Serious Young Catholics Crave Tradition—and We Should Listen to Them
Serious Young Catholics Crave Tradition—and We Should Listen to Them
How about promoting the Latin Mass instead of the Luce Mascot?
Recently at Tradition & Sanity we mentioned the release of a dynamite new book called The Latin Mass and the Youth: Young Catholics Speak About The Mass of Ages, edited by Reyers Brusoe and with a Foreword by yours truly. The publisher is Phillip Campbell’s Cruachan Hill Press.
This book is vitally important, as it contains 42 eloquent testimonials written by Catholics between the ages of 12 and 24 who have all kinds of stories but all of them involve their discovery of, or conversion/reversion through, the TLM, and what it has meant in their lives. We need to get this book into the hands of priests, bishops, FOCUS missionaries, youth ministers — anyone who works with the young or who asks (often with a worried look) “How can we reach the young people?” Here is the Foreword I contributed, shared with the publisher’s permission. — PAK
Over the centuries, seekers of God have often returned to the Rule of St. Benedict as a repository of timeless wisdom, capable of guiding any community to peace and holiness. One cannot help but be struck by the way Benedict emphasizes that the young monks’ voices ought to be given a fair hearing. Benedict was not exactly egalitarian (he frequently counsels the beating of the refractory, for example), but he recognized, with St. John Cassian, that age does not automatically equal wisdom and that young people can have the perspective needed by the community at a given moment.
Thus, he stipulates in chapter 63: “On no occasion whatsoever should age distinguish the brethren and decide their order [in the monastery]; for Samuel and Daniel, though young, judged the elders.”1 In chapter 3, the patriarch legislates:
As often as any important business has to be done in the monastery, let the abbot call together the whole community and himself set forth the matter. And, having heard the advice of the brethren, let him take counsel with himself and then do what he shall judge to be most expedient. Now the reason why we have said that all should be called to council is that God often reveals what is better to the younger.2
The saint’s advice seems all the more relevant in today’s Church, when it is clearly the young who are rediscovering Catholic Tradition in all its fullness, and who, at the same time, are bearing the full brunt of the resistance of their elders, who have been “sticks in the mud” when it comes to welcoming this stirring of the Holy Spirit. In this curious way, today’s older generations often seem like the Jews in the Gospels, who cannot receive the newness of Christ and his apostles.3
It need hardly be said that St. Benedict’s advice applies perfectly to monasteries, convents, and other religious houses, where, let us be frank about it, revival or even bare survival is bound up with a recovery of traditional liturgy, in both the Divine Office and the Mass, and in the chant.4 It is no longer a secret that the most flourishing communities today are the ones that have unashamedly restored the way of life a foolish generation threw away in the name of aggiornamento.
A Benedictine monk once told me that in the late 1960s, when his monastery switched over to a liturgy entirely in the vernacular, a member of the community actually put all of the copies of the Antiphonale Monasticum into a wheelbarrow, carted them outside, built a bonfire, and burned them. Another monk, horrified, gathered as many copies as possible of a different book, the Graduale Romanum, and hid them so they would be spared a similar fate. How many precious volumes, repositories of the wisdom and beauty of ages, were destroyed in this barbaric manner? “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord;5 one can be certain that those who sinned against Catholic tradition have paid the last penny for it.
When I was being given a tour one October of a famous Benedictine monastery near Krakow, the young monk who was my guide stated outright that the younger monks wish to have the tabernacle back in the center, wish to celebrate Mass ad orientem, wish to recover Latin, and wish to receive communion kneeling and on the tongue, while their elders are opposed to all these things. This shift in desire is not merely “generational dynamics,” as if we ought to expect the next generation to clamor for the opposite again—a Church forever ricocheting between chant scholas and folk bands, birettas and felt banners. No. The youth are awakening from the Rip van Winkle sleep of progressive liturgism—that weird coma between the ill-informed but thriving conservatism of the preconciliar age and the better-informed though struggling traditionalism of the postconciliar age.
We have heard and still hear a lot about the “charismatic movement,” but no one can explain how in the world it is supposed to fit in with the Catholic Faith as it has matured and blossomed in the miracle-rich lives of the saints, full of ascetical sobriety and mystical transcendence, which are perfectly mirrored in the liturgical and sacramental rites they knew and loved. What I have come to suspect, and what the contents of this book amply demonstrate, is that Traditionalism is the real “charismatic movement” in the Church today, and that it is high time we stop thwarting the Spirit. Would that today’s shepherds and sheep would heed Gamaliel’s hard-nosed advice:
Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what you intend to do, as touching these men. For before these days rose up Theodas, affirming himself to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all that believed him were scattered, and brought to nothing. After this man, rose up Judas of Galilee, in the days of the enrolling, and drew away the people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as consented to him, were dispersed. And now, therefore, I say to you, refrain from these men, and let them alone; for if this council or this work be of men, it will come to nought; but if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it, lest perhaps you be found even to fight against God. (Act 5:35-39)
“If it be of God, you cannot overthrow it.” No member of the body of Christ, high or low, can fight against God and win. The traditionalist movement is here to stay and is growing. Its adherents truly believe that the Eucharistic liturgy is the font and apex of the Christian life, and act accordingly. Those who oppose this movement are not just setting themselves up for failure, they are setting themselves up against the God who first bestowed the monuments of tradition on the Church, and then raised up a fitting attachment to them as powerful means of sanctification. The immemorial sacred liturgy as well as the desire of the people to worship God through it are both of the Holy Spirit. As we know, the sin against the Holy Ghost is the only sin that can never be forgiven, in this world or in the world to come.
I first noticed this return to tradition when I was a college student in the early 1990s in California. I noticed the same as a grad student in Washington, DC, in the mid-to-late ’90s. I especially noticed it as a teacher of undergraduates and graduates from dozens of countries over the twenty-year period from 1998 to 2018—so many different countries and contexts, confirmed by so many additional correspondents, that I knew it was a genuinely worldwide awakening. The internet had something to do with it, to be sure, but primarily because it provided resources that responded to an already gnawing hunger for “something more” than flavorless pablum.
A decade ago, my son (then fifteen years old) and I participated in a Sacred Music Colloquium of the Church Music Association of America. As with the Sacra Liturgia conferences and many other such gatherings of which I’ve been a part, the participation was dominated by professionals, youths, and teens who unabashedly preferred the great music of our Catholic tradition, sacred in its stylistic qualities and well-suited to ritual action. People from my generation (I was born in 1971) and younger know, without need for much explanation, that Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, and post-Renaissance choral works of grand and intimate scale are the music of the Catholic liturgy.6
Such music says “Catholic” the moment you hear it, which is why Hollywood always reaches for it when depicting anything Catholic. This vast repertoire, “a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art,”7 was written expressly for ecclesiastical ceremonies. At its best, it is not trying to compete with or emulate popular styles of music; it is not serving two masters; it is not a multi-purpose Swiss Army knife. It is church music, sacred music, pure and simple, and that is why it is so singularly effective and lovable. We admire what is pure and simple, because it fits its function to a T. It works. What isn’t broken doesn’t need to be fixed.
In a position paper written by the International Una Voce Federation, I once came across a phrase that struck me as an apt description of the two poles between which bad liturgy oscillates: Rationalism excludes silence and complex ceremonial, while Romanticism promotes informality and spontaneity. Rationalism and Romanticism—the two great counterforces of modernity, each an extreme in perpetual reaction against the other—are the two slave-drivers behind the liturgical reform.
Rationalism cracks the whip and shouts: “No silence! Everything must be SAID and UNDERSTOOD! No complexity! Stop all that intricate symbolic stuff! Stop all that lugubrious chanting! Modern man has no patience, no time, no ability, no need for it! It promotes an aristocracy of clerics! Let the light of objective reason shine!”
But then Romanticism sneaks in, elbows an unsuspecting Rationalism aside, and, with a voice all the more poisonous for its seeming amiability: “Relax! Go with the flow! You are too formal, uptight, rigid, and cerebral! Let go of the rubrics, find your inner child, feel it in your bones, be yourself! Everything’s about YOU, your feelings, your neediness—this is your moment!”
Each struggles for supremacy; in a weird sort of way, they are codependent and collaborative. They stop at nothing to eviscerate the tradition that precedes them, until all that is left is a disembodied reason of empty structures and a derationalized self-indulgent sentimentalism.
Be that as it may, what we see at work in the liturgical reform is a peculiarly self-centered assumption that the preoccupations of modern Western man—rationalism and romanticism being characteristic -isms of an imbalanced worldview and an inadequate philosophy—are the preoccupations of all of humanity, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As a result, the new liturgy is going to be imposed on every nation, every people, every culture, every generation, regardless of whether or not they meet the hyper-modern Eurocentric criteria on the basis of which it was designed. The absurdity of such an assumption is obvious, but it becomes even more obvious when one considers generational shifts.
It seems to me that just as there was a problem with assuming that African Catholics needed the new Mass when the old Mass under which they were evangelized was and still is, in fact, more suited to their temperament and culture,8 there is an analogous problem with assuming that today’s young Catholics, especially those who have been homeschooled or, at any rate, raised in a more traditional manner, or even those who have converted to Christ from indifference, worldliness, or hostility (we see them in these pages, too), automatically carry the same modernist or postmodernist burdens that the rest of Western society bears.
Of course, we’re all moderns in a host of subtle and obvious ways, but since a good deal of the modern mentality is a flight from reality and a sort of self-invited neurosis, it seems distinctly possible—and my decades of experience as a student and then as an undergraduate and graduate-level teacher have confirmed this over and over—that young people today might actually be free of a lot of the existential baggage of their elders. The problems of the sixties and seventies are just not the same as our problems. And young faithful Catholics have not necessarily problematized their existence, or the concept of tradition, or the concept of authority, or the concept of the sacred and the mystical.
We are still struggling with the fallout of Rationalism and Romanticism, but we are no longer (thanks be to God) as naïvely optimistic about the power of human reason or of sincere feelings to lead us into an Edenic new world of human brotherhood. It is too easy to be cynical at this point about such grandiose rhetoric. We are looking for something a lot more serious—something real and realistic, which, paradoxically, we sense will have to be very different, rather strange perhaps; something transcendent. Otherwise it is fake; it is looking at a mirror and falling in love with the image. We are looking for the original, the One from whom we come and to whom we are going.
At Sacra Liturgia, at the Colloquium, at all the schools I attended or worked for, I saw ample evidence that we are turning a corner. The rebels of the Age of Aquarius are pathetic and frail, and angry as hell (truly) that their revolution is crumbling before their very eyes, both for want of internal strength and for want of external interest. The youth who still want to practice their Faith need more, desire more, and deserve more than the Church’s hierarchy has been willing (or even able?) to give them. And these young men and women, without much help from their superiors, are figuring out how to find their way back to the Tradition, in spite of all obstacles, detours, traps, and poor signage.
This movement—this hunger for Catholic Tradition—cannot be stopped. The testimonials found in these pages could be multiplied a hundredfold simply by traveling around to flourishing apostolates of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, the Society of St. Pius X, and diocesan TLMs and asking for submissions from the youth groups. But if the movement cannot be stopped, it can be either delayed by obstructionists who wish to earn burning coals or actively promoted by shepherds who care for the eternal destiny of their sheep. I am reminded in this connection of a butler’s speech from a P. G. Wodehouse novel:
It is my experience that opposition in matters of the ’eart is useless, feedin’, as it so to speak does, the flame. Young people, your lordship, if I may be pardoned for employing the expression in the present case, are naturally romantic and if you keep ’em away from a thing they sit and pity themselves and want it all the more. And in the end you may be sure they get it. There’s no way of stoppin’ them.9
Indeed: the traditional movement is not going away. Meanwhile, our shepherds stand to gain glory or shame, depending on how they react to this impetus of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray for them daily.
The stakes are high. One wishes to say to our bishops: Choose well. To the youth (including the youthful clergy): Choose with discretion and courage, as did Samuel and Daniel, who, “though young, judged the elders.”
You have just read the Foreword to the book The Latin Mass and the Youth: Young Catholics Speak About The Mass of Ages — a book full of tradition and sanity, I can assure you!
In the bilingual McCann edition, p. 143.
McCann ed., 25.
See Acts 7:51.
Even Paul VI recognized this in the ill-starred apostolic letter Sacrificium Laudis, which insisted that retention of the Latin choral office would make the difference between attracting and repelling vocations.
See Deut 32:35; Rom 12:19.
The album Benedicta of the Monks of Norcia made it right to the top of the classical billboard, showing once again that the prayerful yearning for peace and transcendence expressed by Gregorian chant is not a passing fad but a constant need of our society. It would be helpful if prelates and pastors would pay attention to actual cultural trends like this one, instead of paying attention to what seemed to be trends several decades ago.
Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium 112.
See “Sub-Saharan Africa” in Joseph Shaw, ed., The Case for Liturgical Restoration (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2019), 267–73; Peter Kwasniewski, “Mythbusting: ‘African Catholicism is a Vatican II Success Story,’” New Liturgical Movement, January 23, 2023; A Nigerian Catholic, “Inculturation: A Wrong Turn.”
P. G. Wodehouse, A Damsel in Distress, Collector’s Wodehouse (New York: Abrams, 2003), 238.
Thank you for sharing this excellent foreword! As someone who contributed an essay to this book, I am very grateful for the opportunity to give testimony for the goodness of the Mass of the Ages. It was also good to reflect on my own experience as I worked on the essay I wrote, and take it as an opportunity to give thanks to God for His Church. Funnily enough, I was also present at the procession from the thumbnail because of a deliberate decision to move into a city with easy access to the Old Rite; what a small world!