Amid liturgical debate, the answer lies in how we celebrate
The Mass doesn’t draw us in — it lifts us up
Monday, May 4, 2026
*Fr. Richard Vigoa
Somewhere in a parish you have never heard of, a priest lifts a small white Host above an altar. A bell rings. A child looks up. A woman who has not been to Mass in twenty years finds herself, without knowing exactly why, on her knees. She came because her sister begged her. She stayed because something in that elevated Host began to look back at her.
That happens. That happens every day, on six continents, in the rite the Church calls the Missale Romanum, the Roman Missal as reformed after the Second Vatican Council. What most of us simply call the Novus Ordo. The Mass of Saint Paul VI.
I mention this because, in recent weeks, a different claim has been circulating. In a recent interview, the Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X went so far as to say that the Novus Ordo has an “intrinsic incapacity to form and edify souls,” a line that has been retweeted, shared, and amplified. He roots that claim in the argument that the liturgy itself should be sufficient to form souls, as it did for centuries, and that the need today for extensive prior formation, along with the postconciliar decline in practice, reveals a failure in the reformed rite itself.
That is a serious claim. And it raises a serious question: Is the Mass we attend every Sunday actually doing what the Mass is supposed to do?
A serious claim—and a necessary question
I want to answer that question carefully, because it deserves more than a slogan, and because, as priests, we’ve spent years watching what the Mass actually does in people’s lives.
In my work in liturgy and evangelization, I’m asked a version of the same question again and again: why are so many young Catholics drawn to more traditional expressions, and why do some of our parishes feel, at times, tired? It’s the right question. I just think we’ve been answering it poorly. So, permit me to begin with something that sounds, at first, like a concession.
The critics are not wrong about everything. Beauty matters. Silence matters. Reverence matters. Transcendence evangelizes. When the Mass is rushed, when it is performed, when it is built around the personality of the man at the altar, when the music limps and the homily wanders, and the faithful sense that what they are witnessing is more an event than an encounter, something has been lost. And what has been lost is not the rite. It is what the rite is for.
Where the critics are right
Pope Francis named this in 2022, in his apostolic letter Desiderio Desideravi, written precisely to address the polemics around the liturgy. He warned of presiding styles wounded by what he called “a heightened personalism of the celebrating style.” Priests who rush the Mass, or perform it, or smooth it down to a personal aesthetic, or ice it over with detachment. He gave a hard list of those styles, side by side, and the list reads like an examination of conscience for every priest in the Roman Rite. That diagnosis was not written by a traditionalist blogger. It was written by the Bishop of Rome.
Pope Leo XIV has said it again, in his own voice. Last November, on the Feast of the Dedication of Saint John Lateran, he called the Church to a renewed reverence in the liturgy, to a fidelity to the sober solemnity of the Roman tradition. He closed the homily with a line from Saint Augustine: “Beauty is nothing but love, and love is life.”
Two consecutive popes are telling us that the modern Roman Rite, when celebrated thinly, will not feed the souls God has placed before us. The Magisterium is not defensive on this point. It is calling us higher.
The Mass is not about us—it is Calvary
But here is where the critique stops, and where the Catholic tradition begins.
The Mass does not exist to draw us in. The Mass exists to draw us up. We have spent two generations evaluating the liturgy by the wrong question. We have asked whether it engages, whether it inspires, whether it appeals. Those are not bad questions. They are simply not the first ones. The first question of the Mass is not what the Mass does for us. The first question of the Mass is what the Mass does. Full stop. And what it does is Calvary.
Venerable Fulton Sheen, whose beatification will take place this September in Saint Louis, gave us perhaps the cleanest description ever written in English. The Sacrifice of Christ is not a memory we revisit. It is a present reality we step into. Sheen’s image is unforgettable. He pictures the priest at the altar as “the high priest Christ leaving the sacristy of heaven for the altar of Calvary.” The Host is the Body. The wine is the Blood. The chasuble is the cross. And the faithful in the pews are not the audience. They are the offering.
This is not a theological abstraction. This is the doctrine the Council of Trent defined, that the Second Vatican Council reaffirmed, and that Sacrosanctum Concilium placed at the heart of the Church’s life. The Mass is the same sacrifice as Calvary, offered now in an unbloody manner, with Christ Himself as the Priest and the Victim. The bread is no longer bread. The wine is no longer wine. He is there: Body, blood, soul, and divinity.
That is what the Novus Ordo is. That is what every validly celebrated Catholic Mass on the face of the earth is: the Lamb of God, slain and risen, present. To say that this rite has an inherent inability to edify souls is to say something the Catholic tradition cannot say. Because it is to say that Christ Himself, made truly present in the Eucharistic species, lacks the power to edify. And that, brothers and sisters, we will never grant. Not in any rite. Not in any century. Not in any language
.So if the question is whether the Mass converts hearts, I will give you the honest answer of a priest who has spent his ministry watching it happen in real time: Yes!
I have seen people walk into Mass carrying years of distance from the Church, and I have watched something break open in them, not because of a perfect homily or flawless music, but because they encountered something real at the altar. I have watched college students raised on suspicion of the Church kneel at a Eucharistic procession and weep without knowing why. I have watched men who had ruined their lives stand in line with great emotion to receive Communion at a retreat Mass. None of that happened at a perfectly executed Solemn High Mass. It happened in the Novus Ordo, celebrated with reverence, with silence, with care.
The problem is not the rite—it’s how we celebrate
Beauty does that. Reverence does that. The Lord does that. So, what is the call?
The call is not to abandon the rite the Church has given us. The call is not to retreat into a parallel society. The call is to celebrate the Mass we have in such a way that Christ becomes visible. He has bound Himself to the priest’s hands, to the cantor’s voice, to the altar server’s pace, to the silence we keep or fail to keep. He has made the rite His instrument. We have made the rite, too often, our platform.
To my brother priests: let’s slow down. The way we celebrate the Mass matters more than we sometimes realize. The Eucharistic Prayer is not something to move through; it is something to enter into. Pray it. Let it breathe. The faithful know, often without being able to explain it, when we are praying and when we are simply reciting.
To pastors and parish councils: do what you can, but do it well. Every parish, no matter its resources, can celebrate the liturgy with care. Form the people you already have. Invite those who love the Church to take ownership in music, in proclamation, in the preparation of the sacred vessels and vestments. When people see that the Mass matters, they step forward. The liturgy doesn’t require luxury, but it does require intention.
To the faithful: do not let a tweet, or a thread, or a viral interview decide for you what the Mass is. Test the claim against what your eyes have seen. Test it against the saint kneeling beside you. Test it against Eucharistic miracles. Test it against the saints, like John Vianney, who wept at the words of consecration, not because of a particular form, but because he knew what was happening on the altar: that Jesus Christ becomes truly present under the appearances of bread and wine. And that is the question we have to face: do we believe that at every Mass, Christ Himself acts through the priest to make that sacrifice present?
The Mass is not broken. But something is. What is broken is sometimes our preparation, sometimes our reverence, sometimes our music, sometimes our preaching, sometimes our silence. We can fix that, by God’s grace, this Sunday. The Lord, who has not left the altar, is only waiting for us to come back to it with the seriousness the gift deserves.
Because the Mass does not need to draw anyone in. He is already there. He is only asking us to be drawn up.
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