As Archbishop Riordan High School gains more and more new students each school year, half of the student body has experienced school masses solely in the gym.
Until fall 2023, Riordan had its masses in the Lindland Theater.
The change to having Mass in the gym became effective when the Class of 2027 enrolled and “the Riordan Community surpassed the capacity of students, teachers, and staff in the Lindland theater,” said the moderators for the Liturgy Team, Mary Ann Datoc and Deacon Chris Mariano.
Along with this change, organizational teams on campus, such as the Liturgy Team, DJ Club, and Choir, had to adapt to a new, and different, echoey environment. One of the many challenges they had to face and still have issues with is technical difficulties and communication issues.
Considering Lindland Theater has hosted many fantastic plays and musicals, its sound and audio
system is much more advanced and acoustically cleaner in design compared to the boomy and large gym.
Sid Thomas ’25 expressed the difficulty in his role as part of the DJ Club, who run the sound during Mass, “The gym [is] a lot more echoey than the theater… [and] there are problems with how the choir is set up in the gym… and essentially creates feedback into [the priest’s] mic.”
Datoc and Deacon Mariano added how the Liturgy Team was affected by this change, “The biggest effect is the number of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion. It has increased from six ministers to up to 14 ministers. We also have 14 Eucharistic Monitors, which are adults making sure the Body of Christ was consumed in front of the Extraordinary Ministers.”
In addition, “The altar and Marianist Cross need to be moved from [the] theater to [the] gym for each Mass.”
Datoc also added that switching the location of Mass has impacted the engagement of students and faculty since “[they] continuously need to remind the congregation that we need to be reverent on Mass days in the gym, especially in the beginning of Mass and Communion.”
Despite these difficulties, the gym solves a big problem that the theater had: space. When Mass was held in the theater, communion had a huge trafficking problem and took up a lot of time, having only four walkable paths.
Gavin Guan ’26 recalled the time during his freshman year, “There was just a long line going all the way through the whole theater [during communion].”
Now, communion is distributed in the gym stands. The theater had several hundred students in a section, while the gym only has a few dozen, allowing for less confusion.
Considering the size the Riordan community has grown, there’s not a lot of places that can fit all students, teachers, and staff; this is also the reason the new 2024 bell schedule was instilled.
“The gym and field are the only locations where we can have a student body Mass. It is too cold to be in the field,” said Datoc.
Now that masses are held in a much wider, much larger space, and the senior class is seated on the gym floor, there are a lot more available places for receiving communion, thus making Mass less crowded and more time efficient. In this way, members of the community can focus on the Mass.
