Franciscan University of Steubenville’s first Latin Mass of the semester drew a record-breaking crowd to the campus’s Christ the King Chapel on Sunday, Sept. 22.
The Mass took place at 2 p.m. – a change from the Latin Mass’s 7 p.m. monthly time slot last academic year – and was the first of eight monthly scheduled to take place this year. It was celebrated by the Rev. Vincent Huber, a retired priest from Steubenville who offered to say this year’s masses after the reassignment of the Rev. Gregory Plow, TOR, – the only priest on campus who knew how to say the Latin Mass.
By an official count of the congregation provided by offices at Christ the King Chapel, the Mass drew 436 students, faculty, staff members and families from Jefferson County, Ohio, all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Sunday’s large crowd made it officially the largest Latin Extraordinary Form Mass to take place at the university since the rite was first allowed back on campus after Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 Summorum Pontificum.
By 20 minutes before the Mass, the chapel was already full. The congregation was so large that it spilled out of the chapel and into the vestibule.
Photo: Walter Matt
Even after ushers instructed people to move together to make room in the already crowded pews, many of the students still had to stand throughout the mass – yet no one was deterred from attending the Mass in Latin that Sunday.
This first Latin Mass of the semester was a particularly vital one for the university’s new chapter of Juventutem, which became an official club a few weeks prior and whose members helped organize the Mass.
Juventutem-Franciscan, which had received an overwhelming amount of interest at the university’s “Club Fair” the previous week, hosted a reception after the Mass to draw attention to the Latin Mass community on campus.
In its few weeks of existence, the club has gathered a mailing list of over 80 and a discussion group of almost 100, and it is clear that there is a large amount of interest in tradition among this year’s freshman class.
In the coming year, the group hopes to raise awareness of the large Latin Mass community that is present on Franciscan campus but which has gone largely unnoticed.
Its goals include offering students the necessary transportation to attend Latin Masses around the area, providing instruction about the Latin Mass by way of lectures and panel discussions and, by the grace of God, getting the Latin Mass to be offered more often on campus.
Juventutem-Franciscan and the Latin Mass community at Franciscan University have a hard path ahead of them, but it is beyond encouraging to see how much interest there is in the Mass among the students – both freshmen and upperclassmen.
The club has been told time and again by students and faculty alike that its presence has been greatly needed on campus for years.
There is much to be discouraged by in the Church now, but today’s young Catholics are rising to the occasion, carrying their love for tradition with them wherever they go and sharing it with whomever they meet.
Whether priests, bishops and popes choose to recognize it or not, this generation of Catholics is becoming more and more interested in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, and devotion to tradition is making a fast and visible comeback.
