In 2017, when we were still attending the local Novus Ordo parish Mass (and about a year and a half before we discovered the Latin Mass), I wrote a blog post where I was wrestling with the ephemeral, lamenting planned obsolescence, and worrying about the faith of my young children in withstanding the cultural zeitgeist of secularism. There I wrote:
In many ways I fear the faith I am caring for, trying so carefully to preserve, maintaining its integrity and instilling the rituals and remembrances in our family life as my children are young, will be rejected when they come of age. “Sorry dad,” they will say, “we don’t want your stuff.” An old missal, a rosary polished from years of fingering—they’ll become like cherry armoires and cast-iron cookware: of no perceived use to them.
Everybody has their preferred style, but there is something to be said for a quality handmade chair, an old stone church, a set of steel hand tools because it carries with it a memory, a legacy, and a history. Non-denominationalism is the IKEA of worship and architecture today. It is modern, sleek, relevant, and sterile. Its roots do not run deep, the foundation like that of a vinyl-clad townhouse.
In the secular arena, modern progressives destroy everything they touch. They tear down with no real cohesive or thought-out plan of how to rebuild. They tear down the family and religion, statues and monuments, traditional sexual mores. They are impatient, and content to slap up temporary shanties until they can figure out what next thing comes next. Social change can’t happen fast enough. Out with the old, in with the new, until new becomes old and then off to the dump again.
But things get destroyed in the process. Timeless things, priceless things—immortal souls, traditional families, rituals and connections to our past and our ancestors and predecessors.
My prediction goes beyond furniture and housewares, beyond trends and tastes and kitchen renovations. When we hit the modern bottom, when the demons start to tip the scales and become too powerful, when the non-denominational particleboard gets wet and warped, when the trans-everything nonsense hits fever pitch…a few will start to pine for an ancient faith. They will go online to order and meetup; they will seek and they will not find (Jn 7:34) except in those pockets in which it has been preserved as the pearl of great price that it is, a soft glow of candles in stained glass windows in the darkness, shards of light reflecting off a gold monstrance in the sanctuary, the quiet ancient chant of plainsong beckoning behind thick solid wood doors. It will be exotic and intimidating, ethereal and forbidden, austere and arduous, foreign and yet completely familiar. The Faith of our fathers, the Faith handed down, the Faith communion that takes place in real time…it will be both old, and new.
What I didn’t realize then was we would be rounding the corner as a family a couple years later, finding a local pocket of those devoted to the usus antiquior. The rest, they say, is history—the 1962 Missal became our liturgical “docking station” where everything synched. We eventually began attending a diocesan Latin Mass every Sunday where we began to lay down roots. The hope was not that the Tridentine liturgy would be our salvation or the “silver bullet” that would guarantee the transmission of the Faith to our children as (eventual) adults; it simply seemed like a solid foundation, built on rock, that had stood the test of time for generations.
People attend the Latin Mass for a myriad of reasons. For some it may be ideological; for some, aesthetic. For many (like us), it recalibrates the needle of what it means to worship. We are not there to see friends (though we enjoy each other’s company outside the church after Mass). We are not there to “share a communal meal.” We are not there for entertainment or good preaching.
We enter into worship primarily as an act of sacrifice. In this, the “Mass of the Ages” expresses unequivocally its single-minded purpose. As Msgr. George Moorman states in The Latin Mass Explained, “Sacrifice answers the craving of human nature.” There is no ambiguity when one steps into a Latin Mass: this is Catholicism.
The post What’s Old Is New appeared first on LewRockwell.
