- How many children make their first communion in your parish?
This is usually one of the first questions a priest is asked when asked to talk about his parish. It seems that the answer will give us the measure of the pastoral health of the parish.
- ¡300!
- Wow, what a great parish!
- 5 o 6.
- Wow... and do you have a lot of weddings? How many families come to Caritas? Are the people in the neighborhood very old?
What is the true measure of a parish's health? What are the right questions to ask? Do we dare to ask them?
The simple number of first communions, baptisms, confirmations or weddings is hardly enough to fill in the data of the Pontifical Yearbook. It reflects the level of activity, but not the vitality or health of a parish; sometimes it can also serve as an anesthetic so as not to perceive the decline while we are busy.
Of course it is good to have 300 children in first communion, and 1000 would be better. The point is that what gives us the true measure of the strength of the Church is not the number of attendees or beneficiaries.
The other day I was talking to a priest friend of mine, and I was telling him that in my parish, of the 80 children in catechesis, only 3 or 4 regularly attend mass with their families. Most of the parents, in spite of the invitations we make to them, after the catechesis, instead of going to mass, they pick up their children and go... to skate, to go for a walk, to ride a bike, to some activity organized by the city council... This priest friend, who works in a school, told me: "I have to tell you that the children are not going to go to mass:
- That's the way it is, but at least they will have been with us for a few years and will remember that the priest was a stand-up guy and very nice...that's the impact we will leave in their lives.
I was a little mean:
- Yes, but the Lord did not tell us: "Go into the whole world, be nice, be liked by everyone and be remembered with affection...", but He said: "Go into the whole world and make disciples...".
Make disciples. This is the key. All of us who have given our lives to Christ forever, lay and clerical, married and celibate, all of us who follow Christ and are his witnesses have been and are disciples. Our following and commitment are not based on someone we liked; of course nice people help, but what made us disciples was that someone led us to Christ, someone led us to meet him face to face and taught us to listen to him; someone whose face and name we remembered, someone we trusted and who was our mentor, our teacher, our father in the faith; someone we counted on at any hour of the day; someone who sustained us with his prayer and taught us to pray; someone who was a priest, a layman, a man, a woman; someone who was a Christian aware that because he was baptized he had a mission; someone for whom the Lord was the center of his life and all areas of his life, someone....
Perhaps the right question to ask to measure the health of a parish is not how many children it has in first communion, but...: how many of those "someones" are there in the parish?
