• 4 p.m. or later on Sunday, Dec. 24, or sometime on Sunday, Dec. 25.
Since few churches have afternoon Masses on Christmas Day, in most places that means going to Mass on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning and then going again either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.
It’s A Good Thing
Monsignor Panke is trying to emphasize that this scheduling is a good thing spiritually.
“You’re blessed. You get to go to Mass twice this weekend,” Panke has been telling parishioners.
He has also reminded them that the money taken in at each Mass matters.
“The most important thing that we want to do, though, is to get people to two Masses this weekend. It’s important,” Panke said. “The collection is certainly secondary, but not unimportant, because it helps with the mission of evangelizing and preaching the Gospel.”
Fewer donors, but giving more
Manion conducted a recently published study of five years of collections at nearly 1,000 Catholic parishes that found that the number of donors fell about 26% during the coronavirus shutdowns. The figure increased after churches reopened but even now is about 16% less than it was pre-virus, the study found.
On the flip side, though, per-person donations went up about 24% during the first 12 weeks of the coronavirus shutdowns, and that elevated average has remained fairly steady since.
“So there’s fewer people but the ones who are giving are giving significantly more,” Manion said. “So people became more generous during COVID and maintained that generosity after COVID.”
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The initial bump may have come about because stocks remained high, so people with means did fairly well, while many less wealthy people were able to give more because they got coronavirus stimulus checks from the government.
Once parishioners started giving more, they got used to it, along the lines of what economists who study price increases call the “ratchet effect.”
“Once people start giving at a certain level, they stay there,” Manion said. “I think people realized they could afford to give more than they had been, and so they kept doing it. That tends to be what happens when people embrace a stewardship mentality. They realize that God will not be outdone in generosity.”
Whatever happens this weekend with collections, Manion encourages pastors to publish the results and put them in the context of how the parish is doing.
“When people have good information about the financial health of their parish, they tend to be more generous,” Manion said. “I think the worst thing would be to not communicate the information — the good or the bad. Because in an information vacuum, people can’t help.”
Matt McDonald is a staff reporter for the National Catholic Register and the editor of the New Boston Post.