Attending My First Latin Mass

if you've been following my channel for any length of time you might be surprised to find out that I attended my first extraordinary form of the liturgy or the Latin Mass and that's because I've addressed this topic especially aesthetics and liturgy and worship quite a few times in my past videos and if you've picked up on it you will probably have noticed that I have been favoring a more traditional take on things and I expect that's a surprise to some people because usually when someone provides these kinds of commentaries that tend to lean in a particular direction or favor a certain belief it's because they're a spokesperson or they're fully immersed in that demographic or that faction or whatever it happens to be and in this case I'm just a Catholic who has been sorting through these things myself and wrestling with these ideas and trying to reconcile things that I'm struggling with and that's led me to this point where I finally attended my first Tridentine Mass this this past weekend and so I thought it would be interesting to just share some of that experience while it's still new and and raw and not in a way that's trying to be persuasive but just just as it came to me and the things that occurred to me and what that experience will looked like for someone who is a newcomer to it [Music] admittedly my wife and I were nervous going into it and that nervousness reminded me a lot of what it was like to attend the Catholic Mass for the first time I didn't know what to expect I didn't know if I was going to stand out or embarrass myself but that anxiety was also accompanied by a sense of excitement like we're actually doing this this is going to be something new and what is this what are the implications going to be for our lives we attended with our whole family which includes myself and my wife and then also our five kids and while we were trying to be as attentive as possible to the experience and to the liturgy we were also really hyper aware of the behavior of our children so we were focusing a lot of our attention on them mostly just because again we were new and we didn't want to attract too much attention to ourselves the first thing I was struck by was just how powerful the atmosphere was when we arrived there was no chatter or socializing or anything like that the people that were there were obviously very intentional about seeking God in prayer and in worship and that disposition was prevalent through the whole community while this trait is common enough in other masses I've attended it isn't consistently so you'll definitely get people who show up in our very intentional about prayer but then you'll get other people who come and are just socializing or just you know hanging out before Mass the Latin Mass community felt like a real body of believers with a common vision and approach to God which is something I've rarely felt attending other masses typically in the Catholic Church you'll get varying degrees of participation in enthusiasm some people will come and they'll be very intentional and prayerful about what's going on but then a significant number of other people are just barely participating but at the Latin Mass it seemed like everybody was intentionally and prayerfully participating and this is one of the the first great ironies that really struck me about the experience because the reforms that led to the the new ordinary form of the mass were enforced with the promise that they were going to increase participation but I would say the patient at your typical Catholic parish is scattered at best now some people might celebrate that as a triumph of diversity but I don't really see how a lukewarm or disjointed communal life is a cause for celebration I think true diversity good diversity is produced when many individuals with their unique experiences and gifts and traits all come together for one unified vision and purpose to produce something that is greater than themselves their individual cells and I'd say that is what I witnessed at the Latin Mass I saw people from all walks of life coming together from different economic brackets different ethnicities different experiences and offering themselves to something that was bigger to this communal life and to each other and to God in prayer but they were doing so with this common purpose in this common vision having a hundred different approaches to God and varying degrees of prayerfulness doesn't strike me as diversity at least not good diversity I'd say it's discord brought on by individualism and a pervasive focus on self and we get enough of that in our everyday lives I think that the mass or communal worship should be one of those reprieves from the relentless pursuit of self and when you enter into something like a community that calls you outside of yourself to a vision that is not of your own making into a God that is not your of your own preference I think you do find that kind of relief and that's what I would I would say I experienced at the land mass something else I was anxiously anticipating was an unwelcoming and judgmental atmosphere because the kind of unity and harmony I've been describing can be disrupted by newcomers and outsiders and the Catholic Church has its fair share of grumpy and judgmental parishioners but to my surprise I didn't get that sense from anyone there in fact it was incredibly welcoming nobody turned around and stared at my family when one of my kids started making a bunch of noise nobody raised an eyebrow when I didn't seem to know how to participate or or say the responses properly everyone was so intensely focused on God that I don't think anyone had the wherewithal to be distracted by our disruptive presence as the liturgy carried on it did start to feel long and there were moments where I thought we could we could really expedite this process a little bit but there was absolutely no indication from anybody that they wanted to hurry this process everything was so deliberate that it almost felt like life was slowing down my wife were marked afterwards that she felt like she was in a bubble of peace and serenity while the outside world was composed of chaos and anxiety and spectacle it was almost like in here there was a piece of heaven where you could just lose yourself in stillness and in prayer I'm still digesting the experience so I don't think I don't feel like I can fully articulate what the experience meant or what it was like for me but I did want to close with this one last observation I expected it to be different but I didn't expect it to be that different both my wife and I commented on that on the drive in the drive home afterwards we were just wondering out loud how could the most prominent expression of our faith change so dramatically in such a short period of time how did we go from that to what is commonplace in the church today and I don't think that there are easy answers to those questions but I do think that they're worth asking how could you not ask them when he experienced that contrast like how did we take something that had been in use for hundreds of years and then with the wave of a hand cast it aside and enforce something so drastically different when Pope Benedict issued some more on Pontifical which made the extraordinary form of the mass available to communities that wanted it there was actual serious resistance against that permission and keep in mind that this wasn't an attempt to normalize it or promote it but just to make it available and to no longer prohibit it it's a startling thing for me to learn that there are currents in the church that are so fanatically committed to the new form of the mass that they can't tolerate the old form which had been instilled into generations of Catholics as the apex of their faith is this not the Church of Jesus Christ the church the timeless church whose whose teachings are unchanging and you would think whose expression of the faith and celebration of worship would also be unchanging to a certain degree but the more I encounter this contrast between the way things were for hundreds of years and now have suddenly changed so dramatically it's it's hard to see that continuity this wasn't just the mass of our grandparents this was the mass of our great grandparents and our great-great grandparents and our great great-great grandparents and so on and it's shocking to learn how hastily that was cast aside for what we have now which doesn't seem to be delivering on any of its promises when Pope Benedict simply made this available for us there were hysterical responses from some bishops and that has to make you wonder what's really going on and how did we get to where we are today for my part I'm going to go back and to see if this is something that will instill the grace that I need to function in this world and I'd invite you to check it out for yourself as well thanks so much for watching guys if you enjoyed that then please consider 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Channel: Brian Holdsworth

Views: 64,220

Rating: 4.9571128 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Holdsworth, Latin Mass, Catholic Latin Mass, Tridentine Mass, Catholic LIturgy, Roman Rite Liturgy, Extraordinary Form, traditional latin mass, traditional catholic, Catholic, Catechism, Jesus, Catholicism

Id: gFe35kGVa4k

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/LeRedditArmyEcksdee]

Personally, I feel the meditative atmosphere of the Latin masses is a much better way to connect with God than the modern, contemporary music played at some churches and services.

[u/ThreeHornedSnail]

How do we feel about Holdsworth? I think he's well-intentioned but I sometimes wonder how far his apologetics are actually able to take us.