There is a great article on The Catholic Knight blog about a young Missouri priest who found spiritual renewal in the Traditional Latin Mass…
catholicknight.blogspot.com/2010/05/missouri-priest-discovers-renewal-in.html
It’s been my experience that younger priests are more open to tradition than older priests. Has this been your experience too? What do you suppose is the reason why?
One needs to go back in time and see what was happening.
When were these “older” priests ordained? Some were ordained right about the time of the end of Vatican 2 (which puts them into their late 60’s), and they were being ordained into a group of priests who had been ordained in the 1950’s, 40’s and 30’s.
As was the custom more then than now (due to more priests and a generally smaller population) priests were not high-lined in pastorships immediately - they might do 5 or 10 years serving under one or more pastors before they were given a parish.
And so the group ordained in the mid 60’s was trained by priests who had been around during the time of supression, or were in turn trained by those who were ordained during the time of supression. And I don’t mean Loisy; I am speaking of the theologians who were silenced and supressed and later “rehabilitated” by the Church. For not a short period of time Rome gave the impression of being under seige - and not without reason. However, taking a rigid stance can be seen retrospecitivley as doing perhaps as much if not more damage than that which was being defended against.
What do I mean? We had the Oath Against Modernism, and anyone who has paid a lick of attention should by now know that wasn’t even worth the price of the paper it was written on. In attempting to deal with Modernism, anyone and everyone was subject to suspicion if they did anything besides recite old formulas. Thus we had two camps building - those who took the direction of Modernism for whatever reasons - intellectual pride, contrariness, excitement at the “new”; and those who were, if not embittered by the perception of autocratic excercise of authority, certainly ended up with a suspicion that truth had been too long surpressed, and tended to reject whatever appeared to be the status quo.
Coupled with this particularly with those ordained before Vatican 2, the priests were faced with a clear split within congregations. A priest who was 37 when Vatican 2 finished had a congregation that birth-wise stretched back to the late 1800’s. Until after World War 2, people did not mostly go on to college; they mostly did not go on. That meant that the pastor was faced with a significant part of a congregation that at best might have had 8 years of Balitmore Catechism; most likely they had never cracked open their family bible and actually read anything; they had little or no training in any matters theological. When they went to Mass, there were no responses by the congregation - the altar boys said that. Many had no missals, as missals were relatively new and not a whole lot of priests were on fire encouraging their parishoners to buy one. People sat in Mass doing private devotions and because of the fast from Midnight, many did not go to Communion, particularly at later Masses. People knew more about Lourdes and Fatima than they did about the New Testament.
Rightly or wrongly, many priests saw their parishoners more involved with devotional activities and more animated by them than they did the Mass (e.g. Mother of Perpetual Help Devotion).
It doesn’t take too much of that scenario before one starts identifying the problems of receiving the message with the medium with which it is delivered. Not that that is a correct assumption, but one all too easily made.
Was everything just like that? Of course not, any more than today (where, for example, a small minority blames the problems in the Church on Vatican 2 documents). But it is all too easy to slip into such a mindset.
There were priests who were known for how quickly they could say Mass; and that was seen as a plus by all too many people who understood Mass as an “obligation” to be endured, rather than as the sum and summit of our faith. People who seek out the EF now do so because they are seeking a very reverent Mass. In the 50’s and early 60’s some Masses were very reverent; some were reverent; some were hurried. My own pastor could do a Solemn high Mass with all the pomp and circumstance one could want. He also could set speed records for the 6:30 am weekday Mass; we joked that he could say Latin breathing in as well as breathing out.
The short of it was that pressure from a number of areas had been building. And human nature being what it is, teh presumption that the message was not getting across was layed, correctly or not, with the medium. And when it is decided the mdeium is the fault, then the medium will be rejected, whether that decision is ocrrect or not.
Let’s pray that it happens!!