What attracts us to the Mass?

There is, of course, no question about the motivation anyone should have for going to church: it is about two or more of us gathering in his name.

But I have often wondered whether there is a moral case for using incentives to get errant church-goers to gather in the first place. Or, for that matter, to get youngsters to want to go to church without being dragged there by their parents.

I read some time ago that a church in Melbourne, Australia, offered free beer afterwards to everyone who attended Sunday services.

I cannot recall whether it worked or not, but one thing is certain: more and more churches are resorting to incentives to get errant parishioners to attend.

Remember how in the old days threatening fire and brimstone was used? In the modern day and age this doesn’t seem to work anymore. Consumers have become a lot more canny and do not take kindly to threats. In any event the majority of the world’s population has no idea what brimstone is anyway.

I can fully understand the more conservative among us feeling decidedly uncomfortable about incentives, but perhaps there is a case for doing whatever it takes to get people who would normally not bother to go to church—just to come in once or twice with the hope that they would appreciate the joy, reward and inner peace that is a sure-fire consequence of two or more of us gathering in his name.

When I was at school in my earlyish teens, I was forced to get up early on cold winter mornings to cycle up the hill to serve at Mass. That did not endear the Catholic Church to me one bit, and I must confess to contemplating everything from Buddhism to Judaism. But I discovered that the one thing absolutely every religion has in common is that at some stage or other one has to get up at the crack of dawn.

Something that did endear the Catholic Church to me, however, was a phenomenon that occurred every Wednesday evening at the monastery parish in Pretoria. This was novena time—benediction basically.

It started off with no more than a handful of faithful attending, and then some of those faithful started dragging their children along by the ears.

Soon though, I am ashamed to say, we CBC boys discovered that Loreto Convent girls were also being dragged along to attend the novena. The challenge, however, was for the CBC boys to actually socialise with the convent girls after novena.

I am even more ashamed to say that in the absence of early teenage courage, this social integration took the form of both boys and girls squirting each other with water pistols.

Now, in those days no-one had real water pistols because I have the feeling that plastic hadn’t yet been invented. So what we did was use deodorant containers filled with water, the best brand being O-DO-RO-NO. This was not a roll-on or aerosol, but just a rubber bulb filled with a particularly astringent deodorant.

It wasn’t very big and had to be refilled several times in the roughly 15 minutes this post-novena ritual took place. And the only way to get the little spray nozzle out of the bottle neck was to clench it in one’s teeth and twist it out. All of this meant that one went home with an extremely tart taste in the mouth.

Needless to say, Wednesday night novena at the monastery parish became enormously popular and the church was always full to the brim.

The big question is this: did this experience have any effect on those teenagers in terms of both their Catholic faith and future attendance at Mass?

All I know is that for me it is an extremely fond memory, and I am delighted to say that I am still in frequent touch with at least three of those Loreto Convent girls, who are all pillars of their respective parishes.

Nowadays, of course, we don’t make a habit of going around after Mass squirting fellow parishioners with water pistols.

I have no doubt whatsoever that while accepting the main reason for going to church, one of the great by-products of it all is a sense of community.

In fact, that sense of community, of helping each other out, of being there in times of tragedy and sickness, is perhaps not so much a by-product of going to church, but one of the main reasons.

It is a little odd, I must confess, that every time I am dressing in a hurry and miss my armpit and spray deodorant up my nose, I think of church.

Do you have good stories about going to church? I would love to hear them. Write to me at The Southern Cross, PO Box 2372, Cape Town 8000, or fax (021) 4653850 (marked for my attention), or e-mail me at