It is often forgotten that the authors of the 20th-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.
Continue reading at Tradition and Sanity