Make Mass Beautiful Again

As someone who was raised in a Catholic family, Mass was a common occurrence for me. Every week, we would wake up early for Sunday Mass, and no matter what, the whole family would pile into the car and drive down to our local parish to sit, stand, and kneel. I remember that whenever we got up to get in line to receive Communion, I got excited; not because I was excited to receive our Lord in the Eucharist, but merely because it meant that Mass was almost over, we could head home, and I could play video games. I attended hundreds of Masses without ever thinking about anything besides just getting out of there.

In early 2020 and continuing through 2021, when the government told us that going to church and attending Mass wasn’t ‘essential,’ I didn’t bat an eye. This is a problem in part with catechesis and religious education. Even people who are born to and raised by Catholic parents aren’t taught what it means to be Catholic or even the most basic tenets of the faith. Even after the government allowed us to go back to church and attend Mass again, many families, including my own, didn’t go anymore. My parents would go when they could, but my siblings and I almost always found a way to weasel our way out of accompanying them. For us and many others, Mass was just one wasted hour of our lives that we could use to do something we actually liked.

When I came to Boston College for the fall semester of my Freshman year in 2022, I rarely attended Sunday Mass. Thanks be to God for sending my good friend Christopher Tomeo to whip me into shape and drag me to Mass when he knew I hadn’t been earlier in the day. Thanks to him, I kept my faith in college.

I was going to Mass, but it was still a chore; something that I couldn’t wait to be over with so that I could do the ‘fun’ things in my life. Later in my freshman year, another friend of mine, Kai Breskin, took me to my first Solemn Latin Mass. It was incredible to see how beautiful the Mass was. There was so much going on: the most beautiful sacred vestments, the legions of altar servers, the high altar, the movement of the three sacred ministers as they incense the altar, the beautiful paintings on the walls, luminous stained glass windows, the beautiful chants accompanying everything, and the powerful organ in the background. Before I witnessed this, I had grown in appreciation for the Mass and for the Eucharist, but now I was able to finally see things for what they were, in what I felt was their proper context.

I remember leaving the church, thinking about how beautiful everything was, and realizing, “Wow, Our Lord really is present on the altar. This is why we incense it. This is why we kneel, this is why we have beautiful paintings on the high altar, this is why the sacred vessels are made of gold, and this is why the priest who celebrates the Mass wears all of the fancy luxurious vestments he does.”

For me, Mass being beautiful was one of the wake-up calls to the reality of the Catholic faith, the truth of Jesus Christ’s Incarnation, life, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. All Masses should be this beautiful because Our Lord deserves the best; we shouldn’t withhold any worldly good from the worship of God.