Teen-friendly Mass
Last week I took my teenage daughter to a special Mass which I hoped she would find especially appealing. It included inspiring worship music, elaborate visual stimulation and inspired preaching. And afterward, when I asked her what she thought, she enthusiastically told me that she liked it. Here is a description of this “teen-friendly” Mass from the parish’s website:
A Solemn High Mass in the Extraordinary Form for the Feast of the Purification (Candlemas) with a blessing of the Candles and Procession with polyphonic propers composed by William Byrd, and the Ordinary from his Mass for Four Voices, sung by Chantry.
Now I admit that I am not an “Old Mass-only” Catholic. Nor do I think the Mass needs to be in Latin; I prefer the vernacular, truth be told. However, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that we have spent countless hours and enormous amounts of energy over the past 40 years trying to create a Mass that is “relevant” and engaging to our teens, when perhaps it was collecting mothballs in the closet the whole time?
As a convert to the Catholic faith from the Southern Baptist tradition, I can honestly admit that my favorite Mass for myself and my seven children aged 9 months to 14 years, is the traditional Latin Mass. I am not surprised at all at the reaction of your daughter to this magnificent expression of love for Jesus Christ in this particular celebration of His precious body and blood. It is the Mass of a multitude of our most honored and beloved saints and, I believe, has the power to produce countless more to come. May the Extraordinary Form be embraced everywhere and celebrated with greater frequency!
When you read posts like this, hear about teens flooding into adoration, having their own praise-worship-&-adoration, and doing other more “traditional” rituals you wonder why we have any hippie guitar masses left.
One thing I noticed at our local “family friendly” mass, when the uber-clapping begins… the people clapping are not the teens. It is two age groups: those who probably went to woodstock and toddlers. Aside from that most people feel or at least appear very uncomfortable clapping.
I think that the reverent becomes relevant because there is meaning for teens. I know as someone who is not that far removed from my teens, and who didn’t want to BE CATHOLIC because it was to “Stale” wasn’t against the TRADITIONAL or the REVERENT, but that staleness I fought against was the meaningless and the void.