Bear with One Another

 

Traditional Mass attendees are more likely to be unusually knowledgeable about liturgy and theology, and thus have higher standards for both. They’re also more likely to be embittered by experiencing poor liturgy, catechesis, and homilies, then being swatted by a priest or parish office when they dare to speak up about it. They feel that traditional parishes should be a safe space to ask hard questions and push for the best in liturgy. 

Diocesan priests who celebrate the traditional Mass are more likely to feel entitled to heightened deference and loyalty from their parishioners, feeling that they are doing their parishioners a huge favor by offering the Mass at all. Witness this article and comment section in which dozens of people pile on traditionalists whose worst crime, while obnoxious, was occasionally whining and nagging to improve the liturgy. 

Priests in traditional orders are more likely to have been formed in an older ethic that emphasizes obedience above all else and especially the laity’s duty to be subordinate to their priests in all matters. 

This is a recipe for frustration. On one side, you have laity puffed up by their heightened knowledge who demand the highest standards from their priests. On the other side you have priests who expect the laity to be submissive and eternally grateful for whatever the priest is willing to give them. 

This is why Saint Paul reminds us to bear with one another. Both sides need to manage their expectations. 

The laity need to understand that diocesan priests often have an exhaustive workload due to the shortage of priests. They are unlikely to feel that they have the time to perfect their Latin pronunciation or celebrate the liturgy to the utmost every week, complete with solemn Mass and sung Sunday Vespers. 

Those priests are also unlikely to push the envelope on liturgy with the bishop, whether it’s celebrating pre1955 Holy Week or vigils and octaves suppressed before 1962. 

Remember, priests are formed in seminaries, largely separated from the communities they will one day serve. They are assigned to parishes by bishops who are almost never traditional and who have almost unlimited authority about where and when to send a priest (even a pastor) at any given time. 

Their loyalty is to their bishop, and their culture is often that of their brother priests, complete with praying the new Liturgy of the Hours rather than the traditional Office and celebrating the Novus Ordo for most of their Masses. And now, they especially fear offending their bishop given that the bishop can cancel the traditional Mass entirely. 

The bishops in turn are loyal to Rome, since they are almost always elected by the Pope and curia to serve a diocese to which they have no prior connection. And Rome is currently hostile to tradition and to taking hard stances on moral and doctrinal teaching. 

The laity also need to understand that a certain amount of disagreement and even argument with priests comes with the territory. The priests are in charge of the liturgy, sacraments, and church administration. The laity are not, even if the laity are more knowledgeable about some of those matters than the priest. 

The clergy in turn need to understand that the laity have many reasons to be frustrated with the state of the Church and to insist on high standards, especially in the liturgy. A certain amount of annoying questioning and occasional nagging comes with the territory. These tendencies can be gently corrected or harnessed to get such laity involved in altar serving, choirs, or church decoration. Casting off an entire traditional Mass congregation because 5 out of 75 people occasionally whine and nag is unreasonable and not healthy for priest or laity. 

After Traditionis Custodes, these laity are also way past the notion that they have to obey whatever a Church authority figure says. Priests need to be prepared for some pushback and tough questions, not unflinching obedience. 

Laity at traditional Masses will likely have large numbers of children, as the Church demands openness to life, and it is not always possible to keep children quiet for an extended period in an enclosed environment at Mass. This demands patience from priests. And creative solutions would be nice. The FSSP parish in Allentown for instance has a glass enclosed, sound insulated cry room in the choir loft with a full speaker system so that parents with difficult children can see and hear the entire Mass while the rest of the parish doesn’t hear the children’s squawking. 

We’re going to have to deal with each other. Given the paucity of traditional Masses, the laity don’t often have options to move parishes, and priests can’t control where they’re assigned. 

Demographic Collapse

 

Warnings of demographic collapse due to low fertility abound. There’s this video on the European collapse. 

In the main, these come across as reverse Malthusians. Both sides are forever prophesying society’s collapse due to population swings in one direction or another. And it never seems to happen the way they say it will.

The problem with the reverse Malthusian position is that it has even less evidence behind it than the Malthusian position. Malthusians can at least point to real social collapses due at least in part to high population, including Easter Island and even modern Haiti and Rwanda. They can also point to the fact that the global population has multiplied by 8 in just over 200 years. 

The reverse Malthusians can point to… well some economic stagnation in Japan and parts of Europe. Population globally and in most countries isn’t even going down any time soon. This isn’t a social collapse. As for the dire warnings that these economies don’t have enough young people, Spain’s youth unemployment is worse than US unemployment during the Great Depression.

Which brings me to another point. Conservatives complain that Europeans are not having enough kids and that they get married too late or not at all. They then complain about urbanization. 

What’s the alternative? As the video notes, in many of these countries, there isn’t room for many Europeans to live in areas with lower population densities. Where there is room, there isn’t economic opportunity. Even in more successful (and fertile) France, youth unemployment is twice that of the US, and it’s hard enough to build a family in the US. The US trend of conservative families buying farm land and going rural isn’t available to many Europeans, where land and gas costs are much higher. 

Let’s be reasonable: these are small countries where population surged in the 20th century, population in most of them isn’t even going down, and they already have heavy competition for scarce land and jobs. 

Back to my original point: the collapse never seems to come. And I doubt it will, at least in the way we typically think of a societal collapse. Rich western countries have had declining fertility for two full generations and any deficit of young workers is simply recouped through immigration and technology. In China, demographics are even worse but that hasn’t stopped their economy from being one of the most dynamic in the world. 

This isn’t to say that the general lifestyle of having dogs instead of children and building culture on contraception is a good thing. Childless Europeans will be miserable and likely abused in their old age with no family to care for them. But for many, especially those who grew up in secular families without strong communities, it’s tough to see an alternative. They’ll continue to muddle along with a wealthy country middle class lifestyle supported by the welfare state with the hard work (including elderly care) being done by poorer immigrants. It’s not a good life, but it’s also not the French Revolution.