Mostly. There are exceptions, like the Catholic adoption agencies wanting to discriminate against same sex couples in placements, but as far as using charity as a means to directly evangelize, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. A big part of that is also just a cultural aspect of Catholicism—we tend not to be big on the reaching out to people to join the church and there’s a tendency among Catholics to view themselves as members of an exclusive club rather than a party that there’s always room to bring in more people (the late Andrew Greeley commented on this in his book, The Catholic Myth and during a recent project that had me visiting a number of Chicago churches over the last year and as part of that viewing a lot of parish websites to check for Mass times, the numbers of parishes that had any indication on how to become Catholic at all was minimal (the vast majority assumed that you knew what RCIA/OCIA meant and I think I saw maybe a half dozen parishes that had the words “how to become Catholic” somewhere on their home page, all of which were predominantly Black parishes. On the other end of the spectrum, there were a handful of parishes where it was a challenge just to find an address and list of Mass times anywhere on them).
> viewing a lot of parish websites to check for Mass times
How was your luck with that? I often find the website is terribly out-of-date in general, and if the times have changed since the last update...
Sometimes the website links to recent bulletins, which are almost never wrong. If there isn't then I call the office to check; most parish offices have a list of Mass times in their voice-mail message.
Generally good. The one case where it failed was for a Spanish Mass in a neighborhood targeted by ICE where the Mass began about half an hour after what the website said. Out of nearly 400 parishes in the archdiocese, only one parish¹ completely lacked a website and one’s online presence was a Facebook page which showed no updates for nearly two years. For added confusion, there is a pair of parishes which share a single website and the clergy preside at Masses at any of the three (formerly four) worship sites.³
I was (the project concludes on Friday) visiting churches on their patronal feasts⁴ and whenever bulletins were available, I would check them to see if there was any deviation from their published schedule because of the patronal feast. Life frequently intervened to make me miss a number of Masses that I would otherwise have attended, not to mention that a number of parishes didn’t have any Mass at all on their patronal feasts, but it’s still ended up being a lot of church visits.
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1. The Renew My Church reorganization of the diocese has resulted in the number of parishes being less than the number of actual churches with a significant number of parishes having two or more worship sites. Some parishes have a new name for the combined entity with the individual churches retaining their name (e.g., Queen of Apostles Parish has two churches: Queen of Angels and St Matthias) while others just name themselves with the two constituent churches (e.g., St Luke/St Bernardine).²
2. One such parish near me had a previously consolidated parish, St Catherine/St Lucy (which only had a single church after consolidation) and became St Catherine/St Lucy and St Giles) until operations costs led to the closing of the St Catherine/St Lucy church building (the school remains open) and while the parish retains the long name, I don’t think anyone other than official documents calls it anything other than St Giles.
3. That being the St Catherine/St Lucy and St Giles of the previous footnote and the other parish in Oak Park, Ascension and St Edmund.