TIP – Eric Agustin’s eight children often refer to the first day of the week as “Party Sunday”. The family would wake up, attend a short morning mass at a nearby Catholic parish, then go home for lunch and an afternoon of relaxation and football.
But this summer, the family made a “major change,” one of his teenage sons said on a recent Sunday afternoon outside Saint Joseph, the family’s new parish. family. At St. Joseph, the liturgy is elaborately decorated, precisely choreographed, and conducted entirely in Latin. The family drives an hour round-trip to attend a worship service that begins at 11 a.m. and can last nearly two hours.
The traditional Latin Mass, an ancient form of Catholic worship that Pope Francis has tried to discourage, is instead experiencing a renaissance in the United States. It attracts an overlapping mix of traditional aestheticists, young families, new converts and critics of Francis. And its resurgence, fueled by the pandemic years, is part of a growing right-wing trend in American Christianity in general.
The Mass has sparked a wide proxy war within the American church not only over songs and prayers but also about the future of Catholicism and its role in culture and politics.
Followers of the Latin Mass tend to be socially conservative and value tradition. Some, like the Augustin family, are drawn to the beauty, symbolism of the Mass and what they describe as a more reverent form of worship.
Others are also drawn to the old form through a brand of hardline rhetoric and new community they have found in some online Catholic communities. They see the Pope’s attempt to limit the old Latin Mass as an example of the dangers of a world becoming untouched by Western religious values.
The traditional Latin Mass, also known as the “special form,” was celebrated for centuries until the Second Vatican Council’s transformation in the 1960s, partly for the purpose of making the rite more accessible. closer. After the Council, Mass could be celebrated in any language, contemporary music infiltrated many parishes, and priests turned their faces away from those in the pews.
But the traditional Latin Mass, with all its form and mystery, never completely disappeared. Although it accounts for only a fraction of the Masses performed in 17,000 Catholic parishes in the United States, it is thriving.
The United States now appears to have at least 600 traditional Mass venues, the most of any country. More than 400 locations offer it every Sunday, according to an online directory.
This growth is happening as Pope Francis has cracked, enacted strict new limits on etiquette last year. His immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, expanded access to the old Mass, but Francis described it as a source of division in the church and said it often involved denial more broadly abandoned the goals of the Second Vatican Council.
To some extent, the split in the old Mass represented a conflict of priorities and a power struggle within the church leadership. In benches and parishes it is more complicated. Many Catholics say they are attracted to Mass for spiritual reasons, underpinned by aesthetic and liturgical preferences rather than by partisanship.
“There is reverence on the next level,” Mr. Agustin said of Mass at St. Joseph’s Shrine.
Dozens of large, young families have flocked to St. Joseph’s Shrine since it began regularly offering traditional Latin Masses in 2016. A historic German parish with a 19th-century building struggled to keep. for the lights this morning was bustling with people, including many couples with five or more children.
Solemn Mass on Sundays begins with holy water sprinkled over the aisle, and it features clusters of frankincense and the sound of bells, pipes, and Gregorian chant. Men tend to wear suits and ties and most women wear skirts and lace headscarves, a traditional sign of modesty and femininity. Parking nearby is difficult to find on Sundays.
“There is nothing special here,” said Canon Father JB Commins, 33, who lives in the brick house next door. “In other places where traditional Mass is being celebrated, it is growing exponentially.”
Relying on the need for an intense religious experience, many supporters of the Latin Mass seek to return not only to the old rites but also to old social values and gender roles. Here, complexity and rigor are not barriers to accessibility but attractions that bind believers to a long history of spiritual clarity, which they see as the future. markedly contrasted with the modern church.
The pandemic has accelerated divisions, as orthodox parishes are often closed for longer, prompting some Catholics to seek out new parishes. Many attendees said they discovered traditionalist podcasts and influencers who brought them to the older Mass.
Although Catholics are generally a politically diverse group in the United States, those who attend Mass regularly tend to be more conservative: 63 percent of Catholics who attend Mass at least monthly support support Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election, compared with 53 percent according to the Pew Research Center. Informal surveys have found that those who attend Latin Mass not only attend Mass more often, but also have nearly universally conservative views on topics such as abortion and same-sex marriage. count.
Before an 11 a.m. Mass at St. Joseph’s Church on an early October Sunday, attended by about 300 people, Canon Commins read an announcement from Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit, calling on Catholics “action” to defeat a ballot amendment that would respect the right to abortion in the state constitution. (The following state voters approve the measure.)
Political and theological conservatives see Pope Francis’ restriction on the traditional Latin Mass as a disturbing disregard for broader fundamentalism.
Since Francis became pope in 2013, he has emphasized inclusivity, and tried to soften the church’s approach to flashpoints like abortion and homosexuality. He also released a major message on environmental management, pray for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and appointed women to historically important roles in church activity.
Pope Francis’ 2021 document “Traditionis Custodes,” is comparable to an old executive decree, limiting the place and time of the celebration of Mass. And this summer, he infuriated traditionalists even more with a new document that makes clear that the tensions surrounding Mass are not just a matter of taste. “I don’t see how one can say that a person who recognizes the validity of the Council – although I am surprised a Catholic might say not – and at the same time does not accept liturgical reform, ‘ he wrote.
The persecution has helped fuel what some have called “liturgical wars.”
“It’s a holistic vision of the church and what it means to be,” said John Baldovin, a priest and professor at the Boston University School of Theology and Pastoral Affairs who frequently writes on liturgical issues. Being a Christian and being a Catholic is at stake here. . “You can’t say it was just a beautiful Mass.”
The conflict is particularly acute in the United States, where conservatives dominate the bishops’ conference and high-profile critics and media regularly challenge Francis’ leadership.
At a conference in Pittsburgh this fall, Catholic critics of Pope Francis offered three “protest clauses” against the Vatican and its current leadership. Their top protest was the “Traditionis Custodes,” which they called an act of “religious discrimination against traditional Catholics.”
Some bishops, including those in Chicago and Washington, have drastically reduced the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass this year.
“It was something I couldn’t imagine, having to beg and pray for the traditional Latin Mass,” said Noah Peters, who organized a 5-mile pilgrimage in September from a cathedral in Arlington, Va., to a church in Washington in protest of restrictions in both dioceses.
Mr. Peters grew up as a secular Jew and was attracted to Catholicism through the traditional Latin Mass “because it has beauty, longevity and reverence about it,” he said.
Like Mr. Peters, almost all Latin Mass devotees use a version of the word “reverence” spontaneously, contrasting the tone of the Latin Mass with the rare examples cited. Instruction in modern parishes has non-traditional elements such as puppets and balloons, a conventional treatment of the Eucharist, or music and dance that they consider disrespectful. Popular traditionalist broadcaster Taylor Marshall often tells a story about feeling banished from Novus Ordo when he was served the Eucharist by a parishioner wearing a Grover T-shirt.
In Detroit, Archbishop Allen Vigneron allowed the Latin Mass to grow essentially unhindered.
Alex Begin, a Detroit-area real estate executive, trains priests in the liturgy and helps parishes that want to start celebrating Mass.
During a recent drive that started in downtown Detroit and circled formerly working-class German and Polish neighborhoods, Begin pointed out churches that had already begun to celebrate Mass. Latin and some churches are planning to start. Begin has a taste for mystery: His hobbies include maximizing rewards for frequent flyers and collecting charmwhich he calls “Paradise’s frequent flyer program.”
Begin argues that Pope Francis’ opposition to the Latin Mass is against his goal of unification. “You’re going to direct people to separatist groups,” he said.
At Old St. Mary’s, a 19th-century parish in the city’s touristy Greektown neighborhood, about 150 people gathered in October for the monthly Latin Mass, complete with a Gregorian choir.
The parishioners knelt, stood up, made the sign of the cross and whispered prayers. The incense wafted through the large, dimly lit room. When it was time to receive Holy Communion, the children silently went and knelt, their faces slightly upturned.
“Corpus Dómini nostri Jesu Christi custódiat nanimam tuam in vitam ætérnam. Amen,” Priests pray as they place a thin wafer on each tongue. May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ guard your soul foreverg. Amen.
Kristin Kopy, 41, after the ceremony said the Latin Mass “puts out genuine Catholics”.
Ms. Kopy’s husband works for Church Militant, a far-right multimedia website against homosexuality, pandemic restrictions, and Pope Francis.
Mrs. Kopy was holding her 2-week-old daughter, Philomena, as her older children played nearby. She and her husband have attended Latin Mass for the past six years. They felt something was missing in their experience of the new Mass that they now found in the old one.
“I don’t speak Latin,” she said. “But it feels like you’re connecting more with God.”
