The Open Church

Continuing the theme of conversion, I wanted to touch on the topic of locked churches.

I’m in Phoenix for the week visiting friends and attending the local FSSP parish while I’m here. It’s a small mission church and like most traditional orders is in the ‘not-so-nice’ part of town, with lots of homeless people around. 

Whenever I travel, I have found refuge in the church (small c) in whatever town or city I found myself. I also heard from at least two people recently who had experienced conversions that the ‘unlocked church’—where they could just go into to sit or pray or experience some peace and quiet away from the world—was the catalyst for them coming to Christ and his Church. Which is why the idea of the ‘locked church’ (esp during the days of COVID) seems like such a tragedy.

Now, I understand the pragmatic reasons for keeping a church locked during the day especially in the ‘bad part of town.’ But I can’t tell you the times I’ve visited an adoration chapel in the middle of the night during a crisis, or was relieved to find a church open in off hours when I needed it most. How many people have experienced the still silence and opportunity to quiet the soul when they most needed it as well.

I was talking to a woman at work who brought her three kids to register at a local Catholic parish so her kids could attend school there. She was curtly told by the secretary (those formidable gatekeepers of all things parish and sacrament-related) that they only did registrations on such and such a day and time and that she would have to come back then. Instead, she took them to the public school down the street and was welcomed in to sign them up. And that was that.

The locked church is metaphorical also for the ‘locking out of the wedding feast,’ the despair one can feel when the one place of refuge and solace is not open to them. How many, I wonder, have been saved by finding an open, unlocked church and, simultaneously, grace? Similarly, how many unbelievers were set on a new path just from a happenstance stumbling upon an open church? Even if it’s not masses of conversions, finding it made a difference to that one. Had they found it locked, the course of their life may have looked very different and found perdition, rather than the gates of Eternal life.