Why The Youth Want Tradition

About this sermon

Support the channel by donating or joining The Reinforcements at https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com Modern, secular, and progressive advocates have spent generations trying to hammer home the idea that the past is inferior to the present as well as what we can expect from the future and since tradition is backwards oriented, surely, it too is inferior. And it’s something like that logic that seems to have dominated the Church for generations now especially in how we attempt to relate the faith to the youth. We take a superficial look at what interests kids and then we say, let’s include more of that in Church culture and this will help make the faith relevant for the kids. And after doing this for 60 some odd years, the only trend we’ve seen is population decline which only seems to be compounded with each successive generation. But, there seems to be a renewal going on in Traditional parishes. I attend a parish where only the extraordinary form of the mass, also known as the Traditional Latin Mass, is offered and when people find out about that, their immediate reaction is almost always a show of sympathy for my kids. They assume that I’m dragging my kids to it and they’re always surprised when I tell them this story. Probably about a month after we started attending the Latin mass, I asked my kids, who were at the time 10 years old and younger, if they’d like to go back to our old parish where the ordinary form is offered or keep going to the Latin mass. And I reluctantly asked them this, because I didn’t want to go back and I assumed that, at least, some of them would want to go back to our old parish. To my surprise, they unanimously and enthusiastically voted to keep going to the Latin mass. If I recall, they cheered as they exclaimed their preference with triumphant fists in air. When I tell people that story, they usually react in strange ways – they seem to either think I’m lying or they just have a kind of bad disk moment where you can see something’s glitching in their brain before they retreat away to some other corner of the world where things make sense to them. Modern life seems to be fairly cleanly divided between work and leisure or work and play might be a more familiar way of describing it. Work is what we have to do even though we don’t want to – it’s our obligations and commitments – a necessary evil. Leisure or play is what we do because we want to do it. And for the most part, this dimension of life can be summarized by what amuses and entertains us and we have more access to what amuses us than ever before. It seems that virtually everyone has their own curated library of music, their own algorithmically recommended list of video on demand, their own favourite restaurants, their own curated list of apps specific to their digital lifestyle, and so on. And for everything that we haven’t discovered yet, we find that it’s already rated for us so that we can be sure that we don’t waste time with apps, games, music, or movies that won’t maximize our amusement. And nobody is more dialed into the vanguard of popular culture than the youth. For one, the majority of promotional media is aimed directly at them because they have buying potential and are less likely to scrutinize what is being sold to them. They’re seen as an easy target. And popular culture is an industrial business and in the interests of maximizing profits, they’ve drawn from the wisdom of industrial manufacturers who were able to ensure that consumers would buy their products even though they don’t need to through the concept of planned obsolescence. This was a concept devised by General Motors where they would unnecessarily redesign their cars every year so that consumers would want the latest one even though the one they had was perfectly fine and should last several more years. Trends in pop culture are designed to do the same thing. Just when we get caught up with the latest musical genre and fashion trends, they get pulled out from under us in order to compel us to return to the store to keep up with the latest arbitrarily defined trends. This should be our first indication that popular culture isn’t real culture and why we shouldn’t be drawing inspiration from it when we develop our liturgical worship. But concern for the youth is often present in rationales for shifting away from a faith that is reverent and traditional to one that is expressed in more entertaining terms. Back in the 60’s, liturgical activists like the now disgraced Archbishop Weakland were sitting on musical advisory boards and councils promoting the idea that the youth should be targeted with “the choice of music which is meaningful to persons of this age level.” Read the whole transcript at https://brianholdsworth.ca/