I was speaking this morning about how many young converts to Catholicism are gravitating to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. And it is quite true in this neck of the woods. I just recently received into the Church a young man of 20 years old who attended the EF Mass primarily and that is was won him over.
And it dawned on me how many converts Catholicism was making in the period prior to the Second Vatican Council and the great drop off afterwards which eventually recovered until recently.
But I think back to our numerous African American parishes in our diocese each of them having a parish school and the number of black converts and primarily due to exposure to the Latin Mass and its sobriety compared to the more exuberant and emotion based forms of black Protestant worship.
My parish in Augusta which combined with an all black parish there had a number of these converts, older blacks who missed the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass. They would tell me they converted because they had grown tired of all the emotionalism of black Protestant churches.
Today, most of these black parishes and their schools are closed or merged with larger parishes and not one of the once all black schools exist for the purpose of outreach to the black community exclusively. Their mission has changed.
2 comments:
Father McDonald,
I agree with you. I'm a convert myself (from the '80's), and I think the Extraordinary Form of Mass is far more Biblical in its presentation. From beginning to end, one "feels" the perfection of both the ancient synagogue ritual (in the first half of the Mass), and of the Temple ritual (in the second half). A Protestant deeply rooted in the Bible would naturally gravitate towards the EF Mass.
Black Catholics in the USA were a great gift to the Church, but the Church leaders in the '60's and '70's treated them perhaps too much like dependent children, instead of like responsible adults.
In Christ,
Dialogue
My wife is a convert from the black Protestant tradition and she says this all the time.
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