It was our goddaughter’s First Holy Communion on Saturday.

The parish was new to us. The church was full, as you might imagine, and we found seats upstairs overlooking the nave below. Having attended the Tridentine Latin Mass for some years now, and a relatively reverent new rite mass before that, it had been a long time since I had experienced what might be called a very modern Mass.

It’s important to say at the outset that the priest was clearly sincere.

He spoke about the importance of Confession. He invited non-Catholics to attend the parish’s OCIA programme. He spoke warmly and earnestly about Jesus. This was not a man who lacked faith, he genuinely believed that those children were about to receive Jesus Christ for the first time. Not symbolically or metaphorically, but Our Lord Himself; Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

And that is what made the whole thing so strangely sad, because he seemed unable to trust that the liturgy itself could communicate what he believed.

From the moment Mass began, I found my attention drifting. I thought about the errands I needed to run, whether Sainsbury’s would still be open afterwards, whether I had replied to my dad about the electricity bill he had queried. I kept willing myself back to prayerfulness, but everything appeared to thwart my efforts.

The hymn lyrics, along with the responses, were projected onto a large screen at the front of the church. The children came forward to read what turned out to be a simplified paraphrasing of scripture designed to communicate the general gist of St Paul’s words in a child friendly way. Then the priest preached an earnest homily before moving to the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

After the consecration, the children were invited to gather around the altar.

“Now boys and girls, I’m going to invite you around the altar to celebrate a very special part of the Mass, the Lord’s Prayer. So welcome to the sanctuary.”

Then he asked them what intentions they would like to pray for.

Around the circle he went with the microphone. A brother leaving for university. The poor. The sick. The homeless. Victims of war.

Each intention was accompanied by encouragement, explanation and affirmation. All of it sincere. All of it well-intentioned. All of it very protestant.

Throughout the Mass the priest kept adding words. Explanations. Emphases. Elaborations.

“May the body and precious blood of Christ wash away our sins and bring us and those holy souls we are taking a moment to remember to life everlasting”

“And another very special prayer that we pray around the world, ‘Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world’…”

Then, muttering to himself:

“Yes, the sins of the world.”

Moments later:

“My dear young friends, my dear people, look up. Look! Take a moment and behold the Lamb of God. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

The modern mindset assumes that understanding produces reverence. Explain enough, simplify enough, engage enough, and eventually people will believe.

But beauty and reverence precede understanding.

The tragedy was that the children were being treated as though they could only understand what was explained to them, but children understand the sacred remarkably well. They understand too that a whisper means something different from a shout, that a suit is different from pyjamas. They understand that a courtroom is different from a playground, a church is different from a village hall. The Church once knew this instinctively. Rather than translating the sacred into the language of childhood, she surrounded children with the sacred.

The liturgy forms us not merely through propositions but through mystery, signs, gestures, architecture, silence, hierarchy, beauty and ritual. This is what the Church calls the via pulchritudinis.

The more the priest tried to convince us that something extraordinary was happening, the more ordinary it appeared.

He reminded me of the eagle raised among chickens.

All its life it scratched and pecked at the ground, believing itself to be one of them. One day it looked up and saw an eagle soaring high above.

“How I would love to be like that,” it thought.

Then it lowered its head and returned to pecking in the dirt, never realising that it too was an eagle.

I could not help feeling that many priests today suffer from a similar affliction. They possess something infinitely greater than they realise.

When we reduce the liturgy to an exercise in engagement, we burden the priest with an impossible task. He must somehow generate belief through his own personality, his own explanations, his own enthusiasm. Yet no priest is capable of carrying such a burden. Nor should he have to. The liturgy does the heavy lifting.

The catastrophe of much modern liturgical practice is that, in attempting to make the sacred more accessible, it often makes it less believable. The children that morning did not need to be convinced that something extraordinary was happening. They needed to step into the mystery.

On the way home, my middle teenage son simply said ‘I feel really sorry for people who can’t access the traditional mass’. And he meant it. There was nothing superior in what he said, but recognition that as a young man growing up in the modern world, this was not going to keep him above the waves.