anyone who feels that midnight Mass looks a little cumbersome, we have a full schedule of choral/orchestral Masses that occur on Sundays as well as holy days starting in the fall and running all the way up to Corpus Christi with a few additional Masses in the summer. You can find a link to it on [url=http://www.cantius.org/go/music/]this page[/url].