This week’s Economist has a nice story on the revival of traditionalism in the Catholic Church, entitled “A traditionalist avant-garde: It’s trendy to be a traditionalist in the Catholic church.” The usual tropes are there—the “church hierarchy in Western countries [is] beset by scandal and decline”—but as mainstream news reports go, it’s accurate and balanced.
The numbers behind the trend are striking: “The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, started in 1965, now has over 5,000 members. The weekly number of Latin masses is up from 26 in 2007 to 157 now. In America it is up from 60 in 1991 to 420.” More from the report on the Latin Mass scene:
Women sport mantillas (lace headscarves). Men wear tweeds.
But it is not a fogeys’ hangout: the congregation is young and international. Like evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism is attracting people who were not even born when the Second Vatican Council tried to rejuvenate the church. Traditionalist groups have members in 34 countries, including Hong Kong, South Africa and Belarus. Juventutem, a movement for young Catholics who like the old ways, boasts scores of activists in a dozen countries. . . .
A big shift came in 2007 when Pope Benedict XVI formally endorsed the use of the old-rite Latin mass. Until that point, fondness for the traditional liturgy could blight a priest’s career. The cause has also received new vim from the Ordinariate, a Vatican-sponsored grouping for ex-Anglicans. Dozens of Anglican priests have “crossed the Tiber” from the heavily ritualistic “smells and bells” high-church wing; they find a ready welcome among traditionalist Roman Catholics.
The story reminded me of a relevant passage in Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion. He praises Latin Mass Catholics and analogous groups of Protestants for their vibrancy and other virtues before issuing a gentle warning:
In its quest for a greater purity and a more perfect solidarity, the Benedict option [i.e., withdrawing from society or the larger Church, as traditionalists sometimes do] often seems to have little to say about the millions of baptized Christians whom separatism would effectively leave behind. Even if their faith is lukewarm and compromised, the undercatechized Catholic and the Oprahfied Protestant are still only a good confession or an altar call away from a more authentic Christian life.
I thought his warning a prudent one when I read the book, and I still do. But in my experience, traditionalists are well aware of potential pitfalls and doing their best to avoid them. Rather than withdrawing from society, my traditionalist friends are busy inviting undercatechized Catholics to attend the Latin Mass, talking to their Oprahfied Protestant friends about Catholicism, and reviving their local parishes. We should all have such problems.
(Thanks to my friend Paul Schultz, who helped found the Michigan branch of Juventutem, for pointing me to the Economist article.)
December 13th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
Douthat’s objection is a pure straw man. The Tridentine mass was designed for illiterate peasants. You don’t need to know how to read to attend it. You don’t need to know what is going on to attend it. You certainly don’t need to know Latin, church doctrine or Scripture to attend it. All you need to know how to do is kneel docilely in a pew and admire the stained-glass windows while your betters worship on your behalf.
Catholics who go in for the traditional mass are not generally intellectually or morally superior to those who attend the NO mass. In fact, the genuine Catholic elite, both clerical and lay, tend to consider their affectations slightly ridiculous.
Most self-proclaimed “traditionalists” are attending the neo-Tridentine masses merely to perform a watch-me-reject-modern-society charade. They have nothing worthwhile to teach the mainstream Church, IMHO.
December 13th, 2012 | 7:18 pm
This is an exciting trend, one that the hierarchy needs to embrace. Many trads that I know are amazing people who let the faith animate the entirety of their lives.
Many of them fit into one of the categories discussed in this piece from the Atlantic that has been getting some play.
I say that it is important for the hierarchy to embrace this trend, because the trads need shepherds — good shepherds. Some — but by no means most — of the trads I know tend to become overly obsessed with the minutiae of the traditional liturgy. They need good pastors to guide and properly inform their well-intentioned impulses. I think some of the excesses that trads sometimes fall into is at least in part a consequence of their marginalization in the mainstream Church. Bishops have mostly shunned them rather than guided them.
I hope to see the bishops take a more pro-active and pastoral approach to the trads heading into the future.
December 14th, 2012 | 12:37 am
I think Douthat means not that traditionalist Catholics are tempted to “withdraw from society” but that they’re prone to give up on the possibilities for evangelization and re-evangelization — for sharing the good news in the traditionalist idiom, which is beautiful and compelling.
The message is the same regardless of the translation, but for many Bible readers the English of the Douay-Rheims, for example, conveys the message of Scripture more effectively than does the English of the NAB. Likewise, for many Catholics the Latin (with facing-page translation, if need be) of the traditional Mass conveys paschal mystery more effectively than does the ICEL-approved translation of the Mass of Paul VI.
But it may be that many such Catholics haven’t yet discovered the traditional Latin Mass and so don’t realize that the idiom it’s prayed in is the idiom that their souls already sing to. Will traditionalist Catholics have the confidence to persuade them to look into the Catholic patrimony that the traditionalists themselves have decided to make use of?
December 14th, 2012 | 12:48 am
Nicholas,
I didn’t want to quote at too much length from Bad Religion, but the context of my quotation (pages 279-282) makes it clear that Douthat is indeed talking about withdrawal from society, not merely attending Latin Mass on Sundays. He doesn’t say (and neither would I) that such withdrawal is entirely and universally a bad thing, just that it brings its own set of dangers.
December 14th, 2012 | 1:17 am
Thanks for the clarification, Anna. So I assume Douthat isn’t referring specifically to traditionalist Catholics. I share your impression that on the whole they’re given to social engagement, not social withdrawal, although they could always do more to share with their undercatechized neighbor what they’ve discovered, and I wish they did.
December 14th, 2012 | 8:35 am
Don’t confuse a preference for the esthetics of traditional services with holdo g conservative political or social opinions. I loathe the services at modern suburban mega-churches with a fiery passion precisely because they use contemporary music and are extremely informal, even though the members and staff are almost always far to my right on any other issue. This is common among Protestants, where the liturgical churches are the most traditional in form. The case is likely much different in Catholicism.
December 14th, 2012 | 9:24 am
I prefer the TLM, that’s all. I don’t care about Vatican II, it happened before I was born. I don’t think I’m better or smarter than anybody who attends the Novus Ordo exclusively. I don’t actually care anymore about what goes on in the church wars. I’m just thankful that I can go to Mass.
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