"Ever Ancient, Ever New | George Neumayr | Editorial for the June 2010 issue of Catholic World Report
Summorum Pontificum and the young.
Pope Benedict’s critics had hoped Summorum Pontificum would disappear without a trace. It hasn’t. His apostolic constitution authorizing wider use of the Traditional Latin Mass continues to bear fruit, some of it annoyingly visible to these critics.
Far from just a sop thrown to aging traditionalists, as some liberal bishops cast it, Summorum Pontificum has proven popular with the young. As Pope Benedict noted in its accompanying letter, the Traditional Latin Mass is old in origin but new in appeal: “young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction, and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Sacrifice particularly suited to them.”
An illustration of this appeared on April 24 in Washington, DC, when more than 3,500 people—many of them children, teens, college students, and young families—filed into the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for a Pontifical Solemn High Mass that lasted two and a half hours. The Paulus Institute, which sponsored the event to mark the fifth anniversary of Benedict’s pontificate, said it was the first Traditional Latin Mass offered at the Shrine’s altar since 1965.
To the Catholic left, which presides over seminaries that look like ghost towns and preaches to pews that are almost empty, the sight of young Catholics flocking to this Traditional Latin Mass was more than a little discombobulating. One of its publications, US Catholic, lashed out at the Mass. Usually an enthusiastic proponent of liturgies “relevant” to the young, it found this one disheartening.
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