… It is not particularly new that kids in their teenage years don’t “find anything relevant about the Mass”, a feeling that has little or nothing to do with with the liturgy itself and a whole lot to do with catechesis.
I really don’t think the liturgy has all that much to do with it (the loss of attendance); …
Except that the youth apparently attended Mass in greater numbers (at least percentage wise) prior to Vatican II than after.
Also, in addition to your last comment let me add one of Cardinal Ratzinger’s:
I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part on the collapse of the liturgy." **
**
Here is a comment from someone who has worked with youth:
"…I have taught run-of-the-mill Catholic undergraduates, in a basic course on Catholicism for five years now. I require them to attend a Latin Mass, either NO or Tridentine and report on it. So I have a database of between 150 and 200 student reactions. Most of them had no idea what a Latin Mass was like. …95 % of them went into the assignment either indifferent or vaguely hostile, expecting to be bored or feeling lost.
Well over 95 % report that they had never experienced the Mass as an act of worship to the degree that they did in attending a Latin Mass. What they comment on most often is that people were paying attention (in their own vernacular parishes they themselves notice that a lot of people talk and basically behave casually), people were there to worship. They thereby are saying that they do not perceive people at their regular parishes to be there primarily to engage in heavy lifting worship. And they like what they see at the Latin Mass. Without any prompting from me, say that, well, worship ought to be different, lofty, exalted, not casual and everyday. They do not find that in their run-of-the-mill parishes.
The upshot of my students’ papers says to me that with vernacularization and the lack of respect for the rubrics, the improvisation by priests and all the other abuses has come an atittude that even 18-year-old relatively nominal Catholics recognize as saying, “this stuff is a bunch of hooey and I don’t see why I should go to Mass when I could be doing so many other things.” They see the hieratic Latin Mass and they are with very, very few exceptions drawn ineluctably to it, even those who came at it with hostility.
Many of them comment that their first sight of the interior of the building began the process of attracting them. Again, 90 % of them perceive the interior of SJC as lofty, hieratic, the sort of thing a church ought to be and they openly say that they perceive their own parishes, in most cases (not all, because there’s more variety in the architecture and furnishings of their parishes than in the liturgy of their vernacular parishes–it seems to be more routinely desultory) as not particularly worshipfully attractive.
The greatest resistance to the Latin Mass has come from the occasional student already active in his parish and often also active in Jesuit campus ministry events who has heard many times about those reactionary, nostalgic TLM folks who prefer Mass in a dead language. Even they, in most cases, freely admit that they were surprised how much they were drawn to and drawn into the Latin Mass. But in these few cases they simply cannot yet admit that the intellectual animosity instilled in them (different from the garden variety mistrust and doubt in the nominal Catholics who approach the assignment mostly with a standard, why should I have to bother with this?) was wrong–they just can’t quite let go of it so they move the goalposts and invent reasons why, even though they were moved by their experience, it’s still not best for the church–a church of which they consider themselves active ministers.
All of the above says to me that objectively speaking–not merely on the level of tastes in art or feelings–these students perceive a real difference between what they have grown up within their vernacular parishes and what they see at SJC.
…The point is that they do objectively perceive a difference in degree of loftiness, sacrality, hieraticness and they, with very few exceptions assume that worship of God ought to be hieratic and lofty, even though they have been taught their entire lives that God doesn’t need to be worshiped with special art and music and incense, that it’s a matter of indifference because after all, it’s a real (valid) Mass regardless of the kind of music or decorations…
They intuitively reject that at a rate of about 9 to 1. Go figure!"
But age is a factor precisely because we were catechized so very differently from our children today. We were catechized to recognize that we were entering “into the sacred”. All too often today, the emphasis is on community, fun, and festivity (as posted on another thread).
At least they still have traditional seating. My church has a semicircle around the altar. EWW