Some real Diversity Training…
I am of mostly Eastern European descent. Part Polish, German, Ashkenazi with some sprinkles of various other European particles. My wife? Half-Irish and Half multi-ethnic Polynesian and Indonesian. To look at us, we appear white with three children. Directly in front of us at Mass last Sunday was a black family with seven children. The father knelt like a man who feared God more than the mortgage. The mother herded her brood with the serene authority of someone who has done this before, many times. The kids—ranging from teenagers to toddlers—were still, reverent, and participating in the same ancient rite as everyone else. The rest of the pews? A glorious Catholic salad: white, Black, Asian, Hispanic, immigrant, convert, cradle, large families, struggling families, and that one guy who looked like he walked out of a Byzantine icon. All of us facing the same direction, breathing the same incense, responding in the same tongue that has echoed through centuries of cathedrals and catacombs. And after Mass? EVERYONE gathered for donuts in the Parish Hall while the Priest greeted the families…
Most importantly?
No one handing out participation trophies for cultural representation.
This, dear reader, is the Usus Antiquior—the “dreaded” Latin Mass in the news lately. It is the most unintentionally diverse gathering you’ll ever see outside of an actual UN meeting where people still remember how to shut up and pray.
You would think the people whose job it is to market Catholicism as the great big multicultural tent would notice this. You know—the ones in all those “synodal listening sessions.” Instead, they are busy commissioning studies, printing bilingual bulletins, and celebrating their own cleverness at dividing the faithful into ever-smaller identity groups so they can “accompany” them with the sensitivity of a corporate DEI consultant who has attended one too many synodal “listening” sessions and not reading enough Aquinas.
Now, let me introduce you to the alternative: the local Novus Ordo parish I attempted to attend and build this same sense of community. I rapidly found out it wasn’t a parish; it was a Balkan peace conference with occassional incense. There was the Vietnamese community over here. The Spanish-speaking community over there. And, finally, maintaining the 1976 Beige Catholic aesthetic with the Felt Banners and Marty Haugen hymns and leading the parade was the white ex-hippie, “Spirit of Vatican II” community led, of course, by the dreaded “Old Guard.” The bulletin appeared in Spanish and English, with the occasional Google Translate casualty that satisfied exactly zero humans. Scheduling Masses and cultural celebrations required more diplomacy than the Treaty of Versailles.
In charge of this cultural meltdown was a young pastor who looked like a man being visciously pecked to death by culturally sensitive ducks. This good and decent man possessed a thousand-yard stare of someone who had mediated one too many sacristy knife fights over whose flag gets displayed when and could never satisfy ANY faction. Someone always felt their culture was being “erased.” Another complained that the homily wasn’t “relevant” enough to their lived experience. Adding reverence upset the “old guard” and touched off 1000 emails of consternation. I could see his spirit slowly being broken by the constant fights and wounds inflicted from the inability to satisfy the ego-maniacal power struggles. The fighting wasn’t theological. It was tribal. And the more the parish leadership leaned into “intercultural ministry,” the more the tribes sharpened their spears.
Turns out my attempt to bring unity through reverence for liturgy by suggesting Latin and Chant was almost as welcome as a vegetarian at a Knights of Columbus barbeque. It was no accident. It was the predictable fruit of a theology that mistakes Babel for Pentecost.
I decided to investigate how we got here and why this seeming race toward division was accelerating. I had the pleasure of encountering the Diocese of St. Petersburg’s Office of Intercultural Ministries page. And HERE was my answer. It is a masterpiece of modern ecclesiastical satire. “Rooted in the universality of the Catholic Church,” it solemnly intones, the office “accompanies the diverse cultural communities… as they encounter Christ and Courageously Live the Gospel within their unique traditions.” Bolded courage, naturally. Nothing says “bold witness” like demanding your own language Mass, your own saints’ feast emphasis, your own cultural calendar, and your own ministry office so you never have to risk encountering the Church as she actually existed across time.
My Diocese celebrates Mass in fourteen languages. FOURTEEN. Nothing proclaims “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” like requiring a United Nations translator corps to get through Sunday obligations. Topping off this cornucopia of absurdity was the fact that the stunningly diverse yet culturally unified Latin Mass was relegated to a single shrine incapable by Vatican decree from advertising. Proudly declared were the specific ministries for African Catholics, Black Catholics (apparently separate categories), Brazilians, Filipinos, Hispanics, Indians, Indonesians, Italians, Koreans, Native Americans, Poles, Vietnamese—you get the idea. The genius of Catholicism, in this Diocesan telling, is that we can all stay in our respective cultural lanes while occasionally waving at each other across the parking lot during the annual “unity” festival that requires three priests, four choirs, and a police detail to manage all the egos.
The page speaks glowingly of “fostering unity in diversity” and “multilingual liturgies” and “honoring each culture’s traditions and gifts.” What it does not mention is the quiet, boring, pre-Vatican II solution that actually worked: one rite, one language for the liturgy (the vernacular for preaching and catechesis, obviously), one calendar, one standard of reverence, and the expectation that your ethnicity and cultural traditions are secondary to your baptism. The result? Actual unity. The kind where a white family with three kids and a black family with seven kneels at the same rail, receives the same Eucharist, and leaves knowing they belong to the same Church—not parallel ethnic franchises tolerating each other on paper.
These progressive Bishops have forgotten the most basic sociological truth: the more you celebrate surface diversity as the highest good, the more you destroy the deep unity that makes real diversity possible without fracture. When the liturgy itself becomes a vehicle for ethnic self-expression, faith becomes ethnic self-expression with a crucifix on top. When every group is encouraged to “bring their gifts” in the form of competing demands on the parish schedule and aesthetics, the only gift that gets sacrificed is the common good.
At the Latin Mass, there is no “Black Catholic Ministry” because the entire Church is the Catholic ministry and the ancient rite does not require racial caucusing to be valid. There is no frantic search for “relevance” in Vietnamese drumming or Spanish mariachi because the relevance comes from the Sacrifice of Calvary made present, not from how well the processional song matches your grandmother’s homeland playlist. The priest faces ad orientem with everyone else. The prayers are the same prayers St. Thomas Aquinas spoke. The canon has not been reworked by a committee that wanted to make sure no one felt “othered” by all that medieval Latin and those pesky mentions of sin.
This is not nostalgia. This is not “attachment” needing accompaniement as the Holy Father has intoned. This is reality. Walk into almost any Traditional Latin Mass in America and you will see more ethnic diversity in the pews than in the average diocesan “intercultural” presentation folder. You will see large families of every background because the liturgy does not treat children as noise to be managed with children’s liturgy rooms and felt banners. You will see young people who chose this precisely because it is not tailored to their demographic. They are tired of being marketed to. They want to be conquered by something bigger than their own story.
The bishops and liturgists pushing endless “inclusivity” initiatives have not built the universal Church. They have built ecclesiastical theme parks where each ethnic group gets its own ride and wonders why the whole park feels Balkanized. Meanwhile, at the old rite, the immigrants, the converts, the lifelong Catholics, the large families and the childless, the black, white, brown, and rainbows in between, simply show up, shut up, and worship. Together. In the same language their ancestors used when they weren’t busy being “accompanied” in their uniqueness.
That black family with seven children in front of us last Sunday did not require a special ministry to feel at home. They simply needed the Mass. The real one. The one that reminds every single soul, regardless of melanin or mother tongue, that we are not here to celebrate ourselves. We are here to be changed into Christ. My seemingly lily white family was there for the exact same reason. Ebony and Ivory—TRULY living together in harmony. Not side by side on a piano, but, rather side by side forming one body in Christ.
The progressives will keep printing their brochures about courageously living the Gospel within unique traditions. I will keep taking my family to the Latin Mass, where a white dad, a black dad with a van full of kids, an Asian convert, and an old Polish widow can all genuflect before the same God without a single PowerPoint about intercultural competencies.
Turns out, when you stop trying so hard to manufacture unity through diversity theater, you just get the Catholic Church.
Funny how that works.
