“Is ‘Mass’ Leonard Bernstein’s Best Work, or His Worst?” a recent headline asked. Well, after revisiting this two-hour extravaganza on Tuesday, when it was presented by Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, I think that if it’s not his worst, it surely reflects his worst tendencies: his allergy to self-editing, his saccharine streak, his embarrassing wordplay, his obsession with (and tone-deafness toward) youth culture, his weak counterfeits of pop styles.

Bloated, bombastic, cloying, quaint and smug — and occasionally, it must be said, very pretty — “Mass” (1971) now exists mainly as a stale memento of the aftermath of the liberalizations in Catholic ritual inspired by the Second Vatican Council. A strained union of high and low culture written for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, it was Bernstein’s grand effort to match the counterculture-fueled energy of recent hits like “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Godspell” and “Hair.”

Indeed, he enlisted Stephen Schwartz, the creator of “Godspell,” to collaborate with him on a text that crowds the traditional Catholic liturgy with hippie-era nostrums. (“I believe in God,” goes one passage that does resonate in our equally self-absorbed times, “but does God believe in me?”)