{"id":3032,"date":"2006-04-16T22:59:16","date_gmt":"2006-04-16T22:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/let-the-children-come.html"},"modified":"2006-04-16T22:59:16","modified_gmt":"2006-04-16T22:59:16","slug":"let-the-children-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/let-the-children-come.html","title":{"rendered":"Let the children come.."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A reader writes with some reflections on what she saw today &#8211; beginning with the story of her parish, a traditional ethnic parish that seemed on track to be fading away. But:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<div><em>What joy to see the young people coming to church. Not only do we have a wonderful young adult group but our choir (under the direction of a talented organist) has many young people as well and the music is so inspiring that&nbsp; we are attracting new people to the choir all the time. But what is most wonderful is that there are so many single&nbsp; young professionals in the church and young families who bring their babies and toddlers to Mass with the knowldege that our former baptistry is now a family friendly refuge if the children get restless. <\/em><\/div>\n<div><em><\/em><\/div>\n<div><em>At the 9:45 today there were a lot of young people with children and I heard one young man with baby (passed as usual between husband and wife)say&quot; My mother said you shouldn&#8217;t take babies to church but no one in this church seems to mind&quot;.&nbsp; I loved the young couple in froint of me with a fairly well behaved girl of four and a very squirmy boy of two who waited until the end of Mass when they sang the hymn &quot;The Strife is Over&quot; and he said &quot;Good choice.&quot; Am I crazy or does there seem more young people at Mass than in years past? Of course our pastor has has quietly fostered this but there has to be more church going Catholics out there than the critics (chiefly the NY Times) realize<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A reader writes with some reflections on what she saw today &#8211; beginning with the story of her parish, a traditional ethnic parish that seemed on track to be fading away. But: What joy to see the young people coming to church. Not only do we have a wonderful young adult group but our choir&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Let the children come.. - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/let-the-children-come.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Let the children come.. - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A reader writes with some reflections on what she saw today &#8211; beginning with the story of her parish, a traditional ethnic parish that seemed on track to be fading away. But: What joy to see the young people coming to church. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}