On my day-off last week I was sitting in an Omaha coffeeshop, dressed casually and avoiding work on my laptop. At some point I realized that the two gentlemen who were seated behind me and energetically catching up were probably a retired pastor and an active one. Overheard snippets assured me they were Protestant, though not mainline, and probably both had independent, "Bible church", evangelical congregations. I mean, near the end they discussed which local churches were Pre-Trib or Post-Trib, then they chuckled and (I think) shook their heads over some who were even Amillennial, but with the loving resignation that they will always respect those men as "nonetheless, truly committed to the Word."
The line that had piqued my attention was "Well, [some associated church], they've gone in more of a liturgical direction. And you know, that is something many are looking for today..." Naturally, I wanted to hear more. I caught lines like, "Yes, and you know, I think it's the reverence, really. That's a big, big draw. It's important to them." And then: "Definitely. We have young people coming up and saying it outright. They're asking us for it." Later on, one referenced a book he's enjoying: "...you'll hear pastors avoid the term 'religion', but you know, 'religion' is not a bad word. It just means having structure..."
Mind you, these weren't 50-year-old priests contemplating requests at their suburban churches after parishioners came back from SEEK or the Eucharistic Revival in Indy. These weren't ELCA or PCA or Episcopalian ministers reading about new trends of going more "High Church" in Sunday Worship. No, these were pastors whose whole tradition at its core has great skepticism about anything in prayer being ritual, repeated, standardized, or universal. And they were saying: "People, especially our younger people, are telling us they are looking for greater ritual, reverence, and structure."
What's my point? Is it merely that traditional Catholics should rejoice that the generational desire for more ritual and greater reverence has expanded so deeply and so broadly that even the least liturgical of Christian denominations are experiencing it? Not really.
My point is to tell Catholics who love reverent, traditional, transcendent liturgy (1) to not be afraid to just tell your leaders what you want, and (2) to not be afraid to say "I like it, and I am attracted to it because it makes me feel _______."
We made a mistake in the last century. And by "we" I mean (regardless of when you were born), both the Extraordinary Form/Traditional Latin Mass lovers and the Ordinary Form/Novus-Ordo-with-more-reverence-please crowd. In the decades after 1965, there was a nearly-opposite contingent that wanted the most changes, implemented with the most speed, and with the most appeal to modern men and women. And both they, and the less radical majority whom they eventually enlisted, learned the power of telling, of wanting, of liking, and of feeling. "This style of Mass is so much more relevant to me. Done this way, I feel like Jesus is right next to me, as my friend. I want to be able to see and hear and understand everything entirely. I feel so much more connected when we sing or pray or are postured in this way."
The more traditionally-minded "we" recoiled at this kind of self-centering, rejected what seemed like mere emotivism, and put labels on it all collectively: touchy feely, warm and fuzzy, bleeding heart, feel-good. Alone, this dismissal might not have been a mistake. No, if "we" made a mistake, it was letting this distinction crystalize, and soon the trope was codified: "Progressives only care about the warm fuzzies they get from liturgies, while the Conservatives are creatures of reason." This heart/head binary was reinforced throughout the last quarter of the 20th century as obviously being an extension of our respective theologies: The Libs proclaim subjective relativism; the Trads defend objective truths.
And therein lay the trap. For the kind of people who would champion an infallible Catholic Church, its orthodox Councils, and its prophetic Vicar, how could they ever do anything other than obey the clear roadmap laid out by the most recent Council? How could they, in 1990, desire anything more than a priest who would just "say the black and do the red"? If they questioned if there could be more to our worship, or hinted that the Church had let slip some of her ancient treasures, wouldn't they be dissenters, "protestants", and emotive individualists just like the either side? I watched this. I believed this. I told my sister who attended a TLM parish, "Isn't it presumptuous to think that today we twenty-somethings have a better sense of what was good for the Church than thousands of bishops 'with boots on the ground' did in 1963?" Around 2002 a fellow seminarian sat with the FSSP sems at our Jubilarian Dinner and he told me afterward that the reply he got from one when asked why he preferred the Old Mass "sounded just like what we chide Libs for: 'It was so moving. I was just overcome. It spoke to me as nothing else had. I felt like finally I was praying the Mass."
In 1971, the man who missed what he had had just ten years earlier, or who just wished his parish Mass was more reverent and the high altar could stay, was told "Hey man, get with the times. We gotta stay relevant." But 50 years later, if his granddaughter has the same longings, a lot of the pushback to her will ironically be from angles that in 2001 would've been assumed conservative: "But the CDF or CDWS promulgated a doc... At least they do the red and say the black... But intrinsically it's all the same, right? You aren't denying the validity/efficacy of those Masses are you? Isn't receiving Jesus all that matters? We know the Church and the Pope are led by the Holy Spirit..."
And it's not just that a priest or a fellow parishioner or a person on social media will drop these on you. We use them on ourselves. We check our own swings, because: "Yes. It is the same Jesus. Following the rubrics and the CDWS docs is huge. I don't deny the validity of whatever Mass, and I do listen to the Church and the Popes." Early Millennials and late Gen Xers like me heard every priest and apologist give a talk along the lines of "Here's my hard-nosed response when a punk teen says 'I don't get anything out of Mass'." If you grew up in the JP2 Generation or have a B16 mindset or went to a good Catholic college or Newman Center, you probably wince when you hear another say, or resist the voice within yourself that might say: "Mass could be better if... I like it more when... I get more out of Mass when... I think we'd attract more young people if..."
Because, yeah, we largely are a theologically-, philosophically-minded people who understand ex opere operato and who love pics of a priest saying Mass on a Jeep hood with zero trappings. We like talking about that which is objective, intrinsic, legal, moral, absolute, and dare I say, scholastic. So yes, you will pull me up short by saying, "But whether it's with insipid music or no music, pretty church or ugly church, in a bored voice or in a singsong tone, if the priest sticks to the texts, especially the Consecration, then everything was completely valid and is objectively the exact same Jesus in the Eucharist, right? Or are you just chasing a certain kind of experience or aesthetic? Who is the liturgy really about? And would your subjective preferences justify parish-shopping?"
The majority of times in the last 4 years (or 40) that someone has pushed back against a trad or trad-adjacent person who was frustrated at losing their parish or their Mass Form or some legitimate option within the 2003 GIRM, the naysayer's argument has not been "Get with the times," it was "Well, the statute law does say X. The local bishop does have a right to say Y. You prefer your Mass to be Z, but that's also what Nutty Bob the Schismatic on Twitter champions. Wouldn't it be more virtuous to just go along with what your parish is doing?" On May 23rd, when Bishop Martin of Charlotte shrunk their TLMs locations by 80%, the traditionalists there received many digital condolences, but also got plenty of resigned shoulder pats saying, "Well, he is the bishop, and with Traditionis Custodes out there, we can't say it's unlawful..." It was only when his larger plan was leaked 5 days later and people saw that it would bar things that the 2003 GIRM dictates or CDWS letters protect that the firestorm of criticism took off.
I'm not here to tell you to badmouth your leaders or disobey or quit. But I will challenge you to take back the verbs that we eschewed and then abandoned to the liturgical progressives back in the '70s: tell your experiences, say what you want, don't fear to like things, be honest about what you feel. I'm not sure the winning play was every going to be arguing that one Form of Mass was objectively better. And I think most people who like more traditional things are not looking to get everyone to be like them; in 2025 the best that most people hope for is a liturgical libertarianism: "You can have yours, please just let me keep mine." And since the path to greater reverence for a parish is most likely to come from asking and persuading people, it's not going to be with the vinegar of mocking the parish's dated-but-not-abusive Sunday Mass; it's going to be with the honey of (oh forgive me, my former self!) sharing your feelings and experiences.
Yup, I said that.
I know: you didn't like the Synod on Synodality and you don't like "sharing". But do you know what you do have? Opinions and feelings. And dawgonnit, let's use them to your advantage. Tell your story. Say what you saw and, yes, what you felt. What hit you? What was different? Why does this help you pray better? What heart-stopping, mystic insight one-liner has your kid dropped that made you think "I have to keep this gift going for my family"? Use words like: attracted, struck, drew, overwhelmed, captivated. Write moments of insight down so you don't forget. You know you had that thing happen. You're not driving however-many extra miles, you're not wearing that veil at normie Mass and having your friends look at you funny, you're not risking losing the good opinion of your pastor and fellow parishioners by bringing all this up—if those verbs haven't crashed into your life.
They don't need to be airtight arguments. You're allowed a sample size of 1. I have zero statistical charting on this, but I'll still tell it to you: Every priest I know reports the same thing from 2- to 5-year-olds: they call their pastor Jesus or God. We priests chafe at it, but the people think it's cute. But a strange thing happened when a parish I was at tried out Mass ad orientem for 3 years. By the time I left, I realized I hadn't been called Jesus or God in a year or two. (I think maybe the parents focused and prayed better too.)
People will want to craft a metaphysical argument for altar rails, but the most across-the-board convincing pitch I've heard comes from a Novus Ordo parish where the least traddly families will tell you, "It's just so nice to have a pause. It was always start-stop as you got near the front, pushing then pulling back the kids. Now we just wait for the rail to clear, we move up and kneel as a whole family, catch our breaths and clear our minds before Jesus comes, and then you get an extra moment with Him before standing too. Even a total of 5 seconds not moving feels like a mini retreat."
We know that we are more than pure reason. I don't need to make a case for ritual. I don't need a syllogism to prove the power of signs and silence. Just come with me to a graveside service. Nobody can contest that the purest, most perfect, and absolutely compelling act you can find in secular American life is the lifting, folding, saluting, and presenting of an American flag—in complete silence. And nobody can explain why it's powerful either. The little kid at the cemetery asks his dad, "Dad, what does that all mean?" Dad says, "Honestly, I don't know, son." The boy replies, "Yeah, me neither, Dad. But I really like it."
People think they cry because "Taps" was played after that. Nah, you were crying when that serviceman finished the folding, took that crisp step backwards, and made that impossibly slow salute, before the flag bearer turned and carried it to your grandma. And God was in those tears.
I'll give some last examples from previous iterations of the "annual summer trad blog".
but the memorable part was talking to parishioners afterward, folks who had never attended this form of Mass before. Here again, I am relaying but mere impressions, and these from other people even, but when they finally could find words to begin to describe the experience, they dubbed it: beautiful, transcendent, other-worldly, more reverent, more worshipful, and (though I could tell they wanted another word instead) "holier". The reticence with that word makes sense: no one wants to say that one form of Mass "feels holier" than another, especially when the second is the one that you and 99% of the world have attended for decades. One woman I think captured it best when she said, "It wasn't 'more reverent' in a sense that our usual Mass isn't —and Father, our altar boys here are so reverent— but it's more like the reverence in this Mass is just... more unmistakable. It like the reverence is baked-in; it's unavoidable. When you see the boys moving so precisely, the genuflections, the bowing all the way to the floor at the Confiteor before Communion, the extra cautious way everything is handled, the priest's fingers... Uhh! It just compels you."
But [after several weeks] once my brain could do two things at once again, I began to appreciate what the people were saying after Mass about the chanting. One couple was telling some choir members, "When the Sanctus starts, I swear it's like we're not even in a building anymore. Yeah, it's like we are being lifted up above the earth, or that the roof is gone and angels are pouring in above and around," and so I added, "Seriously, when the drones join in on that Sanctus XI, I legitimately want to just freeze and listen, but then I remember that I have to keep going because otherwise we'll never get to the Consecration." Yes, it can be weird and even frustrating to not hear the Canon of the Mass if you are coming from the O.F., but even two or three good voices can create a transformed, transcendent space in which to [grow] more comfortable with the idea that "maybe some words are too sacred for mortals to hear".
[On accusations of nostalgia or cosplaying] Now, I'm a priest so I know my experience at the Latin Mass is different from that of those in the pews. But when I talk to people who grew up with the Ordinary Form and later started going to the Extraordinary Form (especially to sung Masses) they consistently describe the experience as "almost otherworldly", [but distinctly] not as "slighty-earlier-within-this-here-world-ly".
When hearing a high school girl who texts like other teenagers and wears modern fashions say to her friends, "Wanna come to Latin Mass with me? They're singing Mass XI today and that one always gives me goosebumps," you don't get the impression these people think of it like a quick trip to the Renaissance Fair. At a TLM one will meet single parent families, dual income families, college kids who study I.T. and exercise science and broadcast journalism—none of whom seem interested in time traveling to 1905 Catholic Boston for the day. They seem to think this Mass fits just fine into their modern lives.
And therein lies the first big impression: that this was truly the Mass of my forefathers. We have a close-knit family, with an almost-irresistible tug toward history and to our stories, and a deep affection and even awe for our previous generations. But you need to understand: my grandpa was baptized Cletus Clement —straight from the Roman Canon. His brother was named Linus. Each of my four grandparents was a daily Mass-goer at different times in their adult lives. And the Mass of their first 50-60 years on earth was exactly the one that I first said in May 2020. In 1943 those two young couples could reasonable assume that their grandchildren would see and hear the things they did every Sunday. They knew chapel veils and altars rails, the Leonine prayers and the Last Gospel. And all at once, this congregation around me [knew them] too. This is going to sound melodramatic, but at the Commemoration of the Dead I felt like I connected differently with my grandparents— that I was now praying for them as they had prayed for their parents and grandparents, and as those generations had prayed for even older ones.
I could go on, but the whole point is that I want you to go on. Another day I'll tackle the question of whether your witness to your experiences is better suited to improving existing liturgies or to opening the door to other liturgies. But for now, my advice and even my admonition is for you is to be brave and speak up. Brave enough to speak up about your spiritual experiences and even (heaven forbid) your feelings.
And I can testify that it works. Ordained in 2005 for the Lincoln diocese, I was about as traditional with liturgy as you could get—well, as traditional as 1997 Novus Ordo could be. Further steps for me required the people and other priests speaking up and sharing what they had experienced. By 2020, I was pretty "tradvanced" and convinced on many topics, but I was still just theoretical on some of the final concrete steps. Then a kindergartener closed me out.
Masses were reopening in a patchwork of cities in May 2020 and the extended family that had carried the bulk of our livestreamed Masses' music was about to return to the Latin Mass parish about 45 minutes away. Between Masses I shouted up to the choir loft and asked the director what it would take to get them to stay and help. Mom said she would have herself, and it would be way easier for them too, but when she asked her kids if they'd rather stay in town and go to English Mass or make the drive to get to Latin Mass, her eldest, a 5-year-old, begged her that they go back to Latin Mass, and the next daughter agreed. "My girls are picking the thing that is harder on them; that's not a choice I'm able to ignore." I had to respect kids and mom both for that. "Is there nothing we can do?" She replied, "Honestly. You could start a Latin Mass here." And she was right; we could. We had added three Mass times for Covid spacing. So two or three weeks later the new noon Mass became a High Mass.
"Out of the mouths of babes..."
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