Do Young Children Belong at Mass?

The Internet is often a place where personal prudential decisions are dogmatized into supposed principles, then applied to everyone. It is even, on occasion, an opportunity to cloak personal failures in pious-sounding “rules” which you, mere mortal, frankly are just not traditional enough to comprehend. It may come as no surprise that such behavior is clustered around certain sparsely-habited corners of Catholic 𝕏.

A common claim circulating in these deeper recesses is that young children simply do not belong at the Holy Sacrifice. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, it is argued, was not brought to Mass as a toddler, and, therefore, Catholics today should not feel obliged to bring very young children on Sundays, or any day. The argument usually goes something like this: the Martin family were devout Catholics; they sometimes left the toddler Thérèse at home while attending pre-dawn Mass; therefore, traditional Catholic practice is to withhold church attendance from children. Besides, they are of an age where misbehavior is common, and the solemnity of the occasion requires perfect silence.

In some cases, versions of this argument sprout legs and morph into a haughty, “Why can’t you control your children at Mass?” tweet. These are sometimes said in jest, often very-high-engagement, and usually written by authors who have never personally endured a Pre-55 Holy Week—aka Traditional Catholic Olympics—with several small children in tow.

As is usual with these things, there is a kernel of truth in the original claim. But careful examination, both historically, philosophically, and theologically, collapses the point into a serious misunderstanding of Catholic tradition and exposes a deeper question about its proponents.

The evidence shows that while prudential exceptions existed, the broader Catholic instinct, rooted in classical philosophy and various Doctors of the Church, strongly supports the early formation of children through participation in the Church’s visible worship.

The Strongest Version of a Very Absurd Argument

The strongest evidence comes from the letters of St. Thérèse’s mother, Zélie Martin. In a letter dated June 25, 1874, Zélie writes that she had the habit of attending 5:30 a.m. daily Mass. At first, she hesitated to leave her youngest child at home, but after noticing that the toddler slept soundly, she decided she could leave her sleeping while she went to Mass.¹

The Martin household also possessed relative material comfort. Louis and Zélie were prosperous middle-class artisans, and like many bourgeois families of 19th-century France, they had domestic help and a wet nurse.² Their social situation made it easier to leave a sleeping child at home in the pre-dawn hours, a luxury which many readers in the modern usury economy would envy.

Note, too, “destination” churches did not exist; the Martins were not commuting 45 minutes each way for a Traditional Latin Mass. Louis Martin himself preferred early morning Mass and described the 6:00 a.m. Mass as the “Mass of workers and the poor.”³

To boil down the “my-wife-stays-home-on-Sundays-because-I-am-a-trad’s-trad” argument:

• A holy Catholic family sometimes left a toddler at home while attending early daily Mass.
• Therefore, bringing very young children to Mass is not historically necessary—in fact, it’s preferred that they not be there.

That is the argument in its strongest formulation. 

The Martin Evidence Cuts the Other Way

The same Martin sources that mention the early-morning Mass also describe something else: the Martin children regularly attending Mass with the family. In her autobiographical recollections, St. Thérèse remembers Sundays when the entire family went to Mass, and she specifically recalls standing beside her father in church.⁴

In other words, the Martin practice was not “children do not belong at Mass.” It was simply prudence regarding a very early weekday Mass. No one who reads the Martin sources carefully can honestly derive from them a general rule that toddlers should be excluded from church.

If there truly existed a French Catholic norm excluding young children from Mass, we would expect to see it reflected in devotional literature. We actually see the opposite.

In 1858, the Comtesse de Ségur published a book titled Livre de messe des petits enfants (Mass Book for Little Children). The book was explicitly written for young children learning to assist at Mass.⁵ The text very clearly instructs the child to stand during the Gospel, say the Creed with the priest, and kneel and adore during the Elevation.

One prayer even says, “I am still too young to receive Communion….” The passage only makes sense if the child is present at Mass before First Communion age. This contemporary French instruction manual presumes that small children are present at Mass and learning its gestures.

Traditional Catholic Pedagogy

Preconciliar Catholic teaching manuals make the very same assumption. The well-known catechetical text Spirago’sMethod of Christian Doctrine states: “The devout hearing of Mass is a most weighty factor in the religious and moral education of the young.”⁶

The manual insists that children should attend Mass regularly on Sundays and feast days. It also recommends that catechists teach children how to assist properly by explaining how to kneel, genuflect, the meaning of objects in the church, and the overall significance of the liturgy.  

Spirago explains that these external elements exert a powerful influence on children: “The better the children understand the signification of all they see in church, the more recollected and devout they will be.”⁷

Contrary to the failed inductive reason articulated by the no kids at Mass crowd, the historic Catholic instinct was never exclusion but formation. Children were brought to church and trained to assist properly.

The medieval English churchman Ælfric (c. 955–1010) speaks of children being brought to church, even carried daily to Mass after baptism, in his Ecclesiastical Institutes, a pastoral manual written for Anglo-Saxon clergy: “The child shall be baptized…and afterwards the priest shall communicate the child; and afterwards it shall be carried to Mass for several days, and shall receive the holy housel.”⁸

This passage reflects the early medieval Western practice in which newly baptized children were present in church and even received the Eucharist, demonstrating that the liturgy was not viewed as something from which children should be excluded.

St. Alphonsus Liguori, the moral Doctor of the Church, supplies the underlying principle. He teaches that parents have two primary obligations toward children:

1. bodily sustenance
2. religious education

Parents sin if they neglect to instruct their children in matters necessary for salvation.⁹ That is not mere intellectual instruction. It includes forming the child within the life of the Church. The burden of proof, therefore, falls on the claim that children should be excluded from liturgical life, not on parents who wish to raise them within it.

A Philosophy of Learning

The deeper philosophical issue is how children actually learn. Aristotle explains that human beings learn naturally through imitation and through the senses. He writes: “Imitation is natural to man from childhood.”¹⁰ He also notes that sight is the sense most closely connected with knowledge: “Of all the senses, sight makes us know.”¹¹

Children do not learn primarily through abstract explanations. They learn through repeated exposure to visible realities. What more sublime visible representation of our intended eternal destination than the Holy Sacrifice? Does it not seem cruel to withhold such beauty from the very souls we are commanded to instruct?

St. Thomas Aquinas develops the Aristotelian insight. According to the Angelic Doctor, the human intellect understands by turning to phantasms, meaning sense-based images stored in the imagination.¹² Knowledge begins with the senses. This is why Thomistic realism places such an emphasis on the physical (and sacramental) human experience.

A child standing in church does not need to understand the entire theology of the Eucharist in order to benefit from the experience. He makes visual associations in his memory which form his basis of comparison for his later life. What child could observe:

• kneeling before the altar
• silence before the consecration
• candlelight
• sacred vestments
• chant
• the ringing of bells

…and remain unmoved throughout his life by the profundity of the imagery? These impressions form the imaginative framework within which later theological understanding becomes possible. 

For centuries, Catholic educators understood the permanence of the early years of life. The saying often attributed to Jesuit pedagogy, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” may not be an authentic quotation¹³ from St. Ignatius Loyola, but it quite accurately reflects the real educational instinct rooted in classical philosophy which the Jesuits, among others, well understood.

The early years of life establish tastes, habits, loves, and associations. These shape the entire future of the person. Many readers know a family from the parish with adopted children. It’s a common phenomenon in conservative and traditional Catholic circles. The very real reality of early formation (and in so many sad cases, malformation requiring reformation) is obvious and observable.

Some Cultural Context

St. Thérèse grew up in Catholic Europe, where the surrounding culture still contained visible traces of Christendom which were everywhere present. Even outside the church building, her world contained Catholic festivals, religious art, devotional practices, and a home structured around prayer.

The modern Western child often grows up in a radically different environment: strip malls,  fluorescent supermarkets, television, digital screens. In today’s world, the Sunday Mass may be the only place where a child encounters beauty ordered toward God.

In contrast to the ugliness of life, a child who enters the church doors is greeted by the altar, sacred music, incense, silence, vestments, the visible memory of Christendom. To argue that children do not belong at Mass is not merely historically incorrect, it is culturally impoverished. The Church historically understood that children must grow into the liturgy through repeated participation.

They do not begin by fully understanding. They sometimes squirm, giggle, or cry. Parents of young children may have to hold their young ones discretely in the back, on the sides, or even take a fresh air break.

Despite the difficulty, it is imperative to remember that children begin by seeing, hearing, imitating, and absorbing. Any schoolteacher can attest that she knows exactly how a child’s parents speak and behave long before she meets them. Children imitate what they see.

The Martin family story is one of prudence, not exclusion. And certainly not some hidden principle only accessible by the most extreme pockets of Internet websites whose terminally online population may just prefer to not have to manage their offspring.

Sometimes, yes, a mother may leave a sleeping infant at home for a daily Mass at dawn. Sometimes, sure, a restless toddler must be taken outside. But Catholic tradition, from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Alphonsus to preconciliar catechesis, points consistently toward a principle both obvious and intuitive: children belong at Mass not because they already understand everything but precisely because they do not. The Mass teaches children what is worth loving.

1. Zélie Martin, letter of June 25, 1874, in Manuscript A, fol. 5r°, Carmel de Lisieux.
2. Biographical Profile of Louis and Zélie Martin, Louis and Zélie Martin Foundation.
3. Maureen O’Riordan, “May 1: Celebrating the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker with Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin,” Louis and Zélie Martin Foundation, citing Céline Martin, The Father of the Little Flower (Rockford: TAN Books).
4. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, Manuscript A, “Le Dimanche,” fols. 17r°–17v°.
5. Comtesse de Ségur, Livre de messe des petits enfants (Paris, 1858).
6. Francis Spirago, The Method of Christian Doctrine (New York: Benziger, 1901).
7. Ibid.
8. Ælfric of Eynsham, “Quando dividis Chrisma,” in Benjamin Thorpe (ed. and trans.), Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. 2 (London: Commission for the Public Records, 1840), 392.
9. St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Complete Ascetical Works of St. Alphonsus, vol. XV (New York: Benziger Brothers), “Instructions for the People,” Part I, chap. IV.
10. Aristotle, Poetics 4.
11. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1.
12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 84, aa. 6–7.
13. Barton T. Geger, S.J., “’Set the world on fire’? Sorry, St. Ignatius never said that (or these other famous Jesuit quotes),” April 6, 2017, America Magazine.