In a haze of incense, as colored light filtered through stained glass windows, congregants filled the pews of Portland’s St. Joseph Oratory on a recent Sunday. The men and women, many besuited or veiled, smiled as a toddler’s voice rang out from the choir loft, his singing louder than anyone else’s. Like almost all of the rest of the hour-and-a-half service, the hymn was in Latin.
The boy’s father, Andrew Garrepy, 31, has been attending the traditional Catholic Mass since he was 4, and his children are now three of dozens that attend Portland’s Latin Mass with their parents each week. At a time when most U.S. Catholics are 50 or older, the average St. Joseph attendee is just 35, said the Rev. Patrick Finn, who began leading services at the church in early October.
The Stevens Avenue church began holding Latin worship services exclusively a little over a year ago to serve a growing group of Maine Catholics with an affinity for the traditional Latin Mass, a service with a fraught recent history in the Roman Catholic Church.
Today, attendance at Latin services — which had been restricted for decades — is growing across the country and in Maine, especially among young adults and families, with nearly 250 people regularly attending at St. Joseph. Nationally, attendees tend to be conservative, especially on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and the service’s popularity speaks to a vocal, if still quite small, more traditional wing of the Catholic Church.
For centuries, Roman Catholics around the world could only celebrate Mass in Latin. That changed during the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, when church leaders considered reforms to reinvigorate the faith and make services more accessible, and began celebrating mass in local languages.
The new liturgy that came out of the council included a host of other changes, too. Priests began to face the congregation instead of the altar, attendees had more opportunities to participate in the service through songs and prayers, and services featured fewer bells and less incense.
As those changes took hold, priests were largely forbidden from celebrating the traditional Latin Mass. This lasted for decades, until Pope Benedict XVI relaxed the restrictions in 2007 in an effort to appease more traditional Catholics.
That’s around the time Jeff Rowe, 66, of Bowdoinham, became interested in Catholicism. Rowe, who described himself as a Pope Benedict convert, now serves as chair of the Maine branch of Una Voce America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the Latin Mass.
The Catholic Church’s stance on the Latin Mass changed again in 2021 under former Pope Francis, who saw it as divisive because it encouraged Catholics to reject earlier reforms. He required priests to get approval from a bishop before celebrating Latin Mass. The current pope, Pope Leo XIV, has so far kept these restrictions in place.
Relatively few people attend the Latin Mass worldwide. By one estimate, the United States has 450 venues offering services in Latin — the most of any country but a tiny portion of the more than 19,000 Catholic parishes counted by U.S. Religion Census in 2020. According to a 2025 study by the Pew Research Center, 2 percent of Catholics — roughly a million Americans — attend a Latin Mass weekly. Others have estimated the number is much smaller, closer to 100,000.
Rowe, whose wife is a retired Latin teacher and who said Latin is almost a second language to him, attended a mix of Latin and English services when he first converted to Catholicism. Over time, he said he has come to feel that the Latin Mass is more “theologically comprehensive.” Now, he attends the Latin Mass at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston every Sunday morning — one of the state’s two current weekly offerings. Several other congregations hold monthly Latin services.
“When I pray in Latin,” Rowe said, “I feel I’m praying with all my ancestors of the faith over 2,000 years.”
The shift away from the Latin Mass in the 1960s was disruptive for the Catholic Church, said Timothy Kelly, a history professor at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania. Some people saw it as a positive shift, feeling for the first time that they could actively engage in the services in their own languages, he said, but others saw it as a sudden shift in a liturgy that had otherwise changed very slowly. The recent rise in popularity of the Latin Mass, he said, could be due in part to a desire among young Catholics for a form of worship that feels firm in a changing world.
“In a time when society and culture are transforming pretty dramatically outside of religion, there’s a yearning among some people for something to hold onto and say, ‘This never changes,’” he said.
The Latin Mass also offers an aura of mystery, said Hosffman Ospino, a professor of Hispanic ministry and religious education at Boston College. That could be especially appealing to young people, he said, who have grown up with few unanswerable questions in the information era.
“Life is busy all the time on their phones, on their computers, on social media. Everything is explained,” Ospino said. “We lost the sense of wonderment as a society, and a religion like Catholicism somehow has retained these elements of ritual, symbol, mysteriousness.”
In Maine, some travel hours for that sense of mystery.
Andrew and Rebekah Williams drive an hour and a half to and from Rockland with their six daughters to attend Latin Mass each week in Portland. The couple grew up as fundamental baptists, but Andrew converted to Catholicism in 2022, and Rebekah joined the Catholic Church this year.
Rebekah Williams said she was drawn to the Catholic Church’s structured liturgical year, which she said “patterns your life.” Andrew Williams said the Latin Mass feels especially reverent. They started going to Latin services in Orono on the first Saturday of each month, then began driving to Portland for Sunday Latin Masses this year.
The Williams family is in good company at the Latin Mass, they said, surrounded by other growing families with young children.
Rebekah Williams said she sometimes felt her young children were being too disruptive at English services, but that the crowd at the Latin Mass is used to the noise. “There are crying kids, there are screaming kids.… It’s so great.”
Finn, 42, the chaplain of St. Joseph Oratory, said he knew some Mainers were passionate about the Latin Mass while he was in seminary, so he took an elective course on how to celebrate it. Finn occasionally filled in for another priest to lead Latin Mass at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston while he was a parish priest there.
When the Rev. Kyle Doustou, former rector of St. Joseph Oratory, prepared to go on sabbatical, Finn said, Bishop James Ruggieri asked Finn if he would be willing to take over the Latin services in Portland.
Finn said he saw members of the Latin Mass community in Maine hurt during Pope Francis’ papacy because of his restrictions on the rite. So far, he said, Pope Leo XIV hasn’t laid out any official new guidance on the Latin Mass but has advised Catholic clergy to be “generous” with the growing community.
“The people at the traditional Latin Mass at the oratory, they all have chosen to be there. Many of them have been very generous with their time and resources and their drive time with their kids in the car,” Finn said. “It’s a different audience in a really beautiful way.”
For Nick Daniels, 21, the Latin Mass is a part of family life for him and his 11 siblings. His family used to attend English services but switched to the older Mass form when he was 3 years old. At the time, the Latin Mass was held in Portland’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, but the community grew over the past two decades and moved into the oratory, so they could have a dedicated space with a less busy schedule than the cathedral.
Now, Daniels trains altar servers for the weekly mass at the oratory, which he sees as a more direct form of worship.
“The Mass is supposed to be a sacrifice, and they turned it into a celebration,” Daniels said. “It’s more lively, more focused on the people and good feelings. The Latin Mass, it’s all focused on God and the sacrifice.”
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.