At a time when churches are competing to attract the Gen-X crowd, what's the draw of this more traditional practice?
As a non-Catholic, I could only hazard a guess. It could be that the use of Latin adds to the mystery of religion – something that is lacking in the English Mass.
People have been starved for a long time - they are hungry for God and are seeking what they need as if by instinct, thats one of the draws.
Latin is to the Catholic Church what the Declaration of Independence is to America. As President Lincoln said:
When we celebrate the Fourth of July, Lincoln told his listeners in Chicago, we celebrate the founders, "our fathers and grandfathers," those "iron men...But after we have done this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—...finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that the moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are."
There is a lot more to it than the Latin. Visit once. It will not make a believer of you but you will understand its power. Alternatively find an Eastern Right Christmas or Easter High Mass. The effect is much the same and the language isn't Latin.
DEAD ON!!!!
In fact you pretty much restating almost verbatim what Pope Paul VI thought of the novus ordo mass. He did not think the novus ordo was that good but went through with it anyway because he was just not a very good pope at all unfortunately. But anyway Pope Paul VI made a big complaint against the novus ordo when he said, "Where is the mystery?" Way to go.