It's a balance between lowering the understanding of the importance of the feast, and avoiding stirring people up in confusion and dismay.
Personally, I'd have gone for having priests announce it at Mass every Sunday through the month of November instead, and post it in everything parish-related. Very few people who wouldn't miss it anyway will fall through the cracks on that one.
And those who missed would have to be missing enough Masses to be either thoroughly culpable for other missed Masses, or knowledgeable enough on the culpability related to missing Mass, to not freak out about it. Probably not many people will quietly freak out about nonculpably missing 5 Masses in a row.
A sentence I type now and have never typed before: I think Cardinal Cupich is right on this one
MASS hysteria! Dogs and cats living together...
It's a balance between lowering the understanding of the importance of the feast, and avoiding stirring people up in confusion and dismay.
Personally, I'd have gone for having priests announce it at Mass every Sunday through the month of November instead, and post it in everything parish-related. Very few people who wouldn't miss it anyway will fall through the cracks on that one.
I think that's fair. Very few people who would attend in the first place would miss the memo, and those who did would certainly be inculpable.
And those who missed would have to be missing enough Masses to be either thoroughly culpable for other missed Masses, or knowledgeable enough on the culpability related to missing Mass, to not freak out about it. Probably not many people will quietly freak out about nonculpably missing 5 Masses in a row.