Millennials, Authenticity and the Latin Mass

By Jake Neu, Crisis Magazine, November 15, 2018

My wife and I have recently started regularly attending our local Latin Mass in the Extraordinary Form. We took our two young boys one Sunday in July, shortly after the news of Theodore McCarrick’s sins jump started the current round of clergy sex scandals. We had previously attended about once a year just to mix it up, but since July we have gone every other week and now three weeks in four. We may switch permanently.

The antiquity of the Mass contrasts with the youth of the congregation. Numerous little children filling the nave provide a background noise of crying, cooing, crawling over pews, and scuffling into laps. These sounds of family life contrast with other parishes where children depart for children’s liturgies or cry rooms, or are simply absent. The adults also present a diverse group. A majority are young families and adults under 50. Although the Catholic Church has hemorrhaged men for decades, men and women are about evenly split here. Nor is it all white people. Despite being low overall percentage of the local population, a good number of Hispanics are present. Three or four black families and some Asian couples also attend. The congregation more obviously runs the gamut from rich to poor than your typical American parish. “Here,” in Joyce’s mocking but true words, “comes everybody.”….continue reading…. crisismagazine.com/2018/millennials-authenticity-and-the-latin-mass