...And to the Latin Mass

By Tim Padgett

At 32, Catherine Muskett is too young to remember the day the Roman Catholic music died. The Latin prayers, the ethereal Gregorian chant--they were cast out of the Catholic Mass in the 1960s, after the modernizing church council known as Vatican II. But Muskett doesn't remember the '60s either. To her, today's perky folk-guitar Masses are more grating than groovy. "Catholics of my generation are starved for the real thing," she says. So each Sunday, she and her family drive half an hour to attend the Solemn High Mass, most of it in Latin, offered by St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Great Falls, Va. Like some catacombed underground movement, they take out old Gregorian missals for translation and sing Palestrina instead of Peter, Paul and Mary.

At a time when old religious rituals are being embraced anew by many faiths, Muskett is part of a retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics. The generation that not long ago pushed Gregorian chant into the Top 40 may now plant it back into the Mass. Since 1990, the number of U.S. Catholic dioceses allowing traditional Masses (in Latin or a mix of English and Latin) has leaped from six to 131--70% of the total. More than 150,000 people attend them each week.

That's still a fraction of America's 50 million Catholics. But partly in response to Gen-X interest, the Atlanta Archdiocese created a separate parish this spring for the Priestly Society of St. Peter, clerics who celebrate only the most traditional and elaborate style of Latin Mass, the 16th century Tridentine. In Chicago, parishioners like Paul Recchia, 29, who says the pop excesses of the modern Mass "disturbed me," have opted for the Tridentine at the ornate St. John Cantius Catholic Church--where half the weddings are now done in that fashion.

All this reflects a backlash against the earnestly modern Catholic culture that grew out of Vatican II, "whose identity seems rather weak and unclear to the MTV generation," says the Rev. Michael Baxter, a theology professor at Notre Dame University. The traditional Mass has filled a need for more transcendence, through Catholicism that again reaches the soul via the senses.

--By Tim Padgett. With reporting by Andrew Keith/Chicago

With reporting by Andrew Keith/Chicago