We had sixteen hundred years’ experience with one Eucharistic Prayer in our repertoire and the liturgical reforms of the Council of Trent shaped the way we worshiped for four hundred years. In the last years of the Tridentine Mass, the early 1960s, we tended to see children as miniature adults. Fully rooted in the Sunday assembly by the decision of Pope Saint Pius X to push Communion back to the age of seven or so from the standard age of twelve to fourteen years during the early 1900s, children were still more tolerated than acknowledged. The Mass was in Latin, and by the 1960s the people had begun to regain their voices in the “dialogue Mass,” so the focus was on training little children to recite or sing in Latin.
The new attention to the experience of children, their ability to enter into ritual, their spontaneity, their ability to grasp key concepts in faith, felt “untraditional.” Yet we can trace in our tradition the ways in which children have long been given a special place in the assembly. From earliest times, boys have served in choirs and certain ministries in monasteries and in parish churches. Girls were sometimes entrusted to nuns, learning liturgical chants and the arts. Yet, in our day, the formation of a Lectionary for children and Eucharistic Prayers suited to them are truly tremendous breakthroughs in our THANK YOU treasury of prayer.
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