The "Death" of the Faith

When Pope Benedict XVI issued his apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum in 2007, there was criticism that the only people who would attend the Mass in the extraordinary form (in Latin, where the priest faces ad oriens, in the same direction as the people) were old people who grew up before the new "proper" Mass was instituted, and would only attend it out of some sense of nostalgia. Even in our own parish, some objected to the pastor that if the Mass was celebrated in a language people didn't understand, that attendance would drop off. It was certainly expected to drive away young people. Who would possibly want to attend Latin mass who hadn't grown up with it?

I smile to myself, thinking about this, as I walk around in the back of the church with Damien. Another father, I think his name's Michael, holds his two-year-old son, while one of his daughters—who looks about ten—takes up the collection with the other ushers. His wife sits in the row in front of Anne Marie, with their other son, and their other daughter sings in the choir.

Damien fidgets loose from my hold and runs about. He finds another boy around his age and the two of them laugh and squeal. Together, they find the cabinets where the missals are stored, and the other boy's dad and I take turns holding them closed. Over the course of the mass, at least three or four other parents of small children will pass through the back, either to calm a fussing baby, or take a child to the bathroom.

I look out over the congregation, who listen to Father Philip's highly-intellectual homily (he's talking about what we can learn from the fact that the vast majority of God's life here on earth was spent in ordinary family life; it's like he knows his audience). There's another family sitting behind us this week, the girls wearing veils. There's the young couple—no kids yet—that look younger than Rie and I. Probably mid-twenties. They're here every week. And, of course, the family that drives the big white full-size van with three bumperstickers; one for The Monkees, one that says "I ♥ the Old Latin Mass", and another that says "Proud Parents of 6 homeschoolers". From where I stand in the back, I can't see a single gray head. I think the average age of this group must be about 35.

The group that attends the 12:30 Mass in the extraordinary form fills me with such hope, and is a reminder that G.K Chesteron's words that he wrote in 1925 are just as relevant then as they are today: "we know how completely a society can lose its fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion; we know how men can all become agnostics long before they abolish bishops. And we know that also in this last ending, which really did look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old."


Father Zuhlsdorf often refers to "people of a certain age". You know the age. Probably close to or at retirement. Silver hair, if any at all. The ones who abolished the Latin mass. The ones who will justify any and every liturgical abuse with "the spirit of Vatican II". The thing is, though, the ones following them aren't picking up the torch. They're letting the baton drop to the ground, then running in the opposite direction. "No thanks," my generation says. "We'll do it our way." Which just happens to be the way our grandparents did it.

In recent decades, it has appeared that there hasn't been much hope for the Church. Scandals, dissent, people leaving in droves over her "outdated" teachings. How could the Faith survive through that? Holy Mother Church is being dismantled from within as much as from without. But this isn't anything unexpected, really. It's not even anything new. As Chesterton says: "At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died."

This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution. But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But this is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and then had risen again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and there seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it began again.

'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows. ~G.K. Chesterton "The Five Deaths of the Faith", The Everlasting Man (1925)