THROUGH UNTRUE By FR. ROLANDO V. DELA ROSA, O.P. Fr. Rolando V. Dela Rosa, O.P. A few weeks ago, a friend told me that she and her family have ceased attending Sunday mass in their parish church.Thechurch is just a stone’s throw from their house, but they prefer to go to a mall with a new air-conditioned chapel. She added, with unmistakable sarcasm: “The mall has it all. After the mass, we have shopping and entertainment galore. Compare that to the parish church that is old, oppressively humid, and the service sucks!” Admittedly, many parish churches in urban areas fit her description. So, the proliferation of supermall chapels can challenge priests to improve church fixtures, services, and most especially, the quality of their preaching. But parish priests can only do so much. While chapels in malls are financed and maintained by rich owners and concessionaires, priests find it difficult to ask their parishioners to help finance the improvement of church facilities. These days, some malls have several Sunday masses, plus two or three anticipated masses on Saturdays. So, in the competition for Sunday churchgoers, chapels in malls appear to be winning. Some priests and bishops who support masses in malls rationalize this by saying that the Church must go where the people are. But let’s face it, holding masses in malls is like combining faith with consumerism. When people become habituated to attending Sunday mass in malls, they might go to parish churches only when the latter resemble the convenient and comfortable ambience of supermall chapels. Psychologists say that our fondness for particular places becomes incorporated into our idea of who we are. Rootedness in a place or a sense of belonging to a community helps develop our identity. I wonder how children, who are brought to the mall for their Sunday worship, would think of the Church when they grow up. How would they think of themselves as Christians? What kind of relationship will they have with other Christians, when the web of relationships that they see in the mall is governed by the economics of buy and sell? Place has an immense influence on our identity as Christians. People who prefer to go to chapels in giant malls for their Sunday worship will find it difficult to develop a sense of belonging to their parishes. They may even equate religion with comfort and convenience. C.S. Lewis once wrote: “If you want a religion that makes you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.To choose to worship God in a place that is convenient is not worship because we are simply doing what we want to do, or feel comfortable doing.” A convenient religion that does not challenge us to sacrifice, does not make us rely on God very much. The consumeristic atmosphere in the mall where everything can be instantaneously obtained for a price, and where we can discard or exchange things we previously thought as valuable, will develop in us a “throw away” mentality, not to mention impatience and intolerance. Eventually, our fondness for malls and the false sense of comfort and security that it brings make us conclude that going to church is not necessary. After all, we don’t need to pray or to worship God to quench our cravings, which are aroused artificially by seductive come-ons of advertisers. All we have to do is buy a product.