Bishop Barron explains the importance of experiencing Liturgy. Liturgy of the Word. Liturgy of the Eucharist. It keeps us on track. He fears Catholics may have stopped going to Mass during covid.
It is not enough to be a good person in this life. We need to go to Mass.
It is quite clearly a desperate plea. This is what is described by Hebrews 10:25: some have developed an ethos (habit/custom/trait/way) of not gathering together.
When I visited Ireland just before the Covid lockdowns, I actually saw this happening already. It is a largely Catholic country with a long history of contention between people of faith wanting to worship God with the freedom of their conscience vs a church institution that insists that it is the gate by which all must enter lest they be deemed heretical or rebellious. So I met lots of people who had an internal faith but they would say they are not practicing Catholics, or those who would say they are practicing Catholics but who really only want to avoid the inevitable fights that come about whenever the topic of religion is raised. So there are those who say they go to Mass twice a year, and they have all their trinkets on the wall to show their devotion, but on the inside they do not have love for the Word of God.
That's about what it comes down to too, when we really look at the value of meeting together:
"For wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" - Jesus Christ, Matthew 18:20
Of course the fact that He is in our midst doesn't necessarily mean that He will be speaking from the pulpit (1 John 4:16, 1 John 3:15, Galatians 5:14-15). That's one of the greatest shortcomings of churches: that when a preacher begins speaking from an inferior spirit because they have left the Word of truth and gone into fallacy bringing condemnation upon themselves, those in the audience are forced to take sides as being for or against the war on truth. It is an unfortunate reality of the system of loyalty, that a majority instinctively supports a preacher's right to speak freely merely on account of the fact that he has been commissioned to do so, therefore any person speaking out of turn is unable to have the right to speak.
(What that means simply, is that the audience is expected to sit down, shut up and eat what is being fed to them).
It is the key reason why many teenagers, having left the age of childhood with its blind obedience, have begun listening to what is being said, and having a mind that has not already been bent into the pattern of the world, they squirm and wrestle with the lack of power to bring to light the fallacies and hypocrisy they see. Hence, they get a bad attitude because there is no justice for them. Nobody has empathy or understanding for them in their struggle, and as soon as they find the opportunity to flee, that is literally what they do.
When I raise the topic of Christ with people, I meet this a lot: they will say "oh no, I'm not really interested. I went to a Catholic school, so..."
I think that what is happening through the lockdowns, is people are forgetting the way of thinking that church was keeping them in. They have been broken off from the spirit that prevails in the church environment, and in lieu they have become accustomed to the spirit that prevails wherever they are outside of the church (eg: TV, radio, work, social media, games, friends & family etc). So in a way they are looking at church with new eyes and maybe that's all it takes for some of them to see that the church they have always known is somehow not really as relevant to their faith as they once believed it to be. That's certainly one way that Hebrews 10:25 could come to speak of them.
But I am not really sold on all the pomp and ceremony of churches anyway, as most of my church influence is of Protestant flavours, and I think that the scriptures show also that Jesus and the prophets, the disciples too: they didn't place any value on rituals. They devoted themselves to prayer and to live in a way that pleases God, but whenever ritual is employed, it cannot evade the intrinsic legalistic nature of it.
Jesus said that it is the spirit that gives life, and how does a spirit give life? By bringing the mind to the place of being justified in God's judgment (Romans 8:1). The most powerful instrument for the spirit is speech, because words have the power to change minds. That is why Jesus said "you have been made whole by the word I have spoken to you, therefore remain in me and you will produce much fruit".
It is the Word of God that cleanses us, and any pomp or ceremony does nothing but augment the environment in which the Word of God is proclaimed. I think that if a church was more committed to speaking the Words that give life, then it wouldn't need to work so hard to convince it's own members not to abandon it (John 6:66-68).
