Why are young Catholics flocking to ancient rituals?

ByMatthew Teague

Photographs ByRyan Brady

Published October 26, 2023

• 11 min read

In the spring of 2021 at Syracuse University, senior Ryan Brady finished his final project as an advertising major: a marketing campaign for shampoo. The bottle had a pleasing shape. The campaign had Gen Z appeal. A Fortune 100 client selected his ad strategy. But it was “complete nonsense,” he says. Not just the shampoo, but everything it represented: superficial, manipulative work. A life of consumption and extraction. An empty life. A modern life.

As a boy in Connecticut, Brady had roamed vast Wickham Park across from his family home. He couldn’t articulate it as a child, but in the woods he had felt connected with something ancient and numinous, something larger than himself. As years passed, he lost that connection.

“You pick up your phone and it’s this black touchscreen and you’re staring into the void, and it’s almost not real,” he says. “I wanted things to do that weren’t so intellectual and abstracted.”

Brady had occasionally attended a Catholic church, and he had recently heard about a new movement among some Catholics who were rebelling against modernity by worshipping in old ways, ways that centuries ago defined the faith but had almost faded from existence. So he took up his camera and headed toward a nearby church that offered the ancient Latin Mass, or what traditionalists call the Extraordinary Form.

What he discovered as he made the photographs in this gallery often encouraged him, and sometimes unnerved him. But above all, he says, his experience was “otherworldly.”

In a counter-reformation of sorts, devout Americans are flocking to Old World traditions and beliefs. The shift seems to have surprised even the larger Catholic church itself. Last spring, Pope Francis privately told a group of Jesuits he worries the traditionalists’ “reaction against the modern” is indietrismo: backwardness.

Mainstream Catholics considered questions of backwardness and progress resolved after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Following its reforms, priests turned to face congregations, said the Mass in common languages, and some churches offered contemporary music. The new, more accessible style became so dominant that traditionalists now see their practices as emergent and subversive.

And they’re spreading: Each week traditionalists gather at more than 1,200 sites, mostly in the United States. They embrace a version of religious life that had drifted out of fashion—the “smells and bells” of previous generations—and reach for symbols and language that bewilder the outside world, and which the congregants themselves may not fully understand.

“It’s more of a mystery, and more that is veiled,” says Stephanie Wigton, a 32-year-old traditionalist who attends Transfiguration of Our Lord Parish in Syracuse. She means it in a literal sense; she and other women wear veils during services.

“We love Pope Francis. We continually pray for him,” she says. But, “We are benefiting from what we’ve learned from the past.”

Grounded in the transcendent

While many traditionalists are drawing closer to God by revisiting the past, others are finding faith by reconnecting with creation.

Michael Guidice, a Catholic farmer in upstate New York, works a parcel of land between the Adirondack and Catskill mountains. “It was mysterious for me as it was happening,” he says, “but being on the landscape evoked in me a religious experience.” He started teaching other Catholic families homesteading skills and discovered widespread interest. “It’s growing,” he says.

The impulses beneath that growth—a reaction against modernity, a yearning for something immutable—transcend Catholicism. “In the Kingdom of Man,” writes Paul Kingsnorth, an Orthodox poet living in Ireland, “the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through?”

The real and the ethereal

Ryan Brady’s own “way through” started with a small step. During college he took a summer job as a ranger back at Wickham Park, where he spent his days walking among the same trees that had enchanted him as a child. He found himself yearning for something no shampoo could provide: transcendence.

In early 2022, after his disillusionment with advertising, Brady visited Transfiguration Parish. Right away he noticed something strange, a tension between old and new. There were many young adults who embraced veiling and old rites but who had started attending traditionalist services as part of a YouTube challenge. Some at Transfiguration joked that they had been “converted by meme.”

Traditional Catholicism is still a small segment of the world’s largest religion, and its adherents are geographically scattered, so it seemed natural to Brady that they’re finding each other through technology. “But some of the traditionalism gets a little poisoned by ideological bents,” he says. Social media figures—“tradcath” influencers—use the church as a baroque backdrop for selfies. Right-wing politicians exploit conservative customs. “It doesn’t seem to fit with a truly religious, traditional worldview at all,” Brady says. “It seems shockingly unreal.”

But when he first entered the sanctuary at Transfiguration, he felt awestruck. Only candles lit the room, and technology faded from view. The reverence for the Eucharist, the kneeling postures, the Latin intonations all felt solemn and enchanted in a way that brought him back to his childhood in the forest.

“It felt mystical,” he says. “It felt real.”

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