The Hours of Mass
The source and summit.
A record of the Church’s buildings that omitted the hours of the Mass would omit the very thing for which the buildings stand.
Why the hours matter
The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life; the other sacraments and all the Church’s ministries are bound up with it and ordered to it.1 A church building is a shelter for an altar. The hours at which the Holy Sacrifice is offered are therefore not incidental information about a parish, like its parking; they are the parish’s pulse.
On Sundays and the other holy days of obligation, the faithful are obliged to participate in the Mass.2 The obligation supposes an answer to a practical question: where, and at what hour? For the traveler in an unfamiliar city, for the worker whose shift ends at dawn, for the family arriving in a new town with boxes still packed, that question is the whole difference between assisting at Mass and standing before a locked door.
How the hours are kept here
The times of Sunday and daily Mass, of confession, and of adoration are recorded here from the public statements of the parishes themselves, and they are marked by their confidence: a schedule taken from a parish’s own current bulletin is not the same as one remembered from an old listing, and this record does not pretend otherwise. Where no schedule can be established with confidence, none is shown, for a wrong Mass time is worse than none.
Parishes and their hours may be sought from the front page. Those who build tools for the faithful may draw the same record through the open interfaces.