Why I Thank God Every Sunday That My Mass Is So Miserably Dull

Listen, I’m not here to sell you joy. I’m not here to make your Sunday morning “vibrant” or “life-giving” or whatever other nauseating adjective the church-growth consultants have duct-taped onto the faith this week. I’m here to tell you that if you left Mass last Sunday feeling entertained, you probably didn’t worship God at all. You just had a two-hour emotional massage with better snacks.

And that, dear reader, is why the Traditional Latin Mass is objectively superior. Not because it’s prettier—though it is. Not because it’s older—though it is. But because it is, blessedly, crushingly, gloriously boring.

Let’s start with the competition. Walk into one of those gleaming evangelical mega-churches—the ones with the campus maps and the coffee bars and the pastors who look like they just stepped off the set of a Christian rom-com. What do you get? A worship band doing their best impression of a Hillsong tribute act while the congregation sways like they’re at a Dave Matthews concert that somehow got hijacked by a youth pastor. The sermon is a 35-minute yak-fest about “living your best life now,” delivered with enough hand gestures to qualify for interpretive dance credit. By the end you’re supposed to feel something—inspired, affirmed, tingly, whatever. If you don’t, the lights dim for one more power ballad and you’re gently encouraged to “respond to the Spirit.”

Respond to the Spirit.

As if the Holy Ghost is some kind of divine barista waiting to take your emotional order.

This is not worship. This is just spiritual consumerism with better production values. The entire operation is engineered to keep you—the paying customer—in a state of pleasant distraction. The moment boredom threatens to creep in, they crank the volume. The moment silence might actually force you to confront the terrifying reality of a God who is not there to entertain you, they wheel out the fog machine. It’s church as therapy session. Church as self-esteem workshop. Church as the world’s most expensive mirror.

Now, let’s turn to the local Catholic Parish: St. Suburbaness of the Perpetual Felt Banners. You know the ones. The Boomer parishes where the sanctuary looks like a 1973 elementary-school art fair exploded. Rainbow felt banners everywhere. A “tree of life” made of construction paper and pipe cleaners and hovering over the sanctuary a giant mural of a long-haired smiling Mr. Rogers with a halo. And, God help us, the music. “Gather Us In.” “Table of Plenty.” “On Eagles Wings.” The kind of faux-folksy nonsense that sounds like it was written by a committee of retired 70’s music teachers who discovered guitars in 1968 and never recovered. The cantor—bless her heart—sings every verse with the same earnest warble while the congregation mumbles along, half of them wondering if they left the Crock-Pot on.

These are the parishes where the priest faces the people like a game-show host, where the sign of peace turns into a mid-Mass cocktail party, and where the homily is a gentle reminder that Jesus was basically a really nice guy who wanted us all to recycle. The whole production screams, “See? We’re just like you! We get it!” And the result is a liturgy that is neither ancient nor modern, neither transcendent nor entertaining—just aggressively mediocre.

A beige Mass in a beige Church for beige souls.

Meanwhile, in the Traditional Latin Mass, something radical happens: NOTHING. Nothing designed to hold your attention. No playlist. No light cues. No emotional manipulation. Just the priest facing the same direction as the rest of us—ad orientem, toward God, not toward the crowd like a lounge singer working the room. The prayers are in Latin, a language most people don’t speak or understand—which is the entire point. You’re not supposed to be narrating the experience in your head like a Netflix voice-over. You’re supposed to shut up and offer yourself.

You stand, you kneel, you sit. You smell incense. You hear the same unchanging words that have echoed through cathedrals for centuries. And for long stretches—glorious, empty stretches—you are bored. Not the fidgety boredom of a child denied screen time. The deeper boredom of a soul that has run out of distractions and is finally left alone with the terrifying, unchanging, infinite God of the universe.

That boredom is the sound of worship actually occurring.

Because real worship is not about how you feel. It is not about your preferences, your “worship style,” or your precious little felt banners. It is about the objective reality of the Sacrifice of the Mass—the re-presentation of Calvary itself—whether your dopamine receptors light up or not. The Traditional Latin Mass refuses to flatter you. It refuses to entertain you. It refuses to pretend that the Creator of galaxies needs your emotional approval to be worthy of adoration. It simply is. And in its stubborn refusal to cater to your feelings, it forces you to confront the one thing modernity cannot stand: something bigger than YOU.

The critics will whine that this is “exclusive” or “rigid” or “not pastoral.” Translation: it doesn’t make me the main character. Exactly. The Mass was never supposed to be about you. The moment it becomes about you—your bad music, your constantly evolving language, your silly felt banners, your emotional high—it stops being worship and starts being idolatry with a pancake breakfast afterward.

The Catholic Church has survived emperors, plagues, heresies, and two world wars. It did not do so by hiring consultants to make the liturgy “more engaging.” It survived because it had the audacity to remain boring when the world demanded spectacle. The Traditional Latin Mass is that same audacity in action: a weekly reminder that God does not need your attention span. He simply requires your reverence.

So next time someone tells you the Church needs to “meet people where they are,” smile politely and suggest they try meeting God where He is—on an altar, in silence, in a language that hasn’t changed since the days when Rome still thought it ran the world. And, spoiler alert:

It might be boring

—until you realize it ain’t about YOU.