Why Don Roman Catholics Go To Mass?
Is nobody going to Roman Catholic Mass anymore? And if not, why not? The conventional wisdom is that attendance at Roman Catholic Mass is in freefall in the US. Different parties have different explanations. There’s a very funny book, Why Catholics Can’t Sing by Thomas Day, laying out the theory that Roman Catholic culture has surrendered to a sort of 70s bad taste, in its church architecture, its liturgical music, and the liturgy itself. Day is a wry critic, but I’ve lived through the same eras that he has, and methinks he exaggerates a little. In truth, most Masses prior to Vatican II had no music at all, except for sung High Mass, which almost everyone avoided if they could. (To me, Latin sounds better spoken than sung.) The Mass music vacuum sucked up what it could when music became a commonplace at every Mass in the 1970s, and what was available was, well, so-so. Besides, the bad taste in Catholicism has pretty faithfully tracked bad taste in the larger American culture. It’s a gr
