The Generational Divide in the Priesthood, by Darrick Taylor

By Darrick Taylor, Crisis Magazine, Jan. 24, 2022

Darrick Taylor teaches history at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas.

This past Christmas Eve, I attended a Midnight Mass while visiting family for the holidays. The Mass was in the old Roman Rite, provided by one of the religious orders dedicated to it, in communion with Rome. When the priest and his servers processed toward my pew, I received a surprise: the priest was a younger man I had known years before. I last saw him nearly a decade ago in Rome. When I first met him, he was a member of one of the newer religious orders, founded in the 1990s.

He was a good and devoted priest, but the religious order he was a part of was, to put it mildly, none too concerned with the liturgy, and very much inspired by Vatican II ideals (and the witness of John Paul II). Yet here he was, presiding at the altar, chanting the older rite in Latin. …