The actuarial tables have at long last caught up with the Modernist movement that tried and failed to subvert the Church.
According to a recent report from AP News, the Catholic Church is going back to the traditions of her illustrious past.
Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.
The AP neglected to identify exactly which traditional Catholics are complaining that food pantries have twisted the Church. Nonetheless, their reporting that secularized music in the liturgy and doctrinal indifferentism present widespread concerns among the faithful is valid.
Related: The Church of Nice
The progressive priests who dominated the U.S. church in the years after Vatican II are now in their 70s and 80s. Many are retired. Some are dead. Younger priests, surveys show, are far more conservative.
“They say they’re trying to restore what us old guys ruined,” said the Rev. John Forliti, 87, a retired Twin Cities priest who fought for civil rights and reforms in Catholic school sex education.
But this is not a simple story. Because there are many who welcome this new, old church.
They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.
Related: Antibodies of Christ
But look deeper.
Because at Benedictine, Catholic teaching on contraception can slip into lessons on Plato, and no one is surprised if you volunteer for 3 a.m. prayers. Pornography, pre-marital sex and sunbathing in swimsuits are forbidden.
If these rules seem like precepts of a bygone age, that hasn’t stopped students from flocking to Benedictine and other conservative Catholic colleges.
At a time when U.S. college enrollment is shrinking, Benedictine’s expansion over the last 15 years has included four new residence halls, a new dining hall and an academic center. An immense new library is being built. The roar of construction equipment never seems to stop.
Enrollment, now about 2,200, has doubled in 20 years.
Related: Exploding the ‘Religion Is Dying’ Psyop
For decades, many traditional Catholics have wondered if the church would – and perhaps should – shrink to a smaller but more faithful core.
In ways, that’s how St. Maria Goretti looks today. The 6:30 a.m. Friday Mass, Rouleau says, is increasingly popular among young people. But once-packed Sunday Masses now have empty pews. Donations are down. School enrollment plunged.
Some who left have gone to more liberal parishes. Some joined Protestant churches. Some abandoned religion entirely.
But [Fr. Scott] Emerson insists the Catholic Church’s critics will be proven wrong.
“How many have laughed at the church, announcing that she was passe, that her days were over and that they would bury her?” he said in a 2021 Mass.
“The church,” he said, “has buried every one of her undertakers.”
Thanks to Isaac Young for his thread about this report on X.
As even secular media suggest, the Catholic Church has once again defeated her enemies by letting them break their fists on her face.
Time is on traditional believers’ side. Due to their patience and endurance, the Catholic Church is going back to her evergreen teachings.
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The Catholic Church is simply the rock, which Jesus gave to us as gift. It is there until the end of time for us. Jesus promised, and I believe. 🙂
That said, having been knee deep in the issues surrounding the current traditionalist movement, these mainstream reports are surficial at best. I also have my grave doubts about the motivations of reports like this because the last thing the traditionalist movement needs is another report about how “TLM” is a gonna get people stacked to the rafters.
Tradition is timeless, along with reverence, along with an orthodox faith. The use of the Missal of 1962 as a crutch for those things is entirely different discussion that is not particularly healthy for the Church at large. The Missal of 1962 at times feels like a honeypot for Protestant converts in the US in particular.
Anyway, what matters is the return of orthodoxy and enthusiasm. The relativism and the going through the motions is what makes modern Catholic culture a washout. It is the Boomer effect in other words. (So too by the way is the somewhat toxic culture of the current traditionalist movement.) We have a lot of CINOs who do keep the most parish lights on, but make it hard for the orthodox to navigate the culture. As the US church continues to shrink, who will be left will be the faithful, ready to bring Catholic beauty back and grow again.
I’ve seen some catholics try to argue a religious minimalism questioning why it matters that we do certain things. I recently wrote about why tradition matters in reference to a criticism I have of most older catholics not bowing and crossing themselves during the opening and closing procession of Christ. Big T tradition has always been there, but little t tradition has been made trivial in the minds of many gaslit catholics over the generations. This is why I love how many young catholics are seeking the old ways. They seek to align their thoughts and actions with what they profess in Mass on Sunday.
We are at a point where the answer to why tradition matters is clear. The lack of it which compelled us to reverence and beauty, has made for generational crops of weak catholics. Lukewarm, dare I say?
People hate it when I bring these points up, but the burden of proof is on them to prove that lack of habit and discipline leads to desired results. Just because we are talking about the faith here, doesn’t mean we throw out fundamental rules of cause and effect.
We will see a beautiful rejuvenation of the faith over the coming decades.
“Big T tradition has always been there, but little t tradition has been made trivial in the minds of many gaslit catholics over the generations. This is why I love how many young catholics are seeking the old ways. They seek to align their thoughts and actions with what they profess in Mass on Sunday.”
Define “old ways”. This is where the want for the Good, the True, the Beautiful quite often goes astray. For the most part, what people think of as “old ways” are no older than Vatican Part 1, including frequent/mandatory confession for venial sins.
The really “old ways” include: Infrequent confession, a variety of musical styles and sacramental expression, a Mass in the vernacular, and even reception in the hand. That last is older than kneeling and the tongue and is documented with 4th (5th?) century rubrics.
I get the impulse for something better than “Jesus loves you” and “On Eagles Wings”, I really do. I promise. I have been in the Mass of the guitar and the gymnasiums. But quite often what people have been equally gaslit into an expression of the faith that’s “ancient”, when we’re talking 1880’s max.
The point of Vatican II was to restore the act of formation to Mass, which was it’s original purpose, along with Sacrifice. Many old traditions were revived, along with room for every generation to develop their own. It’s just bizarre moment when people looking for ancient/authenticity and go running to a set of rituals that at very best can be thought of as “2024 does 1962 with it’s own spin”.
Anyway, my apologies as these are long standing personal discussions. Overall I agree the trend will be towards more reverence and tradition. I just want to encourage trust that the Church offered all of that at Vatican II and we’re finish up the growing pains. There are many good reasons to revive the really ancient traditions. We’re just dealing with the Boomer cultural version of it.
It sounds like you have more knowledge of church history than I do, but for me the “old ways” mean whatever set of attitudes and behaviors pre-Vatican II which would compel and nurture reverence for the faith and Mass among Catholics. The fruit of that reverence would come in many forms – modest dress, bowing in Christ’s presence or when hearing his name, Eucharist on the tongue, etc. To my knowledge, V2 said that was silly and optional.
I lean more towards TLM despite going to Novus Ordro. So for your terms, that’s the best way I can put it.
I’m seeing now saying the “old ways” was too vague. This is a failure on my part to be clear with what I mean by old ways.
To attempt to clarify more, I identify more as a traditional catholic despite going to Novus Ordo. This means I’ve been to plenty of TLMs to see how beautiful, reverent, and strong it is. When I think of Catholicism and how I’d expect Catholics to behave in and outside of Mass, I think of the TLM crowd*. In an ideal world, I’d attend Mass that was done exactly like TLM only said in vernacular or something pretty darn close to it. The culture nurtured by the TLM crowd would be the norm – this includes the tiny things like receiving Eucharist on your knees and on the tongue, dressing nicely for Mass, frequenting the sacraments, and bowing before Christ (even his name when uttered).
In an oversimplified way to put it, I think it would be a good thing to model Mass after the TLM, model the attitude from the pulpit to the congregation after the TLM crowd, but the only major difference is that Mass is said in the vernacular. In a world that has become too fargone with debauchery and sin, I see a return to reverence, modesty, and piety the only way to go. As I’ve seen it, the post Vatican II church didn’t lead catholics towards those virtues, but the TLM has.
Seeing the shift of catholic youth to more traditional practices of faith is something I’m praising to the rafters. It means the overall cultural shift in the church is heading towards a place I’ve thirsted for my whole (and short) life.
Hope that makes sense.
*I’m not talking about the edgelord trad cath jackasses online
Yes, that all makes sense. I 100% understand all your concerns on the point of reverence/tradition/etc. I was there just a few years ago until a lot of interactions with traditionalists. We do dress up for Mass, we are reverent around the Eucharist, etc.
That said, I want to emphasize that the “TLM” does not exist. The formal name is the Missal of 1962. The liturgy itself is not old, it just feels old. It really does date from 1962, it was modified to transition to the current missal, and Pope Benedict really did modify it.
That’s just like reception on the hand is actually older than reception kneeling and on the tongue. The first is the deep tradition, not the later. However, the later feels old in the modern era. So which one do we want? The genuinely old tradition or the one that feels “old timey”? We are blessed with both, really. No need to choose.
What’s happening with the Missal of 1962 is the difference between living in a real medieval castle and going to a remodeled hotel room in a castle. Everyone is hanging out in the remodeled hotel room with insulation, electricity, and central heat on a vacation. That’s not what was like when it was new and in use as a castle. Real castles are not comfortable/fun places to live.
Vatican I’s imposition of rigid rubrics did not lead to what it was supposed to lead to. It lead to rules based thinking, on the rise at the time, which we are still recovering from. It also appeared to increase the indifference to the Mass itself, which is why Vatican II existed. Participation was the watch word because the average experience, no joke involved people not paying attention at all to the Mass. Show up, check it off, pray a rosary or not, whatever, go home. All the God cared about was the attendance checkbox.
The current missal can be done with reverence and respect for tradition people rightly crave. Focus efforts there and all will be well. There’s nothing inherently different about the Missal of 1962 except the tiny communities it attracts are obviously more liturgically minded. Unfortunately the Missal of 1962 communities also lead to schismatic and the rules based thinking. Sometimes it’s clearly leading to an entirely different religion, with only a passing resemblance to the faith.
Those later issues are why Pope Francis restricted the Missal of 1962. We don’t need that particular missal to have the experiences your looking for. The current missal is the the pre-Vatican II missal in the vernacular with few tweaks. We already have the missal you’re looking for. 🙂
For most orthodox clergy there is a level of respect/tradition there already. However, we’re still living in Boomerville. Many Boomer aged clerics are still “trying to reach the young folks” through rock and roll. Boomer parishioners, the lion’s share of the donors, will squawk to high heaven and/or outright leave when their felt banners/music of choice are banished. They also get upset when their beloved “TLM”, which will fix everything, is restricted as well. Much of the online traditionalist rhetoric/sites are actually Boomer driven, which is worthy of a pause.
The improvement I personally have seen from the 1980’s to now in the current missal is outstanding, despite living in Boomerville. As the Church shrinks, that will continue to improve. There’s nothing but hope out there right now. We just need to trust the process.
Yeah, Vatican 1 and its attendant culture had their flaws. One example that’s particularly close to me is the treatment of scrupulosity. Some old manuals assert that scrupulosity is a manifestation of the sin of Pride, of thinking you’re so special that regular salvation isn’t enough for you. While this might make some sense from outside the Scrupulous condition, it is both incorrect and extremely harmful. The vast majority of scrupulosity cases are a manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder, which inevitably induces strong, intrusive, unmerited feelings of guilt. Telling someone that their ocd compulsions are actually evidence of grave sin is actively playing into the disorders hands and reinforcing it. It guarantees a life of misery and despair for the sufferer, especially since they are probably also convinced that this despair is also sinful. You can see why I’m wary about uncritically reverting to that culture. Still good news overall, of course.
Dante’s Divine Comedy explains the faith in a dynamic poem. Reading that and then going to materials from the 1890’s about some random rule to be obeyed to get XXX days off in purgatory is a quite the contrast.
The formal official catechisms have rules, but they are rarely the laundry lists I’ll find in “pop culture” Catholicism, particularly recent.
Yes, give people too many rigid rules and it’s possible to induce scrupulosity. It goes under appreciated in the traditionalist Catholic culture unfortunately. We also need to avoid the other obvious extreme.
I don’t fully agree with your stance nor do I fully understand it, but I will attribute it to my own ignorance. Maybe one day I’ll understand it; I am chipping away at understanding Catholicism on a deeper level, though for right now I need to make it through the catechism before I jump into church history.
I appreciate the listen to my long rant anyway. 🙂 My thoughts are the results of years of discussion with online traditionalists. If I sound weird, that’s natural. *grin*
I’d only sum it up as this, if it will help:
The Church, the faith, the Mass, and the sacraments have a spirit, along with rules. Remembering that both are important prevents a whole a lot of trouble.
“The AP neglected to identify exactly which traditional Catholics are complaining that food pantries have twisted the Church.”
The AP is limited by their fundamental philosophies, which divide the world into ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, where all compassion and virtue are on the Left, and where ‘Right = political conservative = Republican = capitalist Scrooge whose primary concern is with tax breaks and socioeconomic privilege.’
Yes, and the flip side of that coin is also why the future of political dissent is Catholic.
“But once-packed Sunday Masses now have empty pews. Donations are down. School enrollment plunged.
Some who left have gone to more liberal parishes. Some joined Protestant churches. Some abandoned religion entirely.”
Forgive me if I’m pressing X to doubt on this one, AP. Sounds like sour grapes to me…
They reference the supposed drop in Mass attendance nationwide more than once in that piece. As you pointed out, it’s a cope. If the tares are showing themselves the door, so much the better for the wheat.*
*We should pray that lukewarmers and heretics receive the grace of conversion and return, of course.
I live in an incredibly liberal area and can confirm attendance is down mostly because the older generation is dying out and none of their children attend any form of church, Catholic or not.
That mutation is definitely over. Their worldly kids don’t need to go to a church to justify being worldly. At this point it’s mostly just cracking their shell about their weak understanding of religion as a whole. We’re going to need a lot of prayers for an awakening because the Church around here is still run by boomers who think the solution is just filling the pews with the immigrants pouring into the neighborhoods (which doesn’t work) instead of making any actual effort to connect with the community that is already here.
You haven’t lived until you’ve had your priest transferred out for nearly a year only to get one that only shows up one day a week and who speaks English as a third language so badly he can’t even do Confessions.
We need a change and we need one fast.
God will provide (the change) and do so on his own time. We need only pray and act as best we can.
“Church around here is still run by boomers who think the solution is just filling the pews with the immigrants pouring into the neighborhoods (which doesn’t work) instead of making any actual effort to connect with the community that is already here.”
We will need to be patient. Nothing much changes until Boomerville has moved off to the great tambourine concert in the sky.
I have a traditionally minded Boomer priest. We got him about 2 years ago. Look up the Source and Summit missal. We do our Mass by that book, so you can see how very traditional it is.
Utopia didn’t break out. Neither did we fill our small parish. We have a ton of kids in K-5 youth formation, thanks to the young families at the 11AM Mass. Almost none in middle school or high school. We had only 4 confirm youth this year, down from usually about 8-10. I know that when we frequent our sister parish, there are people there who I no longer see regularly at our parish.
I can confirm that traditionally minded Catholicism headed by Boomer priest, with a Boomer secretary, and a misplaced millennial formation director did not lead to some explosion of the faith in my n=1 experiment.
Ultimately the generational forces that have bound the culture to dysfunction have bound at least the American Church to that as well. The difference is we can trust that God has a reason and that the Church cannot be destroyed. What gets small like a seed will grow again.
“Nothing much changes until Boomerville has moved off to the great tambourine concert in the sky.”
That’s savage. But I can’t disagree.
That’s good news, and thanks– it’s a datapoint I’ve been looking for. We are Orthodox, and the influx into our parish in the last three years has been truly astonishing. I’ve been poking around trying to find out how widespread this is, and it appears to be happening across the country at least in English-speaking Orthodox parishes. But we’re still kind of a tiny religious subset here.
Talking to Catholics, I had an inkling it was happening there too, but only in the more traditional parishes– I had mixed reports from various friends and acquaintances, from standing-room-only Latin masses, to college students flocking to eastern-rite services, to dying parishes selling off buildings in the pacific northwest. Nice to have outside confirmation!
The churches are not as empty as the AP news service would like.
On the other hand, tiny groups of believers can have amazing growth rates, because math. A group doubling from 100 to 200 will feel overrun, in a way that parish that already has thousands will feel it as just another Sunday.
If the trend continues, yes, that’s awesome. I do think the growth will once we get beyond the Boomer years. However, it’s really important to understand that single Mass crowded small spaces don’t quite represent the win of a frequently uncrowded space large parish Messes when measured by raw numbers.
I’d love to know what’s driving it. A third of the churches in our diocese are either building larger buildings, or buying them, right now. That’s mostly a since-covid development. My parish was stagnant for ten years, and then covid, and now we’ve doubled in size. We are baptizing a lot of adults. It’s not showing in the national stats because the last church census was pre-covid, and it’s all happened since then. Plus, our largest jurisdiction (coughGreekscough) is… fossilized and dying. More funerals than baptisms. So it’d be easy to miss what’s going on in the smaller branches, on sheer numbers, even if the next census was tomorrow.
The thing is, we didn’t do anything different. Nothing changed in community outreach or advertising or anything. Same priest. People just came and found us, and we’re now scrambling to keep the Sunday school adequately staffed (went from 10 kids to like 50) and find enough godparents for everybody.
Which is wonderful, but… why is it happening? What changed? It wasn’t us. It was something *out there*. I mean, obviously covid, but… I can’t quite figure out what it was about covid that made tons of people suddenly say “I think I’d like to visit an Orthodox church this week!” What’s the connection?
I’ve talked to some people who made the same leap to Catholicism recently… and I remain unenlightened. They sound like happy converts, telling happy convert stories. Again, awesome, but… it doesn’t quite illuminate what’s different in the last 3 years, that wasn’t going on before.
I’m itching to know the answer to that one.
A couple thoughts:
The 50s , sometimes imagined to have been the glory years for American Catholicism with full churches and Catholic schools overflowing, is where a large number of those hippies and modernists grew up and got educated. Something was not right.
The Church in America was for the first time broadly wealthy, but still had a chip on its shoulder. The desperate need to be accepted as Americans, always present in immigrants and their children, was expressed in the irrational enthusiasm of Catholics for Kennedys – they might be a bunch of gin runners and thugs, but they’re OUR gin runners and thugs.
The post-war boom, plus the acceptance earned through fighting and dying for our country in WWII (Catholic immigrants and their kids have long been overrepresented in the military) lead to Catholics both strutting their stuff – and embracing the Americanism long present in the American Church.
The 60s hit (around 1965), and the house is revealed to be built on sand. Those people the article notes are in their 70s and 80s were educated and learned how to worship during the 50s and 60s. Longstanding problems, present in the Church for many decades, were revealed, not born, at this time.
The Church in America started to actively embrace Modernism starting in about 1890. The (correct) adversarial relationship with the Protestant mainstream (who largely picked the fight, and actively persecuted the Church through at least the 1930s, and then only got more subtle about it) was plastered over – at least, on the Catholic side. Olive branches were offered and rejected. The Protestant majority was not interested in working with the Church, but in destroying it. We, to this day, keep pretending we can live with the Protestantism (that became Marxism and Woke over the last century and a half). Rather than pounding out anathemas, we keep wanting to play nice no matter how often the sand gets thrown in our faces.
Wanting to fit in and work with the world is the opposite of wanting to convert it.
Finally, I have to wonder how much of the success of Benedictine (one of our daughters is a graduate) and other more orthodox Catholic schools is due to their being refuges. It’s not so much that they live and teach the faith as that they are not the increasing insane secular schools. That’s why I’m heartened by the stories in the comments above about adult converts – that’s real growth! As opposed to a ‘growing’ school or parish simply sucking in all the non-insane Catholics from the surrounding areas. Yes, it is good that the tares are being sifted out – but that’s God’s job. Our job is to evangelize.
Catholic clergy used to crow about a mainstream news article published sometime in the 50s that said the Church was better-run than US Steel. They should have cringed at it.
Whatever future Church historians name the crisis she underwent in the last half of the 20th century, they’ll agree it was a necessary evil to purify the excesses that crept in during the first half.
Should look to the Western elites’ fascination with Gnostic and occult practices beginning in the 1890s one source of the poison.
I’ve heard good things about Wyoming Catholic as well.