In Brazil, Catholic youth ask for a reverent liturgy and the firmness of doctrine

A large survey of young Catholics in Brazil reveals a generation asking for more doctrine, a more reverent liturgy, and a faith kept clear of politics. A lack of respect for the liturgy and an excess of sociopolitical preoccupations are named as the chief obstacles to their participation in the life of faith. Far from wanting a Church tuned to the noise of the age, these young people seek in her what is firm enough to resist it.

The Church has always known what these young people are rediscovering: the liturgy is not an entertainment to be modernized, but the worship due to God, which calls for trembling and for beauty. « Keep ye my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary », commands the Lord; and the faithful soul answers Him: « I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwelleth. » Doctrine, likewise, is not a weight from which the faithful must be relieved, but the solid bread that nourishes and holds a man upright.

Measured against this rule, the news is a consolation. This hunger for reverence and truth is no nostalgia: it is the voice of grace, asking for what the Church has possessed from the beginning. Where the sacred has been erased and the Cross replaced by politics, the young have turned away; where God is worshipped worthily and the faith taught without blushing, they return. One does not keep a generation by flattering it, but by giving it God — in the splendour of His worship and the firmness of His doctrine. What it asks, Tradition had been keeping for it.

Sources. Psalm XXV, 8, according to the Vulgate; Leviticus XIX, 30; Dom Guéranger, on the primacy and holiness of the sacred Liturgy.