Responses are from a women’s group lunch discussion held on June 16, 2022.
What are your dreams for the Church?
- I want women to become priests, for the church to focus on family, and for the church to be more open to help the poor.
- I want the Church to coordinate giving food, clothes from the parish run by volunteers, and to coordinate collection of food picked up from stores that give away produce and bread. My parish had a rotating schedule of offering shelter to the poor and needy.
- I want the church to be more interested in relating with different religions—Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim—like we have done with an inter-faith Thanksgiving service.
- We share a stretch of property with a synagogue, but little is going on, despite years ago when there was more exchange. What happened? There was a study of the Holocaust, and they invited us, but did we invite them to anything?
- Now, pastors don’t visit parishioners in their homes, as they did in years past. There is trouble finding priests and people to visit the homebound.
- We need to have religious services online because many people can’t make it to Church.
- More needs to be done for the elderly, with more outreach at the neighborhood level. If the Church wants people to come back, the invitation could be extended to both the Roman Catholics, and non-Catholics. Invite people to local events first, then they are more likely to come to Mass—not the reverse.
- Use of media needs to be developed—visuals at Mass on the wall, announcements.
- Priests could have training on giving a good homily, for example, giving 3 core words repeated, a lesson for daily living, applying a Christian theme. They shouldn’t just repeat what the gospel just said, but how does it apply to my life? I need more than the message, “be good.” We’ve read or heard the gospel already, so what does it mean?
- A lot of priests have become administrators instead of pastors. The Roman Catholic church seems cold, compared to some other faith traditions. Priests give instruction as though we never heard of the Eucharist, talking down to us, those of us who are regular church-goers. Priests don’t always have information about their parishioners.
- There’s always talk about Jews having too many laws. But priests and evangelicals can be caught up in minutiae, like what to wear. Women shouldn’t wear a sleeveless dress? They only notice men’s shorts. Their preoccupation is with women’s clothes.
