What hath God wrought in and around our nation’s capital?

Since July, when a decree from Pope Benedict XVI lifted decades-old restrictions on celebrating the Tridentine Mass, seven churches in the Washington metropolitan area have added the liturgy to their weekly Sunday schedules

says Wash Times in “Mass appeal to Latin tradition.”

“I love the Latin Mass,” said Audrey Kunkel, 20, of Cincinnati. “It”s amazing to think that I”m attending the same Mass that has formed saints throughout the centuries.”

The new-old mass is

“contemplative, mysterious, sacred, transcendent, and [younger people are] drawn to it,” said the Rev. Franklyn McAfee, pastor of St. John the Beloved in McLean. “Gregorian chant is the opposite of rap, and I believe this is a refreshing change for them.”

A Pius X priest is quoted:

Besides the liturgy”s rich historical content and spiritual significance, the younger generations show an interest in the old becoming new again, said Louis Tofari of the Society of St. Pius X, an order of clergy that opposed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

“People who never grew up with the traditional Mass are finding it on their own and falling in love with it.”

This society has been around long enough, by the way, that its young ones are being ordained and service their parishes, as in Oak Park’s Our Lady Immaculate, where born-and-bred Tridentiner Rev. Michael Goldade was relieved on a recent weekend by another young priest who referred to his growing up Tridentine.

The Tridentine Mass helps people in their 20s and 30s who have grown up in a culture that lacks stability and orthodoxy see something larger than themselves: the glory of God, said Geoffrey Coleman of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter”s Our Lady of Guadalupe seminary in Denton, Neb.

This is another group dedicated to Latin liturgy. Its earliest members had belonged to the St. Pius X society but broke when the pope permitted bishops to permit Tridentine masses in 1988.

The Tridentine Mass “detaches me from the world and lifts my mind, heart and soul to heavenly things,” said Michael Malain, 21, of Houston.

Kirk Rich, 21, of Oberlin, Ohio, remembers the first time he attended a Tridentine Mass and recalls thinking that a new religion had been invented.

A Virginia man made a nice distinction:

“The coffee social is after the traditional Latin Mass, not in the middle of it,” said Kenneth Wolfe, 34, of Alexandria. “No one can say, with a straight face, that the post-Vatican II liturgy and sacraments are more beautiful than the ones used for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

The Society of St. Pius X gets up to 25 requests a week from priests looking for instruction, said its spokesman, most of them from priests below the age of 30.