(LifeSiteNews) — When I was 18-years-old, I did the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

St. Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises to be read and practiced throughout a 30-day silent retreat. I had no cell phone, internet, TV, or any other kind of distraction. It was just me and Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle for 6 hours daily, and then the four walls of my bedroom at Manresa Jesuit Retreat Centre in Pickering, Ontario.  

Sounds like a crazy thing to do for the modern 18-year-old, and looking back on the experience, it was.

Even my superiors at the seminary informed me afterwards it was too intense for a first-year diocesan seminarian. Later, when I entered religious life, we ate meals in silence as well, and I loved it. But I’m also quite an extrovert and a social individual, so there was an element of struggle associated with the newly imposed practice.  

I’m now 21-years-old, and I think youth these days are infected with a plague of immaturity.

Young people are not maturing in the way they need to, and maturity is integral to their formation as adults. I mean this emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.

Maturity-lacking youth become immature adults who take years to advance socially, in careers, in relationships, in their own identity, and in figuring out what they want.

Trust me, just ask any Grade 12 student – heck, even a fourth-year university student – what they want to do in life. You will get nothing but a confused, stressed, and frozen response of “I don’t know.” Meanwhile, these young people live in a wealthy society and are given every opportunity to seize life by the throat. I think the root cause of this is not enough silence.  

Now, I don’t want to make this a Boomer-like rant about “101 things wrong with Generation Z” – because we already know the accusations: we are constantly on our cell phones and social media, and this leads to a lack of social skills. We are anxious and depressed, and not challenged enough on any level of education or physical behavior. That’s all true, but I believe this is because previous generations, including the Baby Boomers, had one thing Millennials and Gen Z’ers don’t: silence.

Technology has advanced at such an alarming rate that it has eliminated mandatory silence, which I believe causes, or at least worsens, many of the issues of immaturity and failure among youth today. 

For example, I think whoever reads this can agree that you need silence to learn and study. However, for Boomers to get a paper done in university, they had to go to the library, and spend several hours in SILENCE to read, write, and think for their studies.

My generation has our air-pods playing Eminem while we sit with our laptops open, typing a Google search and instantly getting what we need. That period of silence accompanying being in a library, hunting for a book, reading it, and thinking about it, allowed Boomers to achieve a few things: time to develop their opinions and philosophy, to think about who they were and what they wanted in their life, and what they believed in and why.

It was also the silence that allowed them to think properly, and it was the silence that made them mature psychologically. I think it’s fair to say learning without silence is a reason why Gen Z’ers don’t know what a woman is… 

There are many reasons why youth aren’t mature in the other realms I mentioned, the emotional and the spiritual. They stem from the social culture of Gen Z’ers, but I hope I was able to get my point across about the importance of silence, especially in today’s world. 

I think this is why the phenomenon of young people flocking to the Latin Mass is happening, without them even knowing it.

In short, young people are aching for SILENCE in worship. They are attracted to it because they have never experienced it before in their busy, distraction-filled lives. Silence in worship allows young people to think, feel, taste, flourish, and mature in their relationship with God. The Novus Ordo can’t offer this as much due to the mandatory and constant so-called “active participation” of the faithful. And if older generations disagree with this, it’s likely because they had silence in other areas of their life when they needed it. This made up for the lack of silence in their new liturgy.  

While there are plenty of things young people of this world need, I know for certain high among them is the need for silence.