Not long after Traditionis Custodes was published in 2021, I flew to Rome in my official capacity as president of Una Voce International, the grouping of Una Voce or Latin Mass Society groups around the world. I wanted to find the answer to a simple question: Why had Pope Francis published this document, restricting the Traditional Mass even to the point of looking forward to its elimination? The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had organized a survey of bishops worldwide on the Traditional Mass and prepared a report summarizing the results. Pope Francis wrote, in the letter to bishops that accompanied Traditionis Custodes, that “The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”
However, journalist Diane Montagna’s recent publication of the alleged concluding section of the DDF’s report on the survey puts a very different perspective on things, especially regarding how bishops felt about Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which allowed greater freedom in the celebration of the pre-1962 liturgy. The authors of the report summarize their findings as follows:
Some bishops would prefer a return to the previous indult situation in order to have greater control and management of the situation. However, the majority of bishops who responded to the questionnaire state that making legislative changes to the MP Summorum Pontificum would cause more harm than good. Any change—whether by suppressing or weakening the MP Summorum Pontificum—would seriously damage the life of the Church, as it would recreate the tensions that the document had helped to resolve. As the Archbishop of Milan puts it: “I have the impression that any explicit intervention could cause more harm than good: if the line of the MP Summorum Pontificum is further confirmed, it will provoke new waves of perplexity among the clergy (and not only them). If the line of the MP Summorum Pontificum is denied, it will provoke new waves of dissent and resentment among the supporters of the old rite.” Therefore, it is better to continue along the path already undertaken, without causing further upheaval.
Summorum Pontificum was perceived by bishops as making things better, not worse: The word the DDF uses is “pacified,” a word also used in a survey response from a French bishop, according to Montagna’s report. Many of the quotations from individual bishops’ responses, also presented by Montagna, point in this direction. An American bishop observed: “I believe that many of those who had felt separated from the Church and had gone toward extra-ecclesial communities have felt welcomed again within the structure of the Church thanks to Summorum Pontificum.” An English bishop wrote: “Many of the people who attend are troubled and quite suffering pilgrims, and I believe that the ‘normalization’ of their liturgical experience within the life of the Church strengthens its unity.” A bishop from the Philippines wrote: “I suggest that the Extraordinary Form be allowed as it is, and that the principle of Gamaliel be applied” (see Acts 5:38–39).
These revelations track with what I was told in 2021. Multiple sources said that the pope’s words could only be justified based on a minority view among the bishops who responded to the survey. It might still be possible, of course, that this minority view was strongly held by a large number of bishops, and that there was a serious pastoral problem—though nothing I had gathered from my own sources around the world indicated anything of the kind. These told me that where problems did exist, they were overwhelmingly of a practical rather than theological nature, such as Mass times and clergy rotations—ordinary problems stemming from different communities co-existing.
Insofar as there are voices denouncing Vatican II in the name of the “true Church” (as the letter to bishops claims), they are an extremely marginal phenomenon in Latin Mass congregations in good standing with their bishop. This is not only because the number of people with those views is tiny, but also because they regard typical Latin Mass congregations that accept the authority of the pope and bishop as fatally compromised and thus exclude themselves from them. Readers may think this strange, but I have seen it happen. Episcopal permission for a Mass acts on the more extreme fanatics like garlic to a party of vampires.
Pope Leo will naturally want to resolve the problems created by Traditionis Custodes. I have been assuming, like many others, that he would seek a way to ease the restrictions, which are clearly doing more harm than good, in a way that does not openly repudiate Pope Francis. Thus, he could issue definitive guidance on how Traditionis Custodes should be understood, or simply give new orders to those charged with its implementation.
The publication of these documents makes a diplomatic solution more difficult, since it is now hard to see how the suppression of the Latin Mass was done in good faith. The report challenges Pope Leo to do to Pope Francis exactly what the DDF warned Pope Francis not to do to John Paul II and Benedict XVI by reversing their policy: to “delegitimize” them. It might be poetic justice for Pope Francis to suffer the fate he meted out to his own predecessors, but this is an unhappy pattern that Pope Leo will want to break rather than extend.
At the same time, it increases pressure on Pope Leo to make a concession on the Traditional Mass, and it gives the lie to the claim that Catholics attached to this liturgy are widely viewed by bishops as undermining the unity of the Church. The character assassination directed at tens of thousands of Catholics, who merely wish to worship as their predecessors did, was, in its own way, a greater threat to the preservation of the Traditional Mass than the legal impediments to its celebration introduced by Pope Francis.
The stakes have been raised, and Pope Leo must decide.
