It Isn’t ‘Hard-Right Rhetoric’ Drawing Catholics To The Latin Mass, No Matter What NYT Says

The New York Times recently published an article on the increasing numbers of American Catholic families who are gravitating to the traditional Latin Mass in search of liturgical reverence, orthodoxy, and a more Catholic experience. They are making the switch, as reporter Ruth Graham explains, despite being thwarted by a pope whose hostility to the ancient rite contrasts sharply with the conciliation and pastoral generosity demonstrated by his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

My own family migrated to the Latin Mass in 2021 for many of the reasons cited by the families interviewed for the report. Yet my reaction to the piece, unlike that of some Catholic bloggers and conservative Catholic writers such as Michael Brendan Dougherty, sounded a little less like Deo gratias and a little more like cui bono? On the one hand, at a time when Rome has literally forbidden most Catholic parishes from advertising the scheduled times of Latin Masses in their church bulletins, Latin Mass attendees are probably grateful for The New York Times’ free publicity. On the other hand, it’s intriguing that an ancient liturgy representing “a fraction of Masses performed at the 17,000 Catholic parishes in the US” was important enough to warrant a front page spot. 

Yet significant it is, but not for the reasons close to the hearts of traditional Catholics caught up in the turmoil of Pope Francis’s severe restrictions on the Latin Mass, senior prelates’ abandonment of core Catholic teaching, and liturgical cringefests in the New Mass or Novus Ordo Mass.

Instead, the real focus is sneaked into the third paragraph, where Graham describes the resurgence of the Latin Mass as “part of a rising right-wing strain within American Christianity.” The report is no bigoted attack on “radical-traditional Catholics” like The Atlantic’s recent sledgehammer of an “exposé,” a piece so outrageously obnoxious that the original headline and cover art had to be scrubbed. Graham’s style and substance is far more subtle, sophisticated, and insightful. But the underlying message is unsettling, and certainly not a celebration of traditional Catholicism.

Graham, who covers religious affairs for The New York Times, is evidently taking a pause from profiling white evangelical Christian “extremists” and pivoting to the increasing number of Latin Mass Catholics. Like their evangelical brothers and sisters, traditional Catholics believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God, adhere to its theological and moral truths, and profess that God’s law is eternal and unchangeable. Clearly, this makes traditionalists personae non gratae with the cultural and political elite, and therefore a strain worth examining.

Roots of Resurgence

The Latin Mass is hardly novel. It was the liturgical form celebrated in every Catholic Church throughout the world for hundreds of years until the revolutionary Vatican II reforms of the 1960s. After that, it lingered in the background for decades before bursting back onto center stage during the pandemic. Covid mandates and restrictions drove many Catholics to Latin Mass services, where they knew they wouldn’t be harangued by pastors