I only wish the Church could give me a little help here. I m beginning to wonder if they re not just making it all up. Because by the time my Catholic high school students in my little part of the world reach me as seniors, if I take a poll on any given Monday, out of a class of twenty, perhaps five have attended Mass the previous weekend. Adolescents are marginalized in parishes. Catholic churches don t put enough resources into youth ministry.
Homilies are over their heads.
They re rebelling. They re busy. There is something to all of that. The Latin Rite Roman Catholic liturgy as it is offered in most American parishes at the end of the twentieth century is so stunningly, astonishingly trivialized that it is indeed, taken on the surface, a stultifying, uninspiring, and even faith-sapping experience. This was Easter Sunday Mass at my parish this year.