In this video, Joe Heschmeyer and Cy Kellett discuss why so many young people are attending Latin Masses.
Transcript:
Caller: So I’ve gone to a few different Latin Masses recently, and each time I was amazed at the number of young people and big young families at them. And so I was curious as to why you think so many young Catholics are attracted to the Latin Mass.
Joe: That’s a good question. I think that could be a much longer answer. Let me give you a sketch. Number one, this really. We can see it in the data. I did an episode, if you go back slightly, on *Shameless Popery*, on priests in both their theological affiliation and political affiliation. And it’s wild how big of a shift there’s been between the kind of boomer era priests and actually even the priests even older than them and priests today. There’s been a sea change in terms of their theology and their politics. And we see this as well among the laity.
And so I would say that young people, number one, if they are wanting to be Catholic, are embracing something much more countercultural than it was for their parents or their grandparents. A lot of mid-20th century Catholicism is like, hey, look, we’re good Americans too. We can fit in. We can be normal. And that was, I think, something people were very excited about because they’d been treated as, like, creepy foreigners and outsiders for a long time. They were like, look, we rah, rah, you know, JFK, we got the flag, we’re good.
As a result, there is a big emphasis on fitting in. And, you know, maybe I’m being a little too trivializing with it. I think that’s a valid thing to want to do, to assimilate into the country you’re in, especially when you grew up there and are still treated as a non-American for being a Catholic. But the result of that was right at, like, the worst period of time when the U.S. was going through this really bad sexual revolution. You’ve got all these Catholics desperate to kind of seem cool and fit in.
I think their kids and grandkids increasingly are like, no, we actually want to do something different than what the broader culture is doing, because the broader culture is murdering unborn children and teaching all sorts of sexual depravity and doing one insane thing after another. And it’s also, by the way, deeply unhappy. So we want something that is older, that doesn’t feel like what I could get at a Protestant church on the street, or worse, at a secular concert. We want something radically different from that.
Second, a lot of the attempts to be hip and relevant. What’s Chesterton’s phrase? The man who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower. When you’re trying to seem hip and relevant by doing Peter, Paul and Mary songs in Mass, that’s not going to be hip and relevant for very long. I mean, half of the references I make to pop culture now are 10 years out of date because I stopped being cool somewhere around 12 years ago.
Cy: Wish I could be that up to date.
Joe: Yeah. I mean, my dad is great when music comes on. He always tries to name the artist and the singer because he likes to be. I get my insufferability, honestly. And he’s got an encyclopedic memory of 60s and 70s music and is terrible at 80s music and just says, well, that’s when we started having kids. And it’s like, yeah, sure enough, there it is. All of us kind of stop being cool.
So the problem with the church trying to do anything that feels too hip or too cool is it actually is pretty cringy. People don’t want that. Even if they do want that, their kids definitely don’t want that. Or you trying to seem cool by doing the stuff that was cool 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
As a result, a lot of the stuff that is really comfortable for people who grew up in that era and have lived with it, you know, you’ve got people in their 60s or so who are doing the same bad liturgical music that was really exciting in their youth. It’s literally the same songs. It’s Marty Haugen, it’s David Haas, it’s the St. Louis Jesuits. It’s this handful of, like, pretty mediocre to bad liturgical music from the mid-20th century that they’re just holding on to, and their kids don’t like it. It’s driving people away from the church as much as anything.
Whereas the truly classic stuff, I mean, not like classic rock, I mean like the Pange Lingua, I mean, like 12th-century stuff. I mean, Gregorian chant. I mean, all that stuff. People are drawn to that and will be drawn to that in a hundred years when no one remembers the pop music of today. So that desire for something that is everlasting and endures, I think, is huge.
So all of that is a very long way around of saying there’s a huge draw for reverence, whether that be the Latin Mass or a more traditionally celebrated Novus Ordo. I think it’s something that parishes should take very seriously. I know a lot of dioceses where if you say, is there a traditional Catholic parish? Not like TLM, not like an FSSP, like, is there a diocesan church that does a very reverent liturgy with no contemporary music? The answer is no.
I think that is a spiritual need not being met. And then people wonder, like, why don’t young people want to come to Mass in our diocese, in our church?
Cy: Does that make sense to you?
Caller: Yes, it does.
Cy: So thank you both very much.
Caller: Thank you.
Joe: Absolutely.
Cy: Thank you very much. I do think that, you know, I don’t want to get into a controversy, but it seems to me that Pope Francis, with, you know, he gets all the attention for the Latin Mass stuff, but he has said we need more reverent Masses. We need the Mass, that we have to be more reverent.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. Fortunately, I know Celina’s got some very good gems out there. Bishop Vincke is excellent. The cathedral on the plain is a beautiful parish out there. Not a cathedral, ironically, but, you know, so, yes, you’re right.
One of the things that Pope Francis had called for, I don’t think it’s really being done, is rather than pouring the energy into having some separate, extraordinary form Mass, pour that energy into, like, celebrating the Novus Ordo Mass reverently. I would love to see more people pursue that and say, okay, we’re going to really do this by the book. We’re going to do the traditional option every time we get a chance to. We’re going to do this, you know, precisely and beautifully and reverently.
I think if you do that faithfully over and over again, give it a year and see if your parish doesn’t grow in size.
Cy: Amen to that, Alexander. Thanks very much. I’m trying to get as many.