"Based on decades of direct personal experience, Kelly did not believe that parish schooling, religious formation, or any number of Children’s Masses could ultimately make much of a lasting difference in the lives of children unless faith and formation came primarily from the home. " Father Michael Kelly, over a hundred years ago (?).
I am sympathetic to Father Michael Kelly's viewpoint, especially given his extensive pastoral experience in a great number of parishes. The elephant in the room is that forming children as Catholics is very difficult in a very anti-Christian worldview where secularism is the reigning religion. Maybe we could have syond focusing on it to talk yet some more :-).
This was a fascinating piece of history—in all the debates and brouhaha regarding the Tridentine Rite and Vatican II, I'd never once heard of these Children's Masses, from either side. On the one hand, I do very much like the effort put into helping children to actively pray the Mass and follow what's occurring on the altar. At the same time, I'm sympathetic to Fr. Kelly's concern that by restricting said Masses to children, parents were being further relieved of the duty to raise the children in the faith.
I can see a lot of value in a modern family Mass: poll the families of a parish to see if there's interest and find a time that works best for most of them, then make that time the designated family Mass. Offer a simpler liturgy with more straightforward hymns and responses (if sung); keep the homily brief and applicable to family life (ie, how can you live out today's Gospel with your parents/children/siblings); and most importantly, work to make it accessible to families. This is more than just accepting that there will be crying kids at Mass, this is actively helping parents and children. Maybe that means putting out extra chairs in the back of the church. Maybe it means explicitly saying that yes, it's okay to nurse babies during Mass; they don't control when they need to eat. It most definitely means encouraging families to help each other out, so that for example one family can rock a newborn so the exhausted parents have a little time to pray together. It would also be a great way to engage those elderly people who are interested—those who live far from their children or grandchildren might be delighted to spend time with little ones. Likewise, young single people might also be involved in this way. Many young people have trouble integrating into a new parish where they don't already know people, and this would allow them to get to know the families in the parish. Additionally, many Catholic young women get very excited at the chance to hold a baby, and while the young single men might be skittish at first, they could probably be brought around if they were informed that holding a baby and demonstrating fatherly care nigh-instantaneously makes them more attractive to the aforementioned young women.
Maybe this was your intention, but the later descriptions in your comment of how such a “family-oriented” mass could be just sounds like… a regular old mass at a parish with well-adjusted folks of all ages who are looking to worship God together!! Of course we all know that your typical mass does not always look that way, but… couldn’t it? It wouldn’t even require any liturgical changes, but I will note that my young kids LOVE when incense and bells are used! ;)
Every Mass is chaos and children at my parish, and that should be the goal for every parish.
What should mark a "family mass" should be what else you're describing: a homily tailored for family life and Catholics of all ages (not a theology seminar); brevity for the sake of what kids can endure; a time which doesn't interfere with naps (mid-morning); some Latin, but maybe not as much as I'd prefer; simpler hymns; etc.
But I've seen many a youngish kid get into singing a full Missa Cantata, too. We should not have a soft bigotry of low expectations and give the kids "Gift of Finest Wheat" slop.
I was thinking a little more "Faith of Our Fathers" than "Gifts of Finest Wheat", but I see your point. At the same time, I think there should also be room for Masses that aren't all chaos and children. Some people aren't ready to handle that, while others might genuinely need a quiet Mass to avoid sensory overload. The Mass isn't a designer object, of course, but there's also something to be said for St. Paul's becoming all things to all people. I think a healthy parish should support both.
There was an article a while back about sensory friendly Masses and I was really intrigued by the idea of the "reverse cry room" for this reason - a room that would be silent for the people who need it to be (though the trouble then can become that some people who require a high level of quiet have a difficult time remaining quiet themselves.) When travelling I have noticed that sometimes cry rooms already unofficially seem to serve this purpose, which is rather awkward when I enter one with a screaming toddler or two only to be glared at by a solitary adult.
I do think the earliest morning Masses and evening Masses are the ones most likely to have the fewest numbers of children, though, and I think that kind of natural development is fine, as long as the people present understand that sometimes families gotta do what they gotta do.
I find myself wondering about how my children would behave at a Mass like this. I am astonished sometimes when I attend their school Masses and somehow they know all the things they "forget" on Sundays with their parents. These things have mostly seemed to work themselves out by age 10, and sometimes by necessity our older children go without us, but the idea of doing it regularly strikes me as very odd.
My grandmother told me about these masses in the early 20th century in Providence. She went to the big Irish Catholic parish in town, and they had an 8AM children's mass on Sunday (why are they always 8AM?).
She went to public school, and they let them out during the week for "Instructions." The children's mass was (I took it) the same as any other Irish low mass, but the homily was tailored for the kids.
The kids all walked down the hill to mass, and never missed mass on Sunday (or Confession on Saturday morning before taking the streetcar to the movies for the rest of the afternoon). But God help them if they didn't go to "their mass." One of the priests would find them sneaking out of a later mass, twist them by the ear, and tell them they had better go to "their mass" next week, or it would be trouble for them.
Mind you, this was a kid on his or her own being responsible and getting to mass, no parental oversight needed. And it was still nitpicked. A different standard for Catholics back then.
BTW, the last mass was at 11AM. Because there had to be one Missa Cantata or Solemn High mass per Sunday (I later learned by order of one of the Baltimore Councils), this is where they put it since it didn't matter if it ended after Noon. My grandmother said it was common knowledge that this was the mass all the drunks went to. They also went to mass every week, but they needed to sleep off their alcohol. The sober considered the extra length and noise of this mass compared to the string of hurried low masses preceding it to be just punishment for the drunks.
I’d be worried about too much opportunity for child abuse, especially if a priest was so insistent that the children only attend the Mass without any parents
This is a fascinating article. To be clear, I have no issues with the NO Mass whatsoever, but this article so concretely shows the movements of the Spirit in the 20th century to set the Church up for another millennium and encourage such a dramatic change in liturgy. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a whole lot of struggle in that time, as there always is, but the Lord always guides and provides. It sounds like Ratzinger was right that since the Great War there was a lack of catechesis and the Spirit helped us through what could have been a very bad period of time.
What a wonderful informative article. I knew hardly any of this. Especially when so much writing emphasises the supremacy of Latin before the 1960s.
Was any of this practice of Children's Masses used in other languages? Eg in Quebec, in German/Polish parishes in the USA or various countries in Europe?
I had heard of the liturgical magazine Orate Fratres, produced by the Benedictines of St John's Abbey in Minnesota. This was a major centre of liturgical innovation from the 1920s onwards and the extraordinary chapel at the monastery, built just before Vatican 2, must have been one of the first churches in North America which was purpose built for Mass facing the people.
So it looks slightly odd that Orate Fratres writers were so scathing about this earlier liturgical innovation.
Orate Fratres also provides a fascinating and sinister link to a much darker current in 20th century liturgical history. The cover of its first issue in 1926 was designed by the infamous Eric Gill, who later designed what was one of the first Vatican 2 churches anywhere....in 1939. St Peter's at Gorleston on the east coast of England still stands as a unique monument to the early days of liturgical subversion.
Born in Seattle WA in 1933, I never experience a children's mass. In the forties I attended a Catholic grade school in a Redemptorist parish where a children's choir sang daily mass, admittedly a heavy schedule of requiem masses. That's how I first leaned Latin and to pray Gregorian chant. At the human level the Redemptorists and Holy Names Sisters, who trained us to sing chant, should be credited with the fact that the liturgy has sustained my prayer life throughout a long life. Thank you for your excellent article.
I was born in 1945 and my experience was very, very similar. Holy Mass was exactly the same for both children and adults and I have persevered in the Faith as a result.
Father Michael Kelly's point of view is articulated quite well in this book... Designed to Fail by Steve Kellmeyer.
1. Jesus himself is never seen teaching children, only blessing them.
2. Parents cede their essential and irreplaceable role in faith formation to parish catechists and teachers at Catholic schools.
3. The result is that children never reach spiritual maturity with respect to the faith, and are rendered incapable of transmitting the faith to their own children.
4. The Church ceases catechizing adults and begins to treat them like children presenting a watered down gospel and avoiding moral issues like contraception out of fear that they will drive them away.
It seems the Church has been trying to appeal to young people and "meet them where they are" for decades if not centuries. Vatican II itself and the new liturgy seem to be part of this. Meanwhile, many families, especially large families that tend to take the faith seriously are gravitating towards more traditional liturgies like the TLM and Anglican Ordinariate. They don't want priests and bishops trying to appeal to them and their children through Anime, popular culture, and rock bands. They want their children to experience beauty, devotion and reverence. Yet our shepherds seem bent on trying to suppress this Sensus Fidelium, or at least make it difficult for families to find such havens where the faith is presented and God is worshipped without gimmicks aimed at "meeting people where they are".
Two of the practical problems of meeting people where they are is accurately observing where they are, and then accepting that they aren't where we are. It requires effort, and sacrificing our pre-existing, desire-informed ideas of where they are. To make matters worse, it's a moving target, because God is doing all sorts of things with the person that we aren't aware of. No new problems.
Fascinating! I wonder if the 1920s (?) prayer book Key of Heaven, a popular First Communion gift, wasn't an example of this? It had paraphrases of the whole ordinary, with illustrations to show what the priest was doing at each point. I didn't use mine because I had the wonderful Fr. Stedman's My Sunday Missal, with the actual texts, Latin and English on facing pages. One can buy copies on eBay, but why hasn't someone reprinted this book (with appropriate updates) for use at Latin Masses?
We had the dialog Mass in my little rural parish in Louisiana in the 1940s but also a truly odd innovation: the three elderly ladies in the choir took turns reading the Canon in English aloud while the priest said it silently in Latin! Our pastor was a refugee German Trappist attached to St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington LA Was this something he learned in Germany pre-WWII? No one questioned the practice, of course.
Goodness me, what an article! I had no idea about this history. I was aware of various experiments in vernacular liturgy in parallel with the Latin, but never did I fathom it went this far back and what was driving it.
There's so much I could say, but these seem to me the most salient points: (1) The perceived need for children-specific liturgies arose from the breakdown of family life imposed by the industrial revolution. (2) Clergy, following upon centuries of post-Tridentine thought (e.g CCD), were tempted to insert the institutional Church to make up for this breakdown. (3) Everything follows from there, until today when there is increasing understanding that we've done a disservice to Catholic families for centuries by not empowering parents to form their own children, and giving into the modern separation of children and families for the sake of education.
If there's one thing I'll say in praise of Pope Francis it's that he's been the most vocal in calling out the "technocratic paradigm" in the modern world, and the history of the children's Mass seems to be evidence of its infiltration for nearly two centuries.
Why Francis also encourages the growth of the technocratic paradigm in the Church is a mystery to me. There seems to be a sort of Jekyll and Hyde dynamic that has afflicted the Pope since he took office.
I’m on the fence about children’s liturgy tbh. I was raised evangelical and they had children and youth services that run alongside the adult services, and whilst they teach the basic tenets of faith in a simple way and allowed me to make friends with those of my own age, and also allowed my parents to focus on their service, I’ve noticed that some of my peers had difficulty settling into the adult service once they hit 18 yo and were required to go to the adult one. To them, it was too long and some parts were too complicated, and some eventually left the faith for a number of years before coming back. For me, it was a nice way to know people of my own age group but the simplified version of the service/message was wholly insufficient to satisfy my curiosity.
"Based on decades of direct personal experience, Kelly did not believe that parish schooling, religious formation, or any number of Children’s Masses could ultimately make much of a lasting difference in the lives of children unless faith and formation came primarily from the home. " Father Michael Kelly, over a hundred years ago (?).
I am sympathetic to Father Michael Kelly's viewpoint, especially given his extensive pastoral experience in a great number of parishes. The elephant in the room is that forming children as Catholics is very difficult in a very anti-Christian worldview where secularism is the reigning religion. Maybe we could have syond focusing on it to talk yet some more :-).
I am apparently prescient. This dropped the next day.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/10/26/secular-modernity-and-the-divisions-in-the-church/
Fantastic article! Thank you very much!
What I got out of this was that Father Kelly was an actual prophet 🫠🫠🫠
This was a fascinating piece of history—in all the debates and brouhaha regarding the Tridentine Rite and Vatican II, I'd never once heard of these Children's Masses, from either side. On the one hand, I do very much like the effort put into helping children to actively pray the Mass and follow what's occurring on the altar. At the same time, I'm sympathetic to Fr. Kelly's concern that by restricting said Masses to children, parents were being further relieved of the duty to raise the children in the faith.
I can see a lot of value in a modern family Mass: poll the families of a parish to see if there's interest and find a time that works best for most of them, then make that time the designated family Mass. Offer a simpler liturgy with more straightforward hymns and responses (if sung); keep the homily brief and applicable to family life (ie, how can you live out today's Gospel with your parents/children/siblings); and most importantly, work to make it accessible to families. This is more than just accepting that there will be crying kids at Mass, this is actively helping parents and children. Maybe that means putting out extra chairs in the back of the church. Maybe it means explicitly saying that yes, it's okay to nurse babies during Mass; they don't control when they need to eat. It most definitely means encouraging families to help each other out, so that for example one family can rock a newborn so the exhausted parents have a little time to pray together. It would also be a great way to engage those elderly people who are interested—those who live far from their children or grandchildren might be delighted to spend time with little ones. Likewise, young single people might also be involved in this way. Many young people have trouble integrating into a new parish where they don't already know people, and this would allow them to get to know the families in the parish. Additionally, many Catholic young women get very excited at the chance to hold a baby, and while the young single men might be skittish at first, they could probably be brought around if they were informed that holding a baby and demonstrating fatherly care nigh-instantaneously makes them more attractive to the aforementioned young women.
Maybe this was your intention, but the later descriptions in your comment of how such a “family-oriented” mass could be just sounds like… a regular old mass at a parish with well-adjusted folks of all ages who are looking to worship God together!! Of course we all know that your typical mass does not always look that way, but… couldn’t it? It wouldn’t even require any liturgical changes, but I will note that my young kids LOVE when incense and bells are used! ;)
I agree, that's what it should be like. That said, if it's not (which is often the case), I don't think it would hurt to be more intentional about it.
Every Mass is chaos and children at my parish, and that should be the goal for every parish.
What should mark a "family mass" should be what else you're describing: a homily tailored for family life and Catholics of all ages (not a theology seminar); brevity for the sake of what kids can endure; a time which doesn't interfere with naps (mid-morning); some Latin, but maybe not as much as I'd prefer; simpler hymns; etc.
But I've seen many a youngish kid get into singing a full Missa Cantata, too. We should not have a soft bigotry of low expectations and give the kids "Gift of Finest Wheat" slop.
I was thinking a little more "Faith of Our Fathers" than "Gifts of Finest Wheat", but I see your point. At the same time, I think there should also be room for Masses that aren't all chaos and children. Some people aren't ready to handle that, while others might genuinely need a quiet Mass to avoid sensory overload. The Mass isn't a designer object, of course, but there's also something to be said for St. Paul's becoming all things to all people. I think a healthy parish should support both.
There was an article a while back about sensory friendly Masses and I was really intrigued by the idea of the "reverse cry room" for this reason - a room that would be silent for the people who need it to be (though the trouble then can become that some people who require a high level of quiet have a difficult time remaining quiet themselves.) When travelling I have noticed that sometimes cry rooms already unofficially seem to serve this purpose, which is rather awkward when I enter one with a screaming toddler or two only to be glared at by a solitary adult.
I do think the earliest morning Masses and evening Masses are the ones most likely to have the fewest numbers of children, though, and I think that kind of natural development is fine, as long as the people present understand that sometimes families gotta do what they gotta do.
I find myself wondering about how my children would behave at a Mass like this. I am astonished sometimes when I attend their school Masses and somehow they know all the things they "forget" on Sundays with their parents. These things have mostly seemed to work themselves out by age 10, and sometimes by necessity our older children go without us, but the idea of doing it regularly strikes me as very odd.
Fascinating history, though.
My grandmother told me about these masses in the early 20th century in Providence. She went to the big Irish Catholic parish in town, and they had an 8AM children's mass on Sunday (why are they always 8AM?).
She went to public school, and they let them out during the week for "Instructions." The children's mass was (I took it) the same as any other Irish low mass, but the homily was tailored for the kids.
The kids all walked down the hill to mass, and never missed mass on Sunday (or Confession on Saturday morning before taking the streetcar to the movies for the rest of the afternoon). But God help them if they didn't go to "their mass." One of the priests would find them sneaking out of a later mass, twist them by the ear, and tell them they had better go to "their mass" next week, or it would be trouble for them.
Mind you, this was a kid on his or her own being responsible and getting to mass, no parental oversight needed. And it was still nitpicked. A different standard for Catholics back then.
BTW, the last mass was at 11AM. Because there had to be one Missa Cantata or Solemn High mass per Sunday (I later learned by order of one of the Baltimore Councils), this is where they put it since it didn't matter if it ended after Noon. My grandmother said it was common knowledge that this was the mass all the drunks went to. They also went to mass every week, but they needed to sleep off their alcohol. The sober considered the extra length and noise of this mass compared to the string of hurried low masses preceding it to be just punishment for the drunks.
I’d be worried about too much opportunity for child abuse, especially if a priest was so insistent that the children only attend the Mass without any parents
This is a fascinating article. To be clear, I have no issues with the NO Mass whatsoever, but this article so concretely shows the movements of the Spirit in the 20th century to set the Church up for another millennium and encourage such a dramatic change in liturgy. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a whole lot of struggle in that time, as there always is, but the Lord always guides and provides. It sounds like Ratzinger was right that since the Great War there was a lack of catechesis and the Spirit helped us through what could have been a very bad period of time.
What a wonderful informative article. I knew hardly any of this. Especially when so much writing emphasises the supremacy of Latin before the 1960s.
Was any of this practice of Children's Masses used in other languages? Eg in Quebec, in German/Polish parishes in the USA or various countries in Europe?
I had heard of the liturgical magazine Orate Fratres, produced by the Benedictines of St John's Abbey in Minnesota. This was a major centre of liturgical innovation from the 1920s onwards and the extraordinary chapel at the monastery, built just before Vatican 2, must have been one of the first churches in North America which was purpose built for Mass facing the people.
https://saintjohnsabbey.org/church
So it looks slightly odd that Orate Fratres writers were so scathing about this earlier liturgical innovation.
Orate Fratres also provides a fascinating and sinister link to a much darker current in 20th century liturgical history. The cover of its first issue in 1926 was designed by the infamous Eric Gill, who later designed what was one of the first Vatican 2 churches anywhere....in 1939. St Peter's at Gorleston on the east coast of England still stands as a unique monument to the early days of liturgical subversion.
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/gorleston/gorlestonpeter.htm
https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/planning/contested-heritage/contested-heritage-in-listing/our-statement-on-eric-gill/
A gold mine of information. One of the best long reads related to liturgy in a while. Thank you
Thank you your excellent article.
Born in Seattle WA in 1933, I never experience a children's mass. In the forties I attended a Catholic grade school in a Redemptorist parish where a children's choir sang daily mass, admittedly a heavy schedule of requiem masses. That's how I first leaned Latin and to pray Gregorian chant. At the human level the Redemptorists and Holy Names Sisters, who trained us to sing chant, should be credited with the fact that the liturgy has sustained my prayer life throughout a long life. Thank you for your excellent article.
I was born in 1945 and my experience was very, very similar. Holy Mass was exactly the same for both children and adults and I have persevered in the Faith as a result.
Father Michael Kelly's point of view is articulated quite well in this book... Designed to Fail by Steve Kellmeyer.
1. Jesus himself is never seen teaching children, only blessing them.
2. Parents cede their essential and irreplaceable role in faith formation to parish catechists and teachers at Catholic schools.
3. The result is that children never reach spiritual maturity with respect to the faith, and are rendered incapable of transmitting the faith to their own children.
4. The Church ceases catechizing adults and begins to treat them like children presenting a watered down gospel and avoiding moral issues like contraception out of fear that they will drive them away.
https://www.amazon.com/Designed-Fail-Catholic-Education-America/dp/0976736802
It seems the Church has been trying to appeal to young people and "meet them where they are" for decades if not centuries. Vatican II itself and the new liturgy seem to be part of this. Meanwhile, many families, especially large families that tend to take the faith seriously are gravitating towards more traditional liturgies like the TLM and Anglican Ordinariate. They don't want priests and bishops trying to appeal to them and their children through Anime, popular culture, and rock bands. They want their children to experience beauty, devotion and reverence. Yet our shepherds seem bent on trying to suppress this Sensus Fidelium, or at least make it difficult for families to find such havens where the faith is presented and God is worshipped without gimmicks aimed at "meeting people where they are".
Two of the practical problems of meeting people where they are is accurately observing where they are, and then accepting that they aren't where we are. It requires effort, and sacrificing our pre-existing, desire-informed ideas of where they are. To make matters worse, it's a moving target, because God is doing all sorts of things with the person that we aren't aware of. No new problems.
Fascinating! I wonder if the 1920s (?) prayer book Key of Heaven, a popular First Communion gift, wasn't an example of this? It had paraphrases of the whole ordinary, with illustrations to show what the priest was doing at each point. I didn't use mine because I had the wonderful Fr. Stedman's My Sunday Missal, with the actual texts, Latin and English on facing pages. One can buy copies on eBay, but why hasn't someone reprinted this book (with appropriate updates) for use at Latin Masses?
We had the dialog Mass in my little rural parish in Louisiana in the 1940s but also a truly odd innovation: the three elderly ladies in the choir took turns reading the Canon in English aloud while the priest said it silently in Latin! Our pastor was a refugee German Trappist attached to St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington LA Was this something he learned in Germany pre-WWII? No one questioned the practice, of course.
Fantastic article! Thank you.
Goodness me, what an article! I had no idea about this history. I was aware of various experiments in vernacular liturgy in parallel with the Latin, but never did I fathom it went this far back and what was driving it.
There's so much I could say, but these seem to me the most salient points: (1) The perceived need for children-specific liturgies arose from the breakdown of family life imposed by the industrial revolution. (2) Clergy, following upon centuries of post-Tridentine thought (e.g CCD), were tempted to insert the institutional Church to make up for this breakdown. (3) Everything follows from there, until today when there is increasing understanding that we've done a disservice to Catholic families for centuries by not empowering parents to form their own children, and giving into the modern separation of children and families for the sake of education.
If there's one thing I'll say in praise of Pope Francis it's that he's been the most vocal in calling out the "technocratic paradigm" in the modern world, and the history of the children's Mass seems to be evidence of its infiltration for nearly two centuries.
Why Francis also encourages the growth of the technocratic paradigm in the Church is a mystery to me. There seems to be a sort of Jekyll and Hyde dynamic that has afflicted the Pope since he took office.
I’m on the fence about children’s liturgy tbh. I was raised evangelical and they had children and youth services that run alongside the adult services, and whilst they teach the basic tenets of faith in a simple way and allowed me to make friends with those of my own age, and also allowed my parents to focus on their service, I’ve noticed that some of my peers had difficulty settling into the adult service once they hit 18 yo and were required to go to the adult one. To them, it was too long and some parts were too complicated, and some eventually left the faith for a number of years before coming back. For me, it was a nice way to know people of my own age group but the simplified version of the service/message was wholly insufficient to satisfy my curiosity.
Any chance we could get this recorded on Pillar TL;DR? Thank you!