I've been to plenty of conventional Sunday Masses, and I've been to plenty of family-friendly Sunday Masses. The family-friendly ones are always better.
Priests and religious leaders spend their entire lives reading and studying and grappling with and debating extremely complicated and nuanced texts, and the Catholic Church has a special obsession with inventing oppressively long words to represent these really niche topics. So I'm never really surprised when most priests walk up to the altar in your average Sunday morning Mass and start dropping words like "transubstantiation" and "hypostasis"at 9 am as if my brain is ready to think about anything except the soggy bowl of Cocoa Pebbles I left sitting on my counter at home.
But even though I try to follow what the priest is saying, it's just way too dense sometimes to really be able to pull much meaning out. Now, take that same homily about hypostasis and throw it into a family Mass, and all of a sudden you're getting Clark Kent and Superman references rather than St. Augustine. It sounds pretty gimmicky and definitely won't take the prize for intellectualism, but it's hard to say it's ineffective in getting the basic point across, and religion is only as valuable as the degree to which you understand it.
It's sort of like the saying, "When we design for disability, we all benefit," also known as the curb cut effect. When curb cuts — the downward sloping end to a sidewalk that lets it meet the road seamlessly — were first installed in Berkeley, CA in the early 70s, they were intended as a gesture of inclusion toward people in wheelchairs. However, everyone soon realized that this design was also more convenient if you're pushing a stroller, rolling luggage, or just feeling way too lazy to want to step down from the curb, so this design eventually became the standard across the country. By designing something for the disabled, these inventors made a better product for everyone.
That's how I feel about family Masses. By designing a Mass that can be understood by elementary school students, you're really designing a better Mass that can be more easily digested by every age group. That doesn't mean dumbing it down. That just means cutting back on all the overly complex and alienating language that is a part of the church's tradition but not really its substance.
Quite honestly, I think religion is just at its best when it's discussed with a third-grade vocabulary.
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