The Mass is a constant. But we experience it differently over time.

When I was a baby, Larry Hunt, a kind, funny Jesuit priest and my great-uncle, baptized me. At around age 12, I began attending Sunday Mass when my mom, then in her 30s, decided to cart her five children to an English-language service in French-speaking Brussels. For almost 40 years, I’ve attended Mass.

The experience has changed. At first, I liked the incense, and my mom and sisters’ singing. I loved the coffee room in the back of the church, the hum of chatter and community. The Bible readings and homilies I could take or leave.

In my late teens, taking Communion, I was moved by the realization that my Catholic ancestors had also taken Communion. It was a way in which we were sharing the suffering of being human, the suffering of God in the world. Nowadays what I love most is talking to God in private, saying the Lord’s Prayer as a group and the quiet solemnity right after Communion.

I am sure I am not the only person for whom the various parts of the Mass have felt different at different times of my life. I decided to ask a range of Catholics from all ages. My question: How does attending Mass and receiving Communion change as we go through what Shakespeare called the ages of man?

I live in the Pittsburgh area, so that’s where I based my questioning. Sacred Heart Church was founded in 1872 as Pittsburgh began booming because of the steel industry. Its main building in the East End of Pittsburgh, a prosperous neighborhood near Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, is a neo-Gothic structure built around 100 years ago during another flush time, the Roaring Twenties. I often attend its 9 a.m. Sunday service, which appeals to me in large part because there are so many families with young children. It is a Mass with plenty of toy trucks.

But a study from 2018 causes concern about whether those young children will continue to call themselves Catholic. It found that the median age when people leave the Catholic Church is 13. There was a strong correlation between not attending Mass and leaving the church. More than half the respondents who left said they had been to Mass only a few times in a year or less.

I find that some preferences about the Mass are as subjective as tastes in literature, music and food, and that people’s radically different experiences can be a call to accept grace and to come together.

The Faith of a Child

Catholics baptize their babies, which means that our first significant experience in a church takes place in the murky mystery of infancy, the part of our lives that is the biggest secret to ourselves. A few years later, as we enter consciousness, we discover ourselves in a place full of grown-ups doing funny things. So most of us start our experience of churchgoing by crying, coloring or playing with toys.

“I like the singing, but I don’t like the reading and responses,” said Claire Rossi, a 6-year-old in Pittsburgh who attends weekly Mass with her 9-year-old sister, Maya; 3-year-old brother, John; father, Gabe, and mother, Kate, both in their mid-30s. The girls like to put on nice dresses to go to church.

The week before I met the Rossis at church, Maya had celebrated her first Communion. “She had a party at Dave and Buster’s to celebrate,” Claire told me. “I got the biggest toys, a stuffed lizard,” said Maya.

Within the family, Mass is something that marks the passing of another week. “They have a Pavlov’s dog’s response,” said Gabe. “I’ll have my church playlist music playing on a Sunday morning, and the kids will say, ‘Oh, it’s church today.’” As part of her Communion preparations, Maya’s family encouraged her to pay attention instead of playing with trucks and coloring with her siblings. “I used to do that, before the second grade,” said Maya. Gabe explained the family has a rule, inherited from his own mother: “Once second grade hits, then it’s time to pray with us.”

Church leaders are waking up to the need to make children feel more welcome at Mass. In 2024, Pope Francis held the first-ever Mass for the World Day of Children after a child suggested the idea. “Don’t forget this: Jesus forgives everything and he forgives always,” he told the children.

Maya recalled one homily she remembers and liked. The priest had said, “Not only are the parents teaching the kids to follow Jesus, the kids are teaching the parents.”

Clare Scheid, a Pittsburgh resident who is the daughter of two theologians, is ready to offer her own advice. “My favorite part of Mass is listening to the homilies and criticizing them in my head,” the 14-year-old said. “That and the music.”

Ms. Scheid said she plans to remain a Catholic for the rest of her life. Yes, she would like more women in positions of leadership in the church hierarchy, but she sees more ways to effect change inside the church instead of from outside. Ms. Scheid’s favorite Mass is the Easter Mass because it involves more people: “The church should figure out more ways of getting everybody who’s there involved.”

In any case, said Ms. Scheid, her most transcendent moments are never inside church at Mass. “I experience more God in nature,” she said. “God is definitely more present outside a church. The Mass is more about rituals and tradition, it’s not really about God. It should be. But it’s not.”

As a college student at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Md., I enjoyed going to Mass, even as I was daydreaming and spying on girls I liked. I also appreciated that, like many colleges, the Mount organized Masses on Sunday evenings to spare college students the burden of waking up in the morning for church. But the truth is that Mass, like any other human enterprise, is never going to be exactly how we want it. There will always be off-key music, homilies we don’t like or a lector we can’t hear.

If Catholics can get over this hurdle and accept the imperfections of the humans running Mass, they are likely to keep going. Often, they are more pious than their peers. Clare Merante, 26, has been going to Mass her whole life. She doesn’t remember much from her early days going to church. In California as a first grader, “I received my first holy Communion and I realized it was Jesus,” she said. “It was a really big deal.”

As a teenager, she felt herself going through the motions. It made her feel guilty. But the Mass is “not always user-friendly” for teenagers, she notes. Then she found herself moved by Mass again because it was “Jesus coming to us and being so available and humble.”

Ms. Merante’s parents were converts, so they had puzzled out their own answers to big questions about Catholicism and were able to share their thought processes with her. For example, Ms. Merante’s father explained to her that the offertory means “putting ourselves on the altar just as much as putting gifts on the altar.” Nowadays, she likes going to Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Pittsburgh by herself. She feels her relationship with God is “a gift that God gives me.” Recently, she attended Mass with her grandmother. “That made me more aware of her journey,” she said, “and how Mass is different for older people.”

Growing Into Faith

The experience of Mass changes, too, when we become parents. “We’ve committed to raising our family in the church,” said Gabe Rossi, who is the father of Claire, Maya and John, mentioned earlier, and who works out of Pittsburgh as an aid worker for Catholic Relief Services, supporting its programming in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Keeping an eye on his children at Mass “means that my individual prayer [at Mass] isn’t as deep as it could be,” he said, “but I’m consoled by my kids being there.” Mr. Rossi recalled that Pope Francis once said, “Let the children cry…. It is a beautiful homily when a child cries in church, a beautiful homily.”

There’s a regularity to Mass that Lucas Briola, a theologian at St. Vincent College in nearby Latrobe, Pa., finds comforting. He is the father of a 4-year-old boy, and his child, he said, “loves the people” around him and is learning the Mass through how he is summoned to move his body. “Every time he passes a tabernacle he genuflects,” Dr. Briola said. “Whenever the Eucharistic species is being elevated, he stops playing with his trucks—at least that’s what we aim for.” Bringing a toddler to Mass isn’t easy, said Dr. Briola. Part of the liturgical sacrifice, he says, “is the unwanted attention of other people. It’s easier to not bring a child to Mass.”

Dr. Briola was always interested in religion, from Roman mythology to Christianity, and was fascinated by the priesthood because he liked the priests he got to know. Mass, he emphasized, is meant to affect us differently depending on our age. He quoted St. Thomas Aquinas: “What is received depends upon the mode of the receiver.”

Clare Scheid’s parents, Dan and Anna, are both academic theologians in their 40s. When Dan was a child in suburban Chicago, he liked being at Mass with his family. “I liked the stories, they were part of who I was,” he said. “I got to know the songs.” For Anna, who grew up in a Catholic culture in Indiana, “it never occurred to me to say whether I like this or not.” In their 20s, while attending Chicago Theological Seminary, Dan and Anna attended a lively Mass where the congregation baked its own bread for Communion and “every homily was meaningful,” said Anna. There was great music and a warm, welcoming community. “It was like, people here really care about me,” said Dan. Now, Dan enjoys going to Mass. With three teenagers, “it’s now the only thing my family still does all together,” he said.

The Age of Wisdom

Nothing makes a Catholic appreciate Mass quite like being there with their grandchildren. “It’s my favorite thing to do every day,” said Mary Rossi, Gabe’s 66-year-old mother. “Ever since I was a child and was instructed in the sacraments and the reverence of Communion.” Getting older and attending Mass with her children and grandchildren has reinforced the sacramental quality of the Eucharist. “When I was in junior high, I was anxious to hear the homily,” in order to better understand the priest’s perspective. “It was gas in the tank for the week,” she recalled. Now, when she attends Mass, she is often present in a church full of older people. It doesn’t bother her. “People at daily Mass are there because they want to be there.”

In many cities and churches, the older parishioners are the veterans of daily Mass. “As you get older, you develop a better appreciation of what Mass really is,” said Rudy Richtar, a retired tobacco salesman in his 80s who lives in suburban Pittsburgh. “When you’re younger you go through the motions. You know when to stand; you know when to sit down.” Mr. Richtar tries to never miss a Sunday Mass. His wife is confined to a wheelchair. Mr. Richtar is a Eucharistic minister, and he tries to bring Communion home to her. “For years my favorite part of Mass was the music,” he said. “Now the organist plays so loud so you can’t hear yourself think.” He always hopes the priest is a good speaker and can deliver a good homily, but that’s not easy to count on. It’s important to participate, he said.

“Some people are just staring,” he said. “They’re only there because people said they had to be there.” To fulfill the meaning of Mass, he said, “you have to connect with your God. When I pray at church, I feel like God is closer to me. It’s a house, it’s his house.” There is some truth, he said, to the notion that older people like going to church to prepare themselves for death. “When you look at Mass, sometimes there’s very few young people,” he said. The Covid-19 pandemic made the problem of Catholics’ reticence at Mass worse, he said. “People don’t want to shake hands,” said Mr. Richtar. “They don’t want to touch you.”

Monsignor John Kozar grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and now celebrates Mass at Sacred Heart. He loves the age diversity of the Sunday morning service. Many families include professors from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. “There are a lot of young families, it’s very uplifting,” he said. Monsignor Kozar is almost 80 years old and works hard on his homilies. “I’m trained in speech, and my focus is always on clarity,” he said. “I don’t try to be cutesy or roll out a slew of jokes. I never write my sermons, I just let the Holy Spirit take over.” He said while some people may come to Mass out of a sense of nostalgia or guilt, the key to attracting newcomers is “meeting people where they are. If we can get people to keep going to church in their teens, then they’ll keep coming.”

I was reminded of my first trip to the Vatican, in my early 20s, when I was invited to a Mass in one of the grottoes and chapels around St. Peter’s tomb under St. Peter’s Basilica. We passed by other chapels and heard priests celebrating Mass in different languages. As I walked the tunnel I heard the Lord’s Prayer in Dutch, in Swahili, in Arabic. I was stunned. All these people saying the same things about love and death in different tongues. The lightning struck. This, truly, was a universal church.

This article appears in December 2025.

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