No more surprises
Part of this brief entails eliminating, or at least filing the spikier edges off of, user-hostile features at Holy Family. Yes, sometimes you’re hostile to users.
This task boils down to “no more surprises.”
Consider:
Some of the front doors – but which doors, exactly? – are always locked other than for rare events like funerals. Those doors still have handles and push panels, and they frustrate hundreds of parishioners per month. This deficiency calls to mind plugging in a USB cable upside-down, but with added humiliation and pique.
Certain Holy Family events are announced by voice from the ambo at the 09:30 Sung English Mass for Families... and absolutely nowhere else. (Also at the 12:30?)
Special masses are routinely not announced, except for one line in a place in the bulletin where you’re not looking for it or expecting it (e.g., deep inside misaligned and mistypeset lists of intentions).
One event was listed in the St. Vincent bulletin but not in Holy Family’s despite taking place at the latter. A special mass was announced on Twitter, at an account whose username does not include the lexemes Holy Family, half a day beforehand. (Update [2023.10.16]: The fact that the church organ is “out of commission” was announced on Twitter on a Monday – as if we knew that.)
Candidates for adult confirmation enjoy a nice ritual they know about in advance... but which takes place in the narthex with the doors open and everybody in the nave facing away from the proceedings, with none knowing what the heck is going on.
Nobody tells us when the mass we’re about to sit through is in Latin but is the Novus Ordo. Holy Family repeatedly upbraids parishioners, including well more than once in writing, about saying or not saying “Amen” when receiving communion; this was another such case.
Attendees of the solemn high mass have no idea when a different and unexpected tone of the “Gloria” is to be sung. Indeed, while all musical accompaniment is technically listed in the bulletin, it is so misrendered and mishandled that no one has any idea those details are listed right in front of them. (That’s why so few sing along with hymns chosen for individual Sundays.)
These are own goals, as the saying goes, and do nothing but cause embarrassment and resentment. Indeed, something you won’t be willing to hear, let alone accept, is the degree of embarrassment and humiliation Holy Family gratuitously inflicts.
Holy Family’s parishioners are, they will be the first to tell you, crème-de-la-crème, but the church and the Oratory still find ways roughly once a month to make everyone feel stupid.
No more surprises.
Events This Week
We will typeset and print, and set out no later than Friday afternoon, a custom-written leaflet every week. (It’ll be on near-cardstock and will be cut to a size that will become a trademark over time. Plus we’ll vary the paper colour.) Events This Week will cover every single exception to the norm, all the way down to road closures caused by upcoming marathons.
We will explicitly list, even if this isn’t the only place we do so, musical compositions to expect at mass.
All special masses will be listed, even if we end up listing the same events in the succeeding edition. Indeed, each edition will cover at least the two upcoming weekends, even at the cost of overlap. One of the problems here can be summed up as “Oh, you missed that? We mentioned it last week. Just the once, of course.” If being redundant allows parishioners to avoid missing out, then redundancy is a cost we can bear.
Any and all new programs about to commence – whether one-off concerts or months-long bible-study programs – will be listed before their start dates.
Special editions for Holy Week and Advent (for example) will be elaborately detailed and so well organized and typeset that parishioners will, as they say, fridge-magnet them. At the moment, Holy Week schedules are banged out in Arial and adhered to an A‑frame with glue; day-of-month updates are taped in by hand.
Twitter; podcasting
We will start a new Twitter account, @HolyFamilyEvents, which does nothing but list upcoming events (well in advance and on the day before). This service will be explicitly branded as read-only; there won’t be direct messages or replies, keeping us out of Twitter fights.
That takes care of people on Twitter, to some extent. But others are auditory learners. We therefore inaugurate a weekly podcast (surprise title: Holy Family Events), with each episode lasting no more than four minutes and consisting of a verbal update of what’s going on in the forthcoming week, plus a reminder of address, location, the aforesaid Twitter, and the like.
Bulletin
Running church bulletins through Liturgical Publications is like running tofu through sausage casings. The existing bulletin is not fit for purpose.
The cover is the most important real estate, but is ill-typeset and unchanging.
Back cover consists of ill-presented ads, which are not worth whatever cut you’re getting (if any).
That leaves two letter-sized pages of actual copy, itself ill-typeset and ‑conceived. Half the copy is filler, while crucially necessary information (musical numbers; special masses) is buried.
Instead, bring the bulletin in-house by laser-printing it double-sided on legal paper in landscape format. Sell one and only one ad placement per issue (and keep all the money). Assuming three columns plus ad on right side of front page, and assuming much more careful arrangement of mass, confession, and vespers times on the obverse, the reimagined bulletin leaves well more than enough space for Holy Family’s actual news.
Web site
Oratory-Toronto.org is not a great URL in the first place (the-fashion-for-dashes-in-domain-names-is-to-be-resisted.org), but it will suffice as a Web site for the Oratory. Typography will need to change from the current wall-to-wall Palatino.
That site is also effectively un(at)tended, with news-like items left in place months after they have ended.
But Holy Family per se requires its own Web site. HolyFamily.TO is available (and has not been preëmptively registered as part of this deficiency-list process). HolyFamily.church can be laboriously requested through the Vatican. Other plausible domains have already been secured by others.
The scope of any Holy Family–specific Web site will – perhaps surprisingly – be quite limited. A blog might be installed, for example, but rarely used. The whole topic will require its planning process, which will take months and will require a strong hand.
Labelling doors
Deficiencies in doors will be covered in the physical-plant tranche, but front doors that are effectively never unlocked will have their handles and push plates simply removed, with the adjoining actually reliably functioning doors now adorned with custom-manufactured and ‑typeset PULL and PUSH plaques. (We’ll artfully cover up any holes or gaps.)
It will still be possible to yank or lean into a locked door, but now much less likely. Taking this small step will reduce the embarrassment churchgoers feel. It will, in effect, reduce the church’s hostility toward users.