REGINA: Really?
JOSEPH SHAW: For the youngest children, being calm and quiet is easier because they are in a calm and quiet environment, and parents often say that their young children behave better at the Latin Mass.
In one of his columns in the UK’s Catholic Herald, Fr Tim Finigan addressed parents’ question about how to encourage their young children to be quiet in Mass, with the simple advice: ‘Take them to a quieter Mass.’
REGINA: Some may call that counter-intuitive for small children.
JOSEPH SHAW: There is an attitude that, because one can never guarantee one’s children won’t make any noise, they will disturb people more at a quiet Mass, so parents with small children belong at a noisy Mass where they won’t make things much worse than they already are.
This is a counsel of despair.
Teachers get children, eventually, to be quiet in class; parents teach their children to behave at their grandparents’; you have to stop your children climbing the rigging when on a ferry. Children learn these things because they must.
Mass is no different.
REGINA |13