Father asked me to give a talk on a young person’s perspective on the Church. Given our current Bishop, I had to very careful about what I said and how I said it. This was the result.

Today we are plagued with constant assurance that sin is good. Not just any sin, but selfish pride, the highest of the seven deadly sins. During the Month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus the whole western world now celebrates Pride. At its face this is a celebration of promiscuity and sexual confusion, but these people chose their vice well, because pride is an all encompassing sin. The world has perfectly inverted Church teaching. Like Father said last week in his homily, our attention now is on ourselves, and then those around us and what they think of us. If we have time and aren’t feeling lazy we give God the Father a quick nod. According to Thomas Aquinas, pride is “an excessive desire for one’s own self which rejects subjection to God.” This denies God His place as Creator and source of our life. We are created in His image, so when we turn into ourselves we are denying our reflection of the Father. Furthermore, pride is the source of all other sins. We are lustful because we are selfish. We are lazy because we are selfish. I could go on, but you get the idea. I personally don’t have social media, but today, if I wanted, I could go to pinterest, instagram, facebook, tinder, the grocery store, Sportmans warehouse, pretty much anywhere, and ads and videos and images would be thrust at me promoting my own selfishness. My generation especially is conditioned to think the world does revolve around them, and they are empty for it. They perpetually seek affirmation because they can’t free themselves from society’s false happiness: their own desires and their own will. Beautifully opposed to this, the traditions, canons, and teachings of the Church clearly state that I am not the most important thing in the world, but God is, and what I do to reflect His image is vitally important. By promoting selflessness and looking beyond yourself, the Church is helping people to find themselves. Young people not only need this, but they crave it. The generations before mine were blessed to grow up in a time without smartphones, without social media, and though it was fading, Christianity was more present culturally than now. Today the world shouts that the Church is wrong, and by living for ourselves we will be happier than those before us. But the young generations are more depressed and unfulfilled than any generation before us. This is not a coincidence. It is so clear that embracing the Church in humble obedience to God and His Church will bring fulfillment and peace. Humility is the remedy to pride. This was the remedy for St Augustine almost 1600 years ago, and it is today even more so. Christ says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” This is what young people are searching for, but are blind to the Church’s right claim to this. 

The selfishness that is so prevalent in the culture today doesn’t inspire greatness. Rather, this self-centered world allows people to remain in mediocrity. There is no standard, or very low ones anyway, for young people nowadays. There are low standards expected of us in many jobs, low standards in the family, low standards for beauty and health, and low, vicious standards regarding morality. We are constantly told that we are “good enough” as is. But we’re not, and the Church lovingly tells us that. There is a reason that when you go to the Old Cathedral the line for confession is primarily young people. This is not to say that older people don’t see the value in confession, but I think young people need this sacrament not only for the remission of their sins, but for the reassurance that they can be better. When somebody feels horrible about themselves because of the way they live their life, the worst thing they could hear is that they are good enough and shouldn’t change. The Church tells them the truth, they really can be better, and they should be. The Church holds us to a standard, a standard not written by mere men. This is a goal for young people to aspire to. It’s like when little kids only win participation trophies, they are ok with that, but it doesn’t even compare to the joy and satisfaction they feel when they win a real trophy for placing in a competition. I learned this while I was teaching at Our Lady of the Valley. I had very few rules, but they were to be followed and the kids knew I expected greatness from them. They wanted to prove they could be great, and they did prove it. I’ve learned this many times again since then. Wherever the bar is, most people will meet it. The Church sets the bar high, but not unrealistically so, and this high bar, this possibility to become a worthy son or daughter of God, is something we are looking for, primarily because God is our final end, but more immediately because nobody else expects us to be great.

When I was a junior in high school Maria Grandel and I went to the Wyoming Catholic College PEAK program. The Masses were all said ad orientem and the Mass parts were in latin. I had never experienced Mass this way outside of the extraordinary form when Fr Tom Brundage would do it once a month. It was amazing. I felt like I was a part of the Mass, that Fr Bob Fredrick was offering the sacrifice of the Mass on my behalf, rather than to me. Yes, I know the words and the form of the Mass clearly state that the sacrifice is offered to God the Father, but this was the first time I actually felt like I was a part of that and that a sacrifice was what was happening. It was reverent and pious in a way that I didn’t know a novus ordo Mass could be. Additionally, I remember how it felt when I went to Mass after those two weeks and Mass was said versus populum, facing me. Though I interacted just as much as before, it felt more as though I was witnessing something rather than being a part of it. 

As Father said, there is nothing inherently wrong with saying the Mass versus populum. There is something about the exterior situation of a person or of a room that directly affects your interior disposition. The point isn’t that one is necessarily better than the other, but I noticed immediately I was disposed to pay attention and partake in the Mass in a more intentional way because everything was physically oriented toward God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ who was really present on the altar, actually present in the tabernacle beyond the altar, and signified above the altar on the crucifix. Because the priest and the congregation were facing the same thing, the same person, nobody could ever question who the sacrifice was offered to or what the focal point of the Mass was. It wasn’t the people, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t the priest or the deacon. It was God, clear and simple. And that was an experience I will never forget.

I spent the last two years in Austria. The churches and chapels had varying levels of ornateness and decor, but all of them used their beauty to draw your attention to the high altar and what was happening there. Vatican II did not tell the churches to strip their statues and white wash their walls, but when you travel America that seems to have been the understanding. The Churches here don’t often cause one to stop in awe at the beauty man felt God deserved. Rather, they frequently are devoid of any character or beauty. Beauty is under attack today. This is part of the mediocrity movement. Why put the time, energy, and money into making something truly beautiful that will last when you could get away with less? Man is made for beauty. God is the good, the true, and the beautiful. We seek out beautiful things because they are a reflection of God, whom we truly desire. But the world has rejected God, and so by necessity has rejected the beautiful. My generation has grown up in a culture which idolizes the ugly, or at the very least, the mediocre. Beauty in a church is necessary. Raise your hand if you were at the midnight Mass last Christmas when the power went out. I was. I also had the privilege two years ago to go to a candlelit Extraordinary form midnight Christmas Mass in Vienna since I could not come home that break. The most beautiful part about the Mass in Vienna was the same thing that was the most beautiful part about the Mass here last Christmas even though one was in a huge Baroque church and one was here. It was the consecration by candlelight. Did anyone else notice how after midnight Mass last year everyone remained quiet as they exited the Church, even though Mass was over? Our parish has a problem of people talking in the sanctuary before Mass and after Mass, except that night, and except when the lights are dimmed during Eucharistic Adoration on Thursdays. I don’t think that is an accident. Aristotle teaches in his Nicomachean Ethics that your outward disposition and the things with which you surround yourself directly impact your inward disposition. A brightly lit Church feels like a social hall. I find that when I wear a dress and veil, and I go into the Church and it is quiet and not so bright, and the music is beautiful, that I have an easier time finding a quiet space to converse with God. The modern world is selfish and noisy and ugly but the Church offers a remedy to all of those. I think all of this is why traditional Latin Mass communities are bursting at the seams with young people. But all Masses, not just Traditional Latin Masses, should be reverent and beautiful, and it doesn’t take a whole lot to make them this way.