Are you there God? It’s us, Gen-Z.

Some anecdotal observations on the growth in church attendance among younger people.

Image by falco from Pixabay.

I went to Holy Mass this morning and I thought I’d tell you about it.

The first thing to note is that it was no ordinary Mass. Quite literally: it was a celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, sometimes referred to as the Tridentine Mass. Based on the 1962 Roman Missal, the last before Vatican II, it is conducted in Latin with a pronounced air of piety. No guitars, no tambourines, no ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’, just priest, choir, gospel and host.

This is no diss on the Novus Ordo itself but on the manner in which it came to be celebrated in some parishes by well-meaning priests who pursued relevance at the expense of reverence. There was a spell during my Nineties childhood when the Missal of Pope Paul VI seemed to be supplemented by the Liturgy of Sister Act, and while this was supposed to make Mass more accessible to youngsters it had the opposite effect on me. I was never happy when things got clappy.

I have been trying to make my way back to the Church after a long absence and somewhere on this halting, doubt-ridden, half-embarrassed journey I stumbled across a nearby church that offers the Latin Mass on the first Saturday morning of every month. Curiosity took me along — I knew of the Extraordinary Form only from the childhood memories of my parents — but I was captivated instantly by the majesty of the Mass. It takes some getting used to, not just the rite itself but the humility it demands from a congregation which has grown used to its role as effective co-celebrants. Listening in silence is the ultimate act of obedience.

(Not entirely in silence. There is still some participation from the pews, though all you really need to know is ‘Et cum spiritu tuo’ and ‘Deo gratias’ and, ideally, which one to say at which point. This is a work in progress for me.)

Mass is not for people-watching — mea culpa — but I couldn’t help noticing something this morning. When I attend Novus Ordo Mass, in a different but nearby parish, I am typically one of only a handful of worshippers under 40, or, for that matter, 50. By my very rough estimate, somewhere between one third and 40% of the congregants at this service were under 40. And while there were families there with young children — shout out to the thirty-something mum and dad beside me who patiently whisper-answered every liturgical query from a trio of very inquisitive boys — most of this younger cohort was made up of solo men and women.

And I know what you’re thinking: very online tradcaths who like to cosplay like they’re at the Council of Trent. But no, I don’t think so. In my experience, those sorts of Catholics are ordinarily to be found in large cities or on university campuses, though their natural habitats are TikTok and Instagram. This, however, is a parish in a poor area of a poor town in a poor local authority in the west of Scotland. (The church and its surrounding streets belong to the most deprived quintile on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.) Getting up on Saturday morning for an hour of kneeling and barely audible Latin among a group of strangers is not the MO of your average Catholic chad or tradwife.

There has been some commentary of late about Gen-Z/zillennials and their growing interest in Christianity. A report from the Bible Society in particular caught the interest of the national media. It found that church attendance among 18 to 24 year olds in England and Wales had quadrupled since 2018. Among young men, the increase has been fivefold. Catholics account for 41 per cent of churchgoers aged 18 to 34, compared to 20 per cent for Anglicans and 18 per cent for Pentecostals.

Immigration would seem to be the obvious explanation, with Poles and Ukrainians swelling the pews of the Catholic Church and Africans boosting attendance at Pentecostal and evangelical services. There is something in this: while one fifth of British churchgoers is from an ethnic minority — a category not coterminous with migrant but with some impressionistic value — this surges to one in three among the under-55s.

Yet there is more at work than just changing demographics. Not only is attendance rising among young men, it is rising particularly among young white men, almost one in five of whom now goes to church at least once a month. This development has been met with an abundance of charity and open-mindedness. Like the Guardian contributor who warns us to ‘look out for signs of possible online radicalisation and tendencies towards hateful speech in the guise of Jesus’s influence’, or the academic who muses that: ‘Many Gen-Z men seem to be drawn to churches that nurture their sense of grievance, their disenchantment with society, and their victimhood.’ Judas betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin; these people would have reported him to Prevent.

What exactly is drawing young people to church, in particular the Catholic Church, and especially young men, are questions for another time, and I hope to return to them soon. For now, though, I will leave you with a remark made by the priest during his homily today. When He is dying on the cross, Jesus summons His disciple John, tells His mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and tells John: ‘Here is your mother.’ The verse goes on to tell us that John ‘took her unto his own home’ (John 19:27). As Father observed, the original Greek text reads ‘eis ta idia’ — ‘into his own’. Christ is not merely making arrangements for the care of His mother after His death. He is instructing His disciple to accept Mary as a part of him, an aspect of his soul, integral to his mission of spreading the Word of Jesus. With these words, Christ establishes something it would take the papacy two millennia to formalise into doctrine: that Mary is the Mother of the Church.

Younger Catholics who seek out the teachings of the gospel do so, at least in part, because they too want to be part of the Body and the Church. A Catholicism that regards them with suspicion or derision or hostility has no future. The priest fortunate enough to look out upon pews of Gen-Z and millennial worshippers should, like the impressive cleric whose Latin Masses keep drawing me back, welcome new and returning Catholics eis ta idia.