We Do, In Fact, Like the Latin Mass

We are pleased to publish today a guest article by Esther Berry of the delightful Substack The Literate Woman. She is responding to a rather peculiar article titled “You Think You Love the Traditional Mass.” I thank Prof. Berry for recording the voiceover as well. In order to allow this article to reach the maximum number of readers, I have removed the paywall. —PAK

It is often forgotten that the authors of the 20^th-century liturgical reform were marked by a strong optimism with regards to the visible fruits of their project for the Catholic Church of the future. In hindsight, by nearly any available metric, it is clear that they were mistaken. It was in the spirit of this optimism that Paul VI said in his address to the Italian bishops in 1964:

The liturgical reform opens to us a way to reeducate our people in their religion, to purify and revitalize their forms of worship and devotion, to restore dignity, beauty, simplicity, and good taste to our religious ceremonies. Without such inward and outward renewal there can be little hope for any widespread survival of religious living in today’s changed conditions… Promote sacred song, the religious, congregational singing of the people. Remember, if the faithful sing they do not leave the church; if they do not leave the Church, they keep the faith and live as Christians.¹

And, in a general audience in 1965:

It will be the liturgical life, carefully nurtured and fully assimilated into the minds and practice of the Christian people, that will keep awake and alive the religious sense in these secular, desacralized times, and that will give to the Church a new springtime in its spiritual, Christian life.²

Now, sixty years later, we are still coming to terms with the massive exodus from the Catholic church which occurred just when a “new springtime” was expected. At the same time, we find ourselves wondering why in the world young people disproportionately flock to the traditional liturgy which was officially sidelined before they were born and remains under heavy censure from Rome. We were told quite definitively that traditional liturgy was uniquely unsuited for modern times; it is therefore very strange that young people seem to like it so much. If these are the first blossoms of a new springtime, they appear to be happening in the wrong place.

A recent article at Christendom Quarterly, incredulously named “You Think You Love the Traditional Mass,” has an explanation for this. It is not the case, as many Gen-Z zealots claim, that they love the ancient liturgy because it is beautiful and meaningful. Of course they claim to like it. But, in truth, they do not.

I feel equipped to answer this partially because I am a Gen-Z convert to Catholicism who thinks she likes the Latin Mass. My husband is a Gen-Z cradle Catholic who was raised in a standard Novus Ordo parish, and he also thinks he likes the Latin Mass. Depending on where we live, we sometimes attend the Roman Rite and sometimes attend the Melkite Rite, which of course offers the similarly ancient liturgy of John Chrysostom. We think we like that too.

The author and her husband at their Melkite wedding, participating in the ancient ritual of the common cup. At the time of their wedding they were twenty-two years old....

The argument of the article in question is quite simple.

First, it is not possible for someone who is not brought up in the world of the Latin Mass to like it, to find it compelling and beautiful on its own terms. Second, people who do not find the Latin Mass beautiful and compelling would not attend it purely based on intellectual convictions about the liturgy, but for some other extrinsic reason. And third, the other reason, the true motivation underlying the Gen-Z excitement about traditional liturgy, is an attraction to a culture of stability and seriousness. Therefore the liturgy wars are not really about liturgy, because what young traditionalists like is not the liturgy; it is something else, and we ought to talk about that instead, and focus our efforts at renewal there.

To the first point, the extent to which tastes are determined by education has been debated for a long time. Aristotle made a pretty compelling case that if you were not brought up correctly you were pretty much toast. And there is something to this! The author of the CQ article, drawing on their experience as a teacher, points out that children who did not grow up reading books, real books, full of difficult and arcane language, are simply unable to love them when they are older. I am twenty-five, and so the college students I teach are only a handful of years younger than I am, and I see what she’s talking about as well—that children who didn’t grow up reading have a great deal of trouble getting into it as adults. As the author argues,

We are shaped by the things we see and taste and hear as a child, and the way we see, taste and hear them. This atmosphere, more than anything else, determines which beauties a child can know, and which he cannot fully comprehend. Almost invariably, these capacities or limitations follow the child into adolescence and adulthood.

For good or ill, this is how human nature works, and it is true for more than just words. This is the way we are with music and art and a thousand other things. But most importantly, it is the way we are with the Mass itself.

This is a good argument, and there is plenty of evidence to back it up. But it proves far too much. If the experience of Medieval Catholics “was an experience of life so distinct from our own that it was a difference of kind, not merely a difference of degree,” if “we have been raised in a culture that trains the eye for the fast cut, trains the brain for the scroll, and trains the heart for the dopamine hit,” and so the only kind of worship we are still fit for is “something that satisfies our attention spans and individualism,” then it is not at all clear why we should stop at the Novus Ordo. After all, the New Mass was developed in a time before short-form video content. To really be fit for our times, wouldn’t it have to be even shorter, even snappier, more digital, with even less ritual and obscure “spiritual” content? And one could make—and many have done so—just the same argument about Catholicism itself, or about Christianity. How could we dare to say the same creed or offer the same worship as people who lived in a time so different from our own? What use is Scripture to such a wretched people? What use is Homer?

But perhaps more pertinently, the argument that we cannot appreciate something we are not educated for directly undermines the third point of the article, which is that, given that young people are not, as they claim, drawn to the liturgy itself, it is more plausible to think that what they are attracted to is the rigor and community which could, of course, in principle be found elsewhere.

Locating the appeal of the TLM in culture instead of liturgy is no solution to the stated conundrum—the lack of requisite education for a genuine love of the ancient liturgy—because education is also important for an appreciation of culture. If the children of this generation are so unused to the beauty of liturgy and ritual that they simply cannot be drawn to it, wouldn’t it be similarly implausible that they be drawn to a culture that they do not inhabit, or to a sense of seriousness and discipline they have not experienced elsewhere? If education is totally determinative, why would phone-addicted teenagers be so compelled by seeing “teenagers who are not on their phone at Mass”? How could only-children in a country with a below-replacement birthrate find themselves choked up at the sight of “families with five children where the oldest knows how to hold the baby”?

Either it is possible to be compelled by a great beauty that you were not acclimated to as a child, or it is not. If it is possible, it is quite plausible that (as many young traditionalists claim) the Latin Mass itself has this compelling power; if it is not, then being drawn to communal seriousness remains exactly as impossible as being drawn to medieval liturgy. I do not see why the heart that is impenetrable to Gregorian chant should be melted by Gregorian rigor.

Apparently there is some mysterious mechanism by which someone who was not properly educated is able to be deeply affected by beauty nevertheless. I have no argument whatsoever as to exactly how this works, or what its limitations are; I only know that both things are true, that education is crucial and in many ways determinative, and that encounters with the True and the Good and the Beautiful frequently exert a mysterious, transformative effect on even serious degenerates. The interplay between these two principles is extremely obscure even on the natural level, let alone when we are speaking—as we are—about a locus of supernatural grace. Some things transcend time, and culture, and even serious deficiencies of education. Some things speak to human beings as human. Many people, even great saints, have thought that the liturgy was one of those things. And if this is the case, then one would expect a people systematically deprived of symbols and rituals and beauty to be even hungrier for them, to respond to them with a peculiar fierceness, with the eagerness and desperation of a starving man who has just stumbled across bread.

At the time, in the upheavals of the 1960s, it sounded like a pretty good argument to say that modern man is unsuited to ancient liturgy, that we so utterly lack the symbolic and aesthetic vocabulary of our forefathers that it would be hopelessly naïve to expect our young people to willingly attend obscure, theurgic rituals. That was the theory advanced at the time of the liturgical reform. They thought they knew for a fact that the ancient liturgy, with its incense and incantational repetitions, its obsessive kissing of the altar, the obscurity of the language, the hiddenness of the hands of the priest, a thousand things going on quietly and hiddenly with only the participation of heart and intention—all this they were confident was utterly ridiculous for the modern man. But that was not known a priori—it is, and always has been, a guess. It is not an ironclad axiom about human nature; it is a particular hypothesis about how human nature works in the concrete. And if young people being drawn in droves to a medieval liturgy despite their modern miseducation is not counterevidence to this hypothesis, what is? What could ever be? One senses we may be dealing here with a filter that refuses to allow evidence that does not harmonize with a certain presupposition, rendering the claim for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable.

Even if we are unsure about the motivations of young zealots, even if we have reason to hold them in suspicion, I would argue it is better not to err on the side of cynicism when we are surprised by wholesome proclivities of young people. Growing numbers of young people claim, at least, to like classical music. A recent Forbes article, entitled “Why Gen-Z is Falling in Love with Classical Music,” reports:

Orchestras are reporting a surge in younger audiences that rises above a novelty trend. A 2022 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra tracking survey found that 65% of people under the age of 35 regularly listen to orchestral music. The group is “now more likely to be listening (to orchestral music) than their parents,” the report found.

Maybe this is a fad. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe young people just think they like classical music, but actually they like the aesthetic of sophistication or some such thing, and maybe it’s simply impossible to learn to love beautiful music you didn’t grow up with. But when an apparent resurgence of appreciation for beauty among young people is occurring before our eyes, I think we ought to refrain from asserting that such a thing is simply not possible, since according to our ironclad psychological theories young people ought to only like rap and rock-‘n’-roll. What if we’re wrong? If there is even a chance that someone really is beginning the fragile process of falling in love with the sort of enduring beauty and meaning that they have been starved of their whole life, the last thing in the world we should do is scoff and “call their bluff.”

Of course, many opponents of the Latin Mass believe that it is not like a symphony at all, that it’s not really as beautiful as its proponents assert, that its relative merits are overstated, and so on. Others believe that although it is beautiful, it ought nevertheless to be banned. The argument in the essay I am critiquing is neither of these, but a stranger one: that the TLM is supremely beautiful, that it ought not to be banned, and yet that the people who go to it should straighten up and admit to themselves that they are not there because it is beautiful, but for some other reason altogether.

As paradigmatic of regular TLM-attendees, the article cites the experience of a contributor in their thirties, who says:

I’m frustrated because, having attended Latin Mass, I know intellectually that it’s better, higher, and some part of me understands that it is more beautiful… but because I was raised on [Marty Haugen], the emotional resonance just isn’t there. It doesn’t feel like “home” yet, somehow.

The author maintains that this is the experience of “nearly all the people packing pews at TLMs.” Although some young traditionalists say that it is lifechanging, that it is beautiful and mysterious, that it nourishes their souls, we know for a fact that such a thing is impossible—and so, presumably in the spirit of synodality, we had better not listen to them. This occasions the second point of the article: people who do not feel “at home” with the TLM, but go nonetheless, must go for some other reason besides an intellectual conviction that it is good and beautiful.

As I have said, I do not think that this discomfort and frustration is everyone’s experience. It is not, for instance, mine, or that of many people my age whom I know well. But even given that this is some people’s experience of the TLM, I do not think in the least that this means that their commitment to the liturgy as such is ephemeral. It speaks more to the contrary. When we see young families commuting unwieldy distances to attend traditional liturgies, only to grit their teeth through services they do not understand and have difficulty appreciating, I do not think the proper response is to assume that they are not as committed to the liturgy as they say they are. Perhaps we should take them at their word that they just want to be around something they know is objectively beautiful, something glorious and ancient, even if they do not fully understand it, even if it is difficult and frustrating for them because it goes against the grain of their upbringing. Perhaps they genuinely believe that great things take, and deserve, our time and effort, and that the slow progress we make in such an endeavor, painstakingly rebuilding what should have been habitual, is worth more than instant and easy comprehension.

I understand the urge to look at someone who admits that they go to the TLM because they believe it is beautiful, ancient, and worthy, despite the fact that they do not emotionally resonate with it, and assume that they must be emotionally resonating with something else—the community, say, or the general sense of seriousness. But this would only be a necessary consequence if subjective emotional resonance was the only kind of motivation, and it is not. In many times and cultures it has been speculated that, once in a while, people do what they believe is right, or act in accordance with what they know to be true, even if it is difficult or painful for them.

Gen-Z, more than any other generation, is keenly aware that the world we might have inhabited has been polluted and exploited and carried away by those who came before, that aspects of the Real that were previously regarded as the universal inheritance of all human beings—marriage, family, music, art, dancing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, gathering with friends, home-cooked food—have been denied to us by those who took them for granted. Is it inconceivable that we might fight tooth and nail to get them back, even when we can hardly remember what they look like? Is it totally implausible that, for instance, young parents who did not grow up listening to classical music might try to get into it as adults because they know it’s timeless and wonderful and objectively beautiful and they want their children to grow up with it?

There certainly exist young people whose attraction to the ancient liturgy is a byproduct of some other unexamined appetite that could just as well be satisfied elsewhere. But I heartily disagree that they are the majority. And furthermore, I think that there is something real, even noble, even universal, in the yearning to give your own children the opportunities you never had. To some extent, this is the lot of all adult converts. “Yes, it’s true my parents and grandparents took away the chance I have at fully being immersed in the religion of my fathers,” we admit. “And that fact is irreparable. But that is precisely why I cannot bear to do the same thing to my own children. No, my children will grow up in it. They will live in its glow. They will have the inheritance that was denied to me and one day they will appreciate it more deeply than I ever could.”

1. Address to Italian bishops, April 14, 1964 (Documents on the Liturgy 21).

2. General Audience, January 13, 1965 (DOL 24).