Statistics on Latin Mass?

[YoungTradCath]

Could he be talking about the SSPX or something? Don’t they have a stronger presence in Europe than America?

I strongly doubt that the SSPX has an elite atmosphere/attendance anywhere. The SSPX seems about as red blooded, or in the USA as Midwestern/“cornfed,” as it gets. Gosh, for all the hate they get about the EF, their bishops don’t even wear cappae magnae! You’re more likely to see that garment in a Mass put together by the FSSP or ICRSS.

Where the ICRSS will only take parishes they believe can be restored to beautiful buildings, the SSPX will buy a dinky little suburban box ex-Protestant church, slam an altar in it, and consecrate it in a heartbeat, waiting fifteen years before building a more suitable church.

 

[CutlerB]

Gosh, for all the hate they get about the EF, their bishops don’t even wear cappae magnae!

Pity. Cardinal Burke wears it sometimes.

Where the ICRSS will only take parishes they believe can be restored to beautiful buildings, the SSPX will buy a dinky little suburban box ex-Protestant church, slam an altar in it, and consecrate it in a heartbeat, waiting fifteen years before building a more suitable church.

I would love to have an ICRSS parish somewhere near me, but that won’t happen anytime soon. They’d be the Society I’d join if I were to choose.

 

[RosalieM]

Hello there everyone,

I just saw that Cardinal Lehmann of Germany is against having more Masses in the Extraordinary Form. At the “Eucharistic Congress” in Cologne, he told the local news “I have the feeling that all the enthusiasm, including for Latin, has much to do with prestige and the false pretending of a certain cultural elite”. He believes “an increased side-by-side existence of the two liturgical forms does not make sense, partly because it didn’t grow from the ground up” (I assume he means there was no big demand among the laity) and that “development is leading towards the renewed Mass”.

That prompted me to find some information on how the use of the Extraordinary Form has developed around the world, especially in the Western world. Does anyone know whether there are statistics on this? For example, what’s Mass attendance like, how many parishes are offering this Form, is it growing, etc.?

I’d be very grateful for any help you can provide. God bless.

Well dear cardinal, with all due respect, I am looking forward to attending my first Latin mass in decades today. It has recently been offered in my archdiocese and I am happy for this. I’ll still be in my parish in the choir for our regular mass form. I don’t see a problem here. Pax Vobiscum.

 

[Nils]

Here in Scandinavia, EF-goers have a reputation of being “fascist” and I have heard similar things in France. Someone probably said something about islam, and there you go…

I think what really unite most Traditionalists is that they made more of an active choice when they picked rite. In such milieus, subcultures easily grow, for good and for bad. It also attracts converts and people who are used to make active choices about their religion, but I do not think that is an argument against it, quite the opposite.

The way we pray is important. I think the Traditionalist movement will force the Novus Ordo to reform, otherwise it will eventually replace it. People want worship to be beautiful, mysterious and sacred. Everything else in our time is banal, shallow and plastic, and sometimes the ordinary Mass takes influence from that plastic surrounding.

 

[GangGreen]

I kind of boggles my mind to see Bishops who are so negative against people who desire a reverent and sacred form of worship and who are acting in line with the Church and its history.

 

[ProVobis]

I have a very different perspective than many of you, and I hope that you will read this without attacking me and others who share my feelings. I think that there are a lot of Catholics who feel the same way I do, but they’re not here on CAF, and if they are, they keep quiet on threads like this.

I sincerely hope that the OF Mass will not go away.

I won’t be around in 150 years, so it probably won’t matter to me anyway.

I respect your love of the Latin Mass, and agree that it should continue to be offered, if for no other reason, to preserve the history and tradition of the Catholic Church.

Here we go again. The OF is in fact the Latin Mass as well, with approved translations as options.

 

[Kevin12]

I’ve read this statistic as well from several sources. It’s certainly sad, but not surprising.

A close friend of our family who is a retired priest told us that in his opinion, the NO Mass will eventually be abrogated because there will be hardly anyone going to church anyway and the Latin Mass will be restored as the normative. I think he is right.

This is exactly why the Bishop made these comments. Because so many traditionalists think of the EF as the only legitimate Mass, and the OF as something to be snuffed out entirely.

I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face even everyone on the Traditionalist forum has put me on their ignore list and I’m just talking to myself: the vernacular Mass has nothing to do with the decline in Church attendance, which is part of an overall cultural trend. I know that to many of you we NO-attenders are just Neo-Catholics, but those of us who want to hear the Mass in our native tongue love God no less than those who want to hear it Latin.

 

[Lucky7]

I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face even everyone on the Traditionalist forum has put me on their ignore list and I’m just talking to myself: the vernacular Mass has nothing to do with the decline in Church attendance, which is part of an overall cultural trend.

How can you be sure that the NO had “nothing” to do with the decline in Church attendance? Granted, I wouldn’t say it takes full blame but I do think it does have a part to play (or at least the way that the NO comes across has a part to play). I am not a traditionalist; however, the more NO’s I attend the closer I become to becoming one.

Cat: I once felt the exact same way as you do. I think the Latin Mass is an acquired taste.

 

[Mike30]

This is exactly why the Bishop made these comments. Because so many traditionalists think of the EF as the only legitimate Mass, and the OF as something to be snuffed out entirely.

I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face even everyone on the Traditionalist forum has put me on their ignore list and I’m just talking to myself: the vernacular Mass has nothing to do with the decline in Church attendance, which is part of an overall cultural trend. I know that to many of you we NO-attenders are just Neo-Catholics, but those of us who want to hear the Mass in our native tongue love God no less than those who want to hear it Latin.

I am glad that you and the Bishop communicate with each other so you are able to say with authority exactly why he said what he did.

I suppose that you never evenconsidered that perhaps, just perhaps he said what he did because he as well as numerous other members of the Clergy, and laity at large just don’t like the Extraordinary Form itself, see it as not being spiritually filling to themselves or their congregations and want it gone completely. Dead, buried and forgotten.

I think that is probably closer to the truth than what you think. And i say that from over forty years of dealing withthis anti Extraordinary Form sentiment that has beenvery very prevalent since the issuance of the indult in 1984. If you don’t believe me just check back at some of the statements made by various, Bishops, Priests, Sisters, Brothers and the laity about how much damage would be done if the old Mass was brought back.

 

[Kevin12]

How can you be sure that the NO had “nothing” to do with the decline in Church attendance? Granted, I wouldn’t say it takes full blame but I do think it does have a part to play (or at least the way that the NO comes across has a part to play). I am not a traditionalist; however, the more NO’s I attend the closer I become to becoming one.

Cat: I once felt the exact same way as you do. I think the Latin Mass is an acquired taste.

I will repeat, it has nothing to do with it. It is part of an overall trend that has effected Protestants as well. I have several relatives who became Protestant or stopped attending Mass, including my grandparents from before Vatican II, because they came to view the Church as too conservative and its members hypocritical. My grandfather in particular started to move away from it because he couldn’t respect the way people would get hammered on Saturday night to the extent that they barely knew that they were doing, and then go to Mass on Sunday like it was nothing - and this was all in the supposed golden age of American Catholicism before Vatican II.

Furthermore, the numbers on Church I usually see traditionalists quote are “Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church since Vatican II”, a book published by a Kenneth C. Jones, himself a radical traditionalist with no background in statistics. Bring me a single credible academic study that suggests the decline in Church attendance is the result of Vatican II and I’ll look it over, though I doubt that such a thing exists.

 

[Kevin12]

I am glad that you and the Bishop communicate with each other so you are able to say with authority exactly why he said what he did.

I suppose that you never evenconsidered that perhaps, just perhaps he said what he did because he as well as numerous other members of the Clergy, and laity at large just don’t like the Extraordinary Form itself, see it as not being spiritually filling to themselves or their congregations and want it gone completely. Dead, buried and forgotten.

I think that is probably closer to the truth than what you think. And i say that from over forty years of dealing withthis anti Extraordinary Form sentiment that has beenvery very prevalent since the issuance of the indult in 1984. If you don’t believe me just check back at some of the statements made by various, Bishops, Priests, Sisters, Brothers and the laity about how much damage would be done if the old Mass was brought back.

I don’t know about that - what I do know is that, as I have said, I can count on one hand the traditionalists I have encountered who to not want to snuff out the vernacular Mass entirely. On the one hand, I have your speculation about the clergy wanting to get rid of the EF, and on the other hand, I have first-hand experience of 95% of traditionalists I have encountered wanting to get rid of the OF. So I hope you will excuse me if I think the Bishop is simply speaking to a fact about the attitudes of EF-attendees.

 

[Cat]

i have a question for you, why did you convert ? if the Mass was E.F. and O.F. didn’t exist would you still of converted?

That is a good question and one that my husband and I have often discussed.

My husband and I started attending the Catholic parish up the road from us because we were not able to attend our Protestant church on Sunday mornings due to a conflict with figure skating practices. (Our daughters were members of an elite team that practiced from 5:30 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. on Sunday mornings, and back then, there were no Protestant churches in our city offering Sat. evening church services.)

We believed that Catholics were Christians, and that we should attend the Mass out of obedience to the Bible, which says that Christians are not to forsake assembling ourselves together.

We became intrigued with Catholicism through the Mass, which seemed utterly strange and ancient to us. (It was an OF Mass,and a very contemporary one at that, by Catholic standards). We had no idea what was going on (except the Lord’s Prayer and the Scripture readings.) We had never heard any of the hymns (Haugen, Haas, etc.)

So we made an appointment to speak with one of the priests, and he graciously described the Mass to us and explained what was happening. He also referred us to the Apologetics class offered in the parish at that time. This class introduced us to various writers, ancient and modern, who presented Catholicism in an organized and compelling way.

We converted because, through our studies (two years), we became convinced that the Catholic Church was the Church that Jesus Christ founded and desired for all Christians to be part of.

I don’t think I ever would have attended a Mass in a foreign language. So in answer to your question, if the O.F. didn’t exist, I don’t know that we would have ever converted, because we never would have attended a Mass in Latin. We probably would have tried to find a Protestant “home church” that was meeting at a convenient time, or we might have gone to one of the weekday evening services at Willowcreek (about an hour’s drive from our house).

I know other Evangelical Protestants say that they converted because they DID attend a Latin Mass, so I’m not saying that we are the “norm.” I personally think, though, that most Evangelical Protestants are not likely to attend a Latin Mass. Evangelical Protestants are generally highly suspicious of something that they can’t understand, and even with the translation, they would want to be convinced by a fellow Evangelical Protestant that the translation was truly what the priest and schola were saying/chanting during the actual Mass.

 

[sw85]

This is exactly why the Bishop made these comments. Because so many traditionalists think of the EF as the only legitimate Mass, and the OF as something to be snuffed out entirely.

I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face even everyone on the Traditionalist forum has put me on their ignore list and I’m just talking to myself: the vernacular Mass has nothing to do with the decline in Church attendance, which is part of an overall cultural trend. I know that to many of you we NO-attenders are just Neo-Catholics, but those of us who want to hear the Mass in our native tongue love God no less than those who want to hear it Latin.

There is at least some evidence that the sharp downward trend in Church attendance began in 1970, and was limited almost exclusively to Catholics (Protestants remaining on the whole relatively level or even slightly improving). Other statistics, such as the decline in vocations, marriages, infant baptisms, adult conversions, etc., are also disconcertingly low and began around the same time frame. I have a bookmark to one such report on my work laptop; if I remember this discussion I’ll post it tomorrow.

On the other hand it’s hard to tell how much of that would’ve happened if the Council’s actual vision for the NO, which was much less discontinuous with tradition, had been implemented rather than the mess we got.

 

[Cat]

There is at least some evidence that the sharp downward trend in Church attendance began in 1970, and was limited almost exclusively to Catholics (Protestants remaining on the whole relatively level or even slightly improving). Other statistics, such as the decline in vocations, marriages, infant baptisms, adult conversions, etc., are also disconcertingly low and began around the same time frame. I have a bookmark to one such report on my work laptop; if I remember this discussion I’ll post it tomorrow.

On the other hand it’s hard to tell how much of that would’ve happened if the Council’s actual vision for the NO, which was much less discontinuous with tradition, had been implemented rather than the mess we got.

But you have no real evidence linking attrition from Catholic churches to changes within the Church Herself. You’re just speculating.

The cause of the attrition might have been due to many things; .e.g, more women working outside the home and putting their children in daycare centers. Or perhaps the rise of no-fault divorce. Or the perhaps the widespread availability of the birth control pill. Or the end of the Viet Nam war and the return of the soldiers to a nation that despised them rather than honoring them. Or the disillusionment in the U.S. after two assassinations of popular public figures in 1968. Or the increasing popularity of rock music. Or the rise of “free love”. Or perhaps the increasing devotion to the television.

You have no way of knowing which of these and many many other things contributed to attrition from the Church. If I had to make a guess, I would say that it had a lot to do with radical feminism and the loss of full-time mothers in the home. But that’s JMO, and I don’t claim that it’s the answer.

And I disagree with you about Protestant attrition. I just did some research last week and found plenty of studies demonstrating that the mainline Protestant churches have seen steady declines in attendance for the last several decades.

 

[Kevin12]

There is at least some evidence that the sharp downward trend in Church attendance began in 1970, and was limited almost exclusively to Catholics (Protestants remaining on the whole relatively level or even slightly improving). Other statistics, such as the decline in vocations, marriages, infant baptisms, adult conversions, etc., are also disconcertingly low and began around the same time frame. I have a bookmark to one such report on my work laptop; if I remember this discussion I’ll post it tomorrow.

On the other hand it’s hard to tell how much of that would’ve happened if the Council’s actual vision for the NO, which was much less discontinuous with tradition, had been implemented rather than the mess we got.

I have Grandparents who both stopped attending Church at that time. In both cases, it was because they thought the Church was too conservative, not insufficiently conservative.

Again, your attitude is exactly why the Bishop said what he did and exactly why he is right. The NO is not a mess. The situation of an entire Church having their primary ritual in a language none of them could understand, a ritual which they spent muttering rosaries to themselves while the priest performed a ritual that had almost nothing to do with them was the mess. Such a model would not have survived the massive increase in education that happened throughout the first half of the 20th Century. People who who have something more than a 6th grade education are going to want to know what the priest is saying.

 

[ProVobis]

I have Grandparents who both stopped attending Church at that time. In both cases, it was because they thought the Church was too conservative, not insufficiently conservative.

There may be some truth to that. The older Mass was/is often criticized as being too strict. After all there was insistence that there were too many silent parts, with too many genuflections, bows, and crosses between a set number of syllables. Latin was not really a huge problem in 1962, but neither were meat abstinence and the various fast requirements. However, one has to admit that once the fasting requirement was relaxed, the priest was now able to greet the congregation in the liturgy, and Catholics were able to use their consciences in some matters (now expanded to all matters), a whole new world opened up. Who wants to go back to the days when men wore suits to ball games, people had to learn sentence diagramming, TV sets were black and white, etc.? At least that’s the gist of the arguments presented by those who don’t want “to turn back the clock.”

 

[marimagi]

I have a very different perspective than many of you, and I hope that you will read this without attacking me and others who share my feelings. I think that there are a lot of Catholics who feel the same way I do, but they’re not here on CAF, and if they are, they keep quiet on threads like this.

I sincerely hope that the OF Mass will not go away.

I won’t be around in 150 years, so it probably won’t matter to me anyway.

I respect your love of the Latin Mass, and agree that it should continue to be offered, if for no other reason, to preserve the history and tradition of the Catholic Church.

I’ve been Catholic 9 years now, and I’ve been on CAF for almost as long, and I’ve read thousands of words here on CAF and from other sources in support of Latin and chant.

But I still dislike Latin and chant. It means nothing to me. It is gibberish to me. I’m sorry if some of you find this honest comment offensive, but it’s my point of view, the way I feel. I wasn’t raised Catholic, so unlike many of you, I have no fond memories of Latin and chant in the context of the Church or Christianity. I do not associate Latin or chant with “church” or “God.” I don’t find them “reverent” or even “religious.” Latin and chant do not help me to concentrate or focus more on Jesus; quite the opposite–I find them distracting.

I was raised Evangelical Protestant (47 years) and we were taught to avoid “experiences,” so to me, the Latin Mass, Latin, and chant are “experiences” that I am not interested in. I know that other Evangelical Protestants do love Latin and chant, and fully embrace the EF Mass, and I respect that. But I’m not one of those Evangelical Protestants.

We have a priest now who used both frequently in our parish (OF) Masses, and I just don’t like it at all. Yes, I know that Mass is most certainly not all about me, and I accept that fact intellectually and submit to whatever our priest presents in our Masses, and I love this priest for his passion for the Church and Jesus, and I’m grateful to have a priest to say Mass for us. (We actually have 3 priests in our parish.)

But I really, really dislike Latin and chant, everyone, and I can’t imagine attending Mass all the time that is all Latin and chant. I would attend out of obedience, of course, and I know (intellectually) that the Holy Spirit would continue to give me graces of the Holy Mass. But my heart wouldn’t be in it.

How about this–if there were Latin Masses available in all dioceses within fairly comfortable driving distances, would that make all of you happy? Would you be willing to allow the rest of us to continue to have the OF Mass? Why does it have to be all EF?

I’m happy that you shared your opinion. You shouldn’t have to worry about sharing your thoughts, as we should always be charitable to one another on this site.

Personally, I wouldn’t want the entire Church to return to the EF, but I do appreciate that my parish uses both. And I do travel a distance to attend this parish, which is not the parish in my community.

The Catholic Church has a history of great adaptability to the spirituality of different peoples and cultures (as long as beliefs and practices can be woven into the true meaning of Christianity. I think this is another area where we need to provide some appropriate options which touch our spirituality in different ways.

 

[Cat]

How can you be sure that the NO had “nothing” to do with the decline in Church attendance? Granted, I wouldn’t say it takes full blame but I do think it does have a part to play (or at least the way that the NO comes across has a part to play). I am not a traditionalist; however, the more NO’s I attend the closer I become to becoming one.

Cat: I once felt the exact same way as you do. I think the Latin Mass is an acquired taste.

How long did it take you to acquire the taste?

 

[Lucky7]

How long did it take you to acquire the taste?

To be honest, I am still working on it. Although I struggle when I can’t find my place in the missal or when I can’t respond (or sing!), I find there is something so sacred about it that I look beyond this discomfort. Also, I look to the priest …his reverence is palpable to me and catching. Although I enjoy being able to sing and respond at the NO, I just don’t find the same reverence at the NO.

 

[jwinch2]

If my memory is serving me correctly, when His Holiness, Paul VI promulgated the OF of the Mass, he claimed it would do two things specifically. The first one was that it would make it easier to evangelize Protestants and bring them into unity with the Catholic Church. The second thing he suggested is that it would increase an understanding of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist and lead to increased devotion among the Faithful. By any objective standard, it is hard to argue that those two things have been successful. I have certainly seen no data supporting some sort of wide spread return of Protestants to the Church, and Catholic belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is incredibly low by all accounts I have seen.

The liturgical reforms called for by Vatican II were laudable in my opinion. The vernacular can be good (whether all of the Mass needs to be there is another story), increased Bible readings is a good thing (the EF has no OT reading), an increase in the responses, singing, and participation of the Laity can be good (if done properly, not turning the laity into “ministers”, etc). There was simply no need in my view to scrap the beauty and richness of the prayers, postures, etc. which went along with it in order to enact those changes.

*“The liturgical reform, in its concrete realization, has distanced itself even more from its origin. The result has not been a reanimation, but devastation. In place of the liturgy, fruit of a continual development, they have placed a fabricated liturgy. They have deserted a vital process of growth and becoming in order to substitute a fabrication. They did not want to continue the development, the organic maturing of something living through the centuries, and they replaced it, in the manner of technical production, by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.” (Ratzinger in Revue Theologisches, Vol. 20, Feb. 1990, pgs. 103-104)

“[W]e have a liturgy which has degenerated so that it has become a show which, with momentary success for the group of liturgical fabricators, strives to render religion interesting in the wake of the frivolities of fashion and seductive moral maxims. Consequently, the trend is the increasingly marked retreat of those who do not look to the liturgy for a spiritual show-master but for the encounter with the living God in whose presence all the ‘doing’ becomes insignificant since only this encounter is able to guarantee us access to the true richness of being.” (Cardinal Ratzinger’s preface to the French translation of Reform of the Roman Liturgy by Monsignor Klaus Gamber, 1992).

“I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is, to a large extent, due to the disintegration of the liturgy.” (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)*

Ironically, if we look at the Mass used by Parishes which came into the Church through Pope John Paul II’s Pastoral Provision, we see a close approximation of what the Mass might have looked like had those changes been enacted, but other things left alone.
youtube.com/watch?v=Q251EywW__M

The vernacular? Yep. Increased Bible readings? Yep. More responses from the Faithful? Yep. Does it do so in continuity with Sacred Tradition rather than a complete break with it? Definitely.