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Crying babies

Mark Rhoads

I am past 70 and wear hearing aids at mass. But even in a church with good acoustics I often cannot hear the mass due to the crying and screaming of tiny children at mass. I have been told to chill out and just accept the noise and I understand that priests and ushers do not want to play the role of bad cop and ask parents to leave to a quiet room where they can still hear the mass but not disturb others. Young mothers often do not even realize they are making mass attendance hard for senior citizens because they are so used to the noise. But surely Catholic churches can do more to ask parents of babies to remove the crying babies from being a distraction to others. A fellow Catholic in my age group recently told me that she no longer wants to attend a Catholic Church because she has found a large Protestant Bible Church where children and their parents must listen from a crying room. The problem of loud noise in church is a real harm to older people. The parish councils of the diocese need to address this issue.

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