Let's Get Back To The Latin Mass Question

For some time, I've been in the habit of revisiting what I thought I knew about the Catholic Church when I was a lot younger, vis-a-vis what I've learned since converting. Just in the last few days, it occurred to me that I knew a lot of Catholics in high school, college, and early adulthood, and that shouldn't be a surprise, since Catholics are the largest religious denomination of any sort in the US. Not only that, but I was always at least somewhat interested in Catholicism, though I was raised Presbyterian. If nothing else, I wanted to know how so many people could be so wrong over so many centuries.

I was born in 1947, as were the Catholics whom I knew in my age cohort. I could probably list two dozen names among fairly close friends, as well as girls and women I dated, and they would have been a large proportion of people who were more than just acquaintances in my youth. And this means we can extrapolate: if they were early baby boomers like me, they would have been confirmed at about age 12, which is to say in the late 1950s, not only before Vatican II, but well before the introduction of the Paul VI mass in 1970. They were raised, formed, and initiated as pre-Conciliar Catholics.

What I began to realize once I followed this train of thought was that, by the time I knew them in their mid to late teens and into early adulthood, none was still an observant Catholic. This would be in a ten year span, between about 1965 and 1975. Of the two Catholic women I dated in my single years after college, both were already divorced. (One had shot her husband, but it was an accident. There's more to that story.) All these people had been formed as Catholics prior to novus ordo, and nearly all had come to a conclusion that, while they still identified as Catholics, their Catholic formation had been a serious handicap, something to be overcome.

I would also say that most still regarded the Catholic brand as something prestigious, an indication that they were serious people and not superficial. Their problem was they felt this had made them neurotic and guilt ridden. And they'd gotten this way before novus ordo was even a glimmer in a cardinal's eye.

I'll grant that this is anecedotal and subjective, but I think it reflects what had become of Catholicism in popular culture, and in fact in Catholics' view of themselves, by the 1950s. The 1979 play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You is clearly based on pre-Conciliar stereotypes of Catholic education, including a teacher who is a religious fanatically inculcating a sexually repressive, anti-Freudian world view. Fulton Sheen in his televison presentations of the period, also pre-Conciliar, clearly recognized this threat to Catholicism posed by the view of psychoanalysis and its efficacy in popular culture.

But let's put this in the context of the current Catholic traditionalist movement, especially the view that the Latin mass is a revival of a somehow purer Catholicism. Let's take what I think is a representative expression of this view, Ten Reasons To Attend The Traditional Latin Mass, The reaons include:

2. What is true for me is even more true for my children. This way of celebrating most deeply forms the minds and hearts of our children in reverence for Almighty God, in the virtues of humility, obedience, and adoring silence. It fills their senses and imaginations with sacred signs and symbols, “mystic ceremonies” (as the Council of Trent puts it).

The problem here is that the Catholics I knew, in the last generation to be fully formed in the old Latin mass Church, hadn't been effectively formed in it. By adolescence or early adultood, they'd all fallen away, and they all felt their Catholic upbringing was a handicap to be overcome. Not just some of them, all of them.

The piece sums up:

Similar points could be made about the distracting “Sign of Peace”; or female lectors and EMHCs, who, apart from constituting an utter break with tradition, can be clad in clothing of questionable modesty; or the almost universal custom of loud chitchat before and after Mass; or the ad-libbing and optionizing of the priest.

This is a straw man argument that conflates innovations that, whether you agree with them or not are sanctioned by the Church, with accidents like skimpy clothing, chitchat, or a skylarking priest that may or may not be present in a novus ordo parish-- and indeed, there's nothing to prevent them from happening in a Latin mass. The piece goes on:

This point should be emphasized: it is especially harmful for children to witness, again and again, the shocking lack of reverence with which Our Lord and God is treated in the awesome Sacrament of His Love, as pew after pew of Catholics automatically go up to receive a gift they generally treat with casual and even bored indifference.

I would say again that in my admittedly anecdotal experience and my subjective view of it, every Catholic I knew in my age cohort, formed as children in the universal Latin mass environment of the 1950s (and indeed, some older Catholics I knew at the time) had lapsed and felt their Catholic formation was a handicap well before novus ordo came on the scene.

It's also plain that figures like Fulton Sheen were aware of factors like Marxism and psychoanalytic theory that were challenging Catholicism well before Vatican II. I've been carefully reading Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, and it's plain that the Council was aware of these and many other factors that were challenging the Church, and they recognized that these were not simple problems, and the Church would be dealing with them for centuries to come.

To regard the Latin mass as some sort of panacea that will stop the erosion of observant Catholics is simplistic and reflects an inability to recognize trends that were well under way before Vatican II.