Lost Sheep:

The Modern Crisis of Catholic Formation

By Clare Wilson

As a lifelong member of one of the societies which promote and preserve the Traditional Latin Mass, it is possible for a Catholic to be almost completely removed from the culture of what we might call ‘mainstream’ Catholicism, and to have little direct experience of the crisis in the Church. In such a situation, a Catholic might even find it hard to believe that the Church really is in a critical state. Perhaps the constant warnings from priests and conservative thinkers might even strike a sheltered traditional Catholic as an exaggeration of the true state of things.

For most of my life, I have been just such a Catholic. Born and baptized in the Traditional Roman rite, I was raised by parents who did all they could to locate our family within reach of the Latin Mass. In the Catholic girls’ school which I attended, we spoke occasionally about the lamentable state of the Catholic world at large, but otherwise were completely sheltered from its effects. At the Catholic college where I earned my bachelor’s degree, most of the students were Latin Mass attendees, at least occasionally, and the faculty espoused the Anglican use of the Novus Ordo Missae, which is perhaps the most reverent form of the new Mass in English. My schoolmates and I earnestly studied Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Fathers; accepted the truths of revelation without question. After college, I returned to my home in Post Falls, Idaho, and worked for the same girls’ school where I had attended high school. Later I moved on to work for a traditional Catholic homeschooling company. Through all this, I had a good theoretical grasp of the crisis in the Church, having studied almost all the documents from Vatican II, as well as various encyclicals of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, but mostly I assumed that Novus Ordo Catholics behaved much the same as Traditional ones, just putting up with an unfortunate downgrade to the form of the Mass.

When I began my graduate program in 2017, I began to realize this might not be the case. From the first day of class, I was open about being Catholic, and over the next few months one after another of my classmates began to mention that they also are Catholic—or used to be.

At current count, I know of six young men and four young women who were all raised Catholic; adding myself to the number, eleven out of the thirty-five students in my program are Catholic—a quite impressive percentage!

I, however, am the only one who practices. Among those who have discussed the Faith with me, one actually practices, two still consider themselves Catholic and occasionally tell me that they plan to return to Mass or go to confession (but then do not), while a few more have adopted a sort of weak spirituality in which they believe in God but find it impossible to embrace the doctrines of the Church. The majority of them have been or are cohabitating with their significant others.

As you might imagine, I was somewhat stunned by the terrible rate of attrition represented by the Catholic population of my graduate program. Twenty percent of students are Catholic, but only fifteen percent of these Catholics practice.

(Obviously these numbers are skewed by the small sample size, but I would not be surprised if this rate held true even among thousands). Wondering at the cause, I supposed perhaps this phenomenon arises from the liberal atmosphere in which most American Catholics of the millennial generation have been raised. When pulled between the rigors of Catholic morality and the pleasures of the modern world, it’s not surprising that, at least in their youth, most of these young people slip towards the easy path of pleasure and fall away from the Church. It’s probably an American problem, I told myself.

Then I spent a month in Europe, walking one of the oldest Catholic pilgrimages in the world—the Camino de Santiago.

Of course, I was aware before I started that people walk the path for any number of non-Catholic reasons. Some view it as an athletic endeavor; some think of it as a way to get in touch with their inner selves; some see it as an opportunity to connect with other people. I supposed, however, that I would meet many Catholics from Spain and France and Italy, who had undertaken the pilgrimage for expressly religious reasons. This was true to a certain extent, but I noticed an interesting fact: more than three-quarters of obviously Catholic pilgrims were well over the age of fifty. At the pilgrim Masses, I did see a young Spaniard here, a young Italian there, a Czech couple, a Polish boy, girls from America or Mauritius or France, but these youthful Catholics were few and far between. I spoke to many Italians and Spaniards in their twenties and thirties who shrugged and admitted they were baptized, but only attend Mass at Christmas and Easter. At one of the parish hostels, a diocesan seminarian who was acting as host asked me if I were a nun, probably because I wore a scarf over my hair during Mass. That one comment revealed to me how uncommon it must be to see devout or traditional young people in churches along the Camino, despite its venerable history as an act of Catholic devotion. I realized that perhaps the state of the Catholic Church in Europe is just as dire as in the States.

What is the cause for this lamentable state of affairs? Two conversations from the past year have helped me understand. The first happened in the Fall of 2017.

I had been explaining the Traditional movement and the Latin Mass to a Jewish classmate, when another classmate across the table asked if I attended a local sedevacantist parish of which he knew. I then attempted to lay out the difference between the traditional movement and the sedevacantist movement, supposing that he was unfamiliar with the terms. He, however, announced that he was raised Catholic but had stopped practicing years before.

It turned out, however, that he had studied comparative religions as a minor

in his undergraduate degree, and the campus of his New York university was very close to the American headquarters of the Dalai Lama, who used to visit the campus occasionally to speak to the students.

This lapsed Catholic explained that he is very drawn to Buddhism, but that while listening to the Dalai Lama on one occasion, he heard this advice: don’t look outside your own religious tradition for spiritual nourishment, but instead embrace the tradition in which you were born. Apparently the Dalai Lama’s thought is that a person’s cultural religion is the only which he or she can really understand and profit from, so it makes no sense for an American Catholic to practice Chinese Buddhism or vice versa. Of course, this viewpoint is problematic in its own right, but the interesting result was that the young man began to wonder if he should return to the practice of his Catholic Faith, especially since he acknowledges how ancient and enriching it can be. He had not done so, though, he informed me, because he could not imagine practicing a religion just because it was old and beautiful, even if those qualities attracted him. My somewhat befuddled response to this observation was that certainly the Catholic Faith is old and beautiful, but that’s not why I practice it; my belief is instead based on doctrine which I have studied and taken pains to understand.

The second conversation I had occurred at the very end of my Camino, when I spent a couple of days walking with a lawyer in his mid-thirties from Milan.

As we sat over breakfast on the second morning, I prayed the blessing before meals. The night before, when we visited a basilica together, I had knelt to pray before walking through the building to admire the side altars and statues.

Having observed all this, the lawyer asked me how I, as an American, came to be a practicing Catholic (Europeans, it turns out, have no idea that almost twenty percent of U.S. citizens still identify as Catholic).

The only explanation that really satisfied him for my religion was that my Catholic grandfather was half-Irish and half-Italian. I felt like protesting that this fact of my heritage is only accidentally connected to my practice of the Faith, since it was actually my convert Welsh-English grandmother who brought my father’s family into Tradition, and my convert German-English mother who taught me the catechism. For this Italian, though, ancestry and culture are the chief justifications for being Catholic. He explained to me that he was, of course, baptized—most Italians are—and that he goes to Mass on occasion, and believes in God, and appreciates the symbolism and imagery connected to Catholic identity and history. At the same, though, he informed me, Italian Catholics are too rationalistic to accept their own Faith completely at face value, so he is Catholic, but really only by culture.

What I noticed about these conversations was that, while the two men both felt a certain attraction towards the traditions of the Church, neither of them seemed to know anything about doctrine. They are both intelligent, well-educated, cultured men raised by Catholic families, or even in the Italian’s case, surrounded by a deeply Catholic national heritage, but there is a huge gap in their education regarding the Faith of their birth. Since the two men and I fall in the same agerange (30-35), it seems astonishing that I should be the only one who can confidently reference even simple truths of the catechism.

Then it struck me that the main difference between us is that I consistently attend the Traditional Catholic Mass, while they were both brought up with the Novus Ordo. During my five-week pilgrimage in Spain, which was the longest time I had ever been unable to attend a Latin Mass, I decided to attend the parish Masses in Spanish churches, simply to avoid the danger of scandal. After all, once other pilgrims found out I was Catholic, I didn’t want them observing me skip Mass, since that might give them the opinion I condoned such behavior. In total, I went to the Novus Ordo six times during the trip.

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Lost Sheep

C. Wilson/ Continued From Page 13

By the end, I was so homesick for the Latin Mass that I felt almost angry to be present at the Novus Ordo pilgrim Mass in Santiago Cathedral.

This was not just a manifestation of sentimental attachment to the Traditional Mass. Instead, several factors contributed to my chagrin. I was frustrated that I could not understand the exact words of the Spanish Masses.

Since I, at least, have a sense of basic Spanish vocabulary, thanks to years of studying Latin, I was more or less able to keep track of the various parts of the Mass, but I imagine other non-Spanish pilgrims felt even more lost and possibly more frustrated. I was also distressed by how much the Mass has been shortened, as if the Church has lost confidence in her children’s ability to focus and decided that forty-five minutes is the most that can be allotted to even a high Mass celebrated by a bishop in the seat of his diocese. It was also clear that most of the prayers relating to sacrifice, connecting the Mass to the Old Testament, and emphasizing the mystical body of Christ—Church triumphant, suffering, and militant—had been eliminated. Even in a country that is still obviously very Catholic, like Spain, the priests seemed to handle the Sacred Species and the altar vessels and linens with a sort of cavalier attitude, as if they were serving at a buffet or folding laundry.

Observing all this, I began to realize: mainstream Catholics are not offered a constant nourishment and reinforcement of their Faith. The Novus Ordo Missae has stripped away large portions of both the doctrinal content and the physical reverence inherent in the Traditional Latin Mass, leaving Catholics with little reminder that in every Mass they are dealing directly with God. The Italian cultural Catholic is a little better off than the American lapsed Catholic, simply because the relics of the Faith— churches, sanctuaries, pilgrimages, monasteries, etc.—are constantly present before his or her eyes. These remnants provide a sort of subconscious education, but otherwise, it is clear that neither the cultural nor the lapsed Catholic has received a thorough education in the truths of the Faith. Without that foundation, when presented with a form of the Mass that omits to confirm those truths, these Catholics have little hope of retaining belief or devotion.

I have friends and family members who did receive a solid Catholic education, thanks to some intervention of grace and good parenting, and who attend the Novus Ordo with obvious lively faith.

However, once that crucial childhood formation is lacking, baptized Catholics in the mainstream Church seem to fall from practice in droves, not finding the support needed to retain their faith. At the same time, I know many young people from the Traditionalist movement who have only vague answers for reasonably simple questions about doctrine, because perhaps the only instruction they received was weekly catechism classes years ago in their parish basement. In spite of this ignorance, though, they still attend Mass every Sunday, appear in the confessional line, say grace before meals in public, marry other practicing Catholics, bring non-Catholic friends to introduce them to the Church. To me this says that attendees of the Traditional Latin Mass, even those who are poorly instructed, receive some indispensable element of ongoing formation which preserves their faith while mainstream Catholics fall away. If the chief difference between these two groups of Catholics is the form of the Mass which they attend, perhaps we can conclude that the Traditional Latin Mass in itself offers more to the average Catholic than does the Novus Ordo.

I think perhaps there can at times be rhetoric from the traditional movement in the Church that sounds extremist, as if the Catholic Church has lost the Faith and only Traditional Catholics really deserve the name, ‘Catholic,’ anymore.

This is of course a rash judgment, since even if we cannot know the providence of Christ for His bride, we can at least be sure that He has not divorced her, as one might say in human terms. Even while we reserve judgment and cultivate trust in God, though, one thing we can know for sure is that the Novus Ordo fails in most cases to bolster the faith of modern Catholics. The mass apostasy of young Catholics in America and Europe points out a real problem that perhaps older and better educated Catholic generations in the mainstream Church fail to notice.

The Novus Ordo does not provide its attendees with enough, and if they come to it already ill-formed in the Faith, they will seldom have the strength to resist the loud appeals of the world constantly echoing in their ears. The result: up to ninety percent of Catholic millennials have lapsed.

Does this mean there is no hope for their souls? Of course not. What it does mean, however, is that Traditional Catholics in the world have a particularly strong obligation to be true to their Faith and to its practice. If nothing else, their silent example can be a reminder to their less fortunate Catholic peers that the commandments of God and the Church have not been dissolved, and that it is possible to live a happy, balanced life while following them. In the best cases, though, we Traditional Catholics can hope and pray that lapsed Catholics whom we encounter and whom we invite to attend Mass or with whom we discuss the Faith will be led gently back into the fold of the Church, thus bringing about that joy of which the Gospel speaks: "There shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that doth penance, more than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance" (Luke XV, vii). ■