While post-pandemic Sunday Mass attendance in the United States has increased, it has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Adoremus asked me to write about whether, post-COVID, parish Masses should still be televised or made available online. My judgment was that, while broadcast Masses help the sick and shut-ins, they have numerous downsides. I listed many but my concerns were primarily two: broadcast Masses gave people excuses not to return to their parishes by registering instead at Our Lady of the Bedcovers, and they promoted our culture’s anti-metaphysical, almost quasi-gnostic “virtualization” — an enemy of the physical. (See here for the Adoremus article.) Since I wrote that piece, I have grown convinced we have not thought out what our experience of broadcast Masses on a mass (no pun intended) scale told us. Some might say I am splitting hairs and the problem is apparent: people not going to church. I don’t deny that’s the problem, but it’s not the only one.

I have repeatedly criticized the bishops — both the USCCB and the Vatican — for not undertaking a serious post-mortem of what happened in 2020-21. (See here and here.) While the term mercifully seems to have been retired, the late Pope Francis told us the Church is a “field hospital.” Well, two things. First, if it is a “field hospital,” it was the first M.A.S.H. so totally to retreat from the battlefield in wartime. Second, after real hospitals suffer a crisis — a pandemic, a local mass shooting, a major accident — they perform post-event assessments of their performance. What worked? What didn’t? What protocols need changing? The Church “field hospital” CEOs — the Pope and bishops — insist in Panglossian fashion that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Given ongoing episcopal obstinance in grappling with their performance in 2020-21, the laity — as Vatican II affirms — should tell the bishops what we need.

One question concerns “commuting to church.” Granted, this is probably not a primary driver why people haven’t returned to church. But it is a factor. The return to the workplace is instructive. Depending on how flexible the job and needy the employee were, many workers were back in the workplace quickly. Some (truck drivers, stock clerks) never even left. But those workers provided an invaluable infrastructure to other employees — generally the management and cogitating classes that decided on the former’s fate — to stay off the job and be virtual. Two lessons: Those in need went back early (not unlike recourse to prayer in times of need) while those who had the freedom to prevaricate often indulged their “telework” options. Not unlike those indulging “tele-Mass” options.

America also saw a surge in retirements as some workers decided they’d had enough of the commute, especially its length and time. The social expectation to exert oneself to get to an obligation is weakening. The U.S. post-World War II urban model — work in center city, live in removed suburbs, move primarily by car — is changing. Like Mass attendance, big city commercial property occupancy has not rebounded to pre-2020 levels. New urbanism, an urban planning model promoting human-sized mixed function communities that emphasize proximity, is gaining interest. Again, without suggesting that people have not returned to Mass because of the “rigors” of the trip, there is much to consider here. How many families who would never dare to be late for enrichment classes or soccer practice always seem to have punctuality issues with Mass? Pastorally, we generally don’t make a big issue of it; at least they are there! But do we see the phenomenon as symptomatic of a greater “practical atheism” impugning claimed belief that the Mass is an encounter with the Living God? Is this phenomenon telling us something we don’t want to see, a practical disbelief in God’s liturgical Real Presence?

What else might the flight from commuting tell us? The canonical norm is the territorial parish, i.e., the parish, usually the closest, within whose boundaries one lives. Now, geography was never the sole criterion that attached people to a parish; the faithful’s construction and defense of national parishes, American episcopal antipathy (if not hostility) notwithstanding, is one example. The phenomenon of “parish shopping,” i.e., attending a parish because something about it is appealing that trumps added distance, is another example. Geography, nevertheless, has its gravitational pull. Living in Washington, I’ve wanted to attend the one Polish parish in the area but, with a 20-mile one way trip, that affiliation has worn down in favor of the territorial parish church.

Paradoxically, while contemporary urban planning is pushing against postwar suburban sprawl, the bishops’ mass consolidations, “twinnings,” and closures of parishes have in fact led to de facto parochial sprawl. Today’s territorial parish, while still nominally geographically one’s closest, is in fact usually further away than the territorial parish of the past. In many instances it’s not walkable, even if one wanted to, expanding commutes just as people want to cut back on them. We talk about the parish as a “community,” but episcopal mergers are producing mega-churches like our Protestant brethren. Except mega-churches by definition are not communities nor are they really attached to the physical community in which they are located. In fact, they reinforce the worst of “suburban sprawl.”

I’m not saying that the drive to church is the Sunday-attendance make-or-break factor. It is not. But it is a phenomenon that collides, in some sense, with the direction in which other aspects of modern life are moving. It’s really not about reducing the time. It’s about recovering Sunday as “the Lord’s Day,” its central raison d’être around which everything else we do (including getting to church) revolves. Secularization of Sunday has led to Mass becoming “another thing” to be wedged into the schedule (for which we have generously thrown in extra Saturday night hours to “make it count”). What we need instead is a Catholic cultural recentering.