Father Antonio Maria Cossu, a priest from Sardinia, Italy, has been visiting the bars of his homeland, Barbagia, to give sermons for three years. The parish priest was forced to seek worshipers outside the church after facing a sharp decline in participation in Mass, Italian news agency ANSA reported. He then began organizing meetings in bars, publishing flyers with the words “Meetings in bars, half-evangelical beer, talking about Jesus.”
Known as Don Totoni, he is 68 years old and has been the parish priest in the small town of Beatty for seven years. “My idea of a religious man has never been to work behind closed sacristy doors or wait for people to start returning to mass,” he told ANSA.
This year’s sermon theme is “The Message of Jesus: Love.”