End, Don’t Mend, Traditionis Custodes: Guest Essay by Kevin Tierney

We are very grateful to Mr Kevin Tierney for sharing with NLM this insightful essay on the failure of Traditionis Custodes, which I am sure our readers will find especially interesting in light of the upcoming extraordinary consistory. You can find more of his excellent writing on his Substack; He is also on Twitter at https://twitter.com/CatholicSmark

When the cardinals gather in Rome in January at the invitation of Pope Leo XIV, they will discuss, among other things, the sacred liturgy. While not explicitly named, everyone understands that, in this conversation, some of them will raise the topic of Traditionis custodes. To speculate, the ensuing discussion will likely center on how to preserve it while eliminating its worst aspects, such as the rescript that revoked the bishops’ right to regulate the liturgy in their dioceses. I think instead that the cardinals should discuss not how to mend Traditionis custodes, but how to end it.

While normally this discussion centers on why people prefer the TLM vs the Novus Ordo, I’d like to look at the legislation itself, and the culture in which that legislation came into being. A striking thing about Traditionis custodes (hereafter TC) was that the plan had a single point of failure. By his own words, Pope Francis promulgated TC to bring about liturgical uniformity within the Roman Rite, because only liturgical uniformity could faithfully honor the Second Vatican Council. (“This unity I intend to re-establish throughout the Church of the Roman Rite.”) Since the bishop is the moderator of the liturgy in his diocese, Francis entrusted this task to the bishops… who mostly ignored it. This led to Francis changing Church law regarding the liturgy, removing the authority of the local bishop (in the Roman Rite) to regulate the sacred liturgy, and instead putting it in the hands of the head of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, whom he could more easily pressure into eliminating the TLM on a case-by-case basis. In doing so, he exposed TC’s single point of failure.

Dangerous counter-revolutionaries threatening the unity of the Faith!

A single point of failure is an engineering concept where an entire system succeeds or fails based on one point. Many times, a single point of failure is ignored because of all the complex dynamics involved in a system, or the number of data points involved. When that one point fails, the entire system crashes, normally leading to long term disaster. For this reason, the first thing any smart design of a system does is abandon a single point of failure, by either adding redundancy (a backup) or diffusing the risk (distributing the cost of failure between points.)

Pope Francis proved that the person of the Roman Pontiff is TC’s single point of failure. As Diane Montagna revealed, when he asked the bishops for their opinion, the majority told him what he wanted to do was a bad idea. Francis responded to this by bypassing every norm of implementing a law, and demanding that it take immediate effect. He moved a change into a live environment, not knowing if it would work. When it was clear that it would not work, he doubled down on the single point of failure, by making enforcement dependent almost entirely on who is Pope. With the end of a pontificate, the desire to keep enforcing TC would be entirely in the hands of a successor, whose priorities might be very different. I think we have seen this with Leo. While some bishops have attempted to continue to implement the decree, Leo has shown himself far more amenable to the TLM’s continued existence. While some might say that Leo can fix this situation by being less oppressive, this does not change the fundamental reality of TC: few want it, and even fewer are invested in its success.

Solemn Mass celebrated by His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke in St Peter’s basilica on October 25th, during this year’s Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage. 

The second reason it should be rescinded is that TC fails to achieve its stated goal. The decree and the documents implementing it claim that a powerful sign of unity will be fostered in the Church because of these actions. I would simply ask the reader to look at the dioceses where this approach has been emphasized. Are Detroit and Charlotte centers of unity and visible communion? Are their bishops united with their pastors and laity? Are those bishops known for being well liked by their brother bishops? To ask these questions is to answer them.

The third reason TC should end is there is no realistic way to get to Yes. When you introduce a change into the world, you must have a way you can measure if it is successful, at which point you can say that “Yes, this worked” or “No, it didn’t.” At what point can you say that TC worked? Does anyone believe, in 2025, that the TLM is going to be abolished? If not, what are the options for getting to that point? The first option would be even greater centralization or a brute force ban of the TLM, options which, whatever their chance of success, just add even more pressure onto that single point of failure. The second would be a mass purging of bishops, and appointing outright yes-men in their place. This would destroy the authority of even bishops sympathetic to TC, and introduce into the dynamic a lot of bishops deprived of their jurisdiction, who would nonetheless still be admired by the faithful, while central authority would be held in contempt. Ecclesiastically speaking, bad things happen in that situation.

Faced with this reality, there will be a temptation to take measures which will turn the temperature down. The rescript could remain in place, but just ignored. Bishops would receive automatic approval to keep having the TLM celebrated, or Rome could drop that part entirely. The rescript could be removed, returning the issue to the bishops entirely. While all of these would be welcomed as short-term measures, they do not address the long-term instability of TC. Most bishops still do not want this decision, and are fine with leaving it to their priests. They either do not care about the TLM, or they want it preserved and encouraged. The younger a priest is, the more conservative he is, and the more at peace he is with the continued existence of the TLM, and not just in America.

Instead of trying to make a dying project work, the cardinals – and the Church at large – have a chance to introduce a new question: instead of trying to check off long desired ideological goals that have no relevance to today’s Catholics, what can we do to make it easier for Catholics to follow Christ?

About That Interview...

I am sure that by now that our readers have all heard the worrisome report from Rorate Caeli (which has in the past proved to be quite well-informed on this topic), namely, that the Roman authorities are preparing another dose of Accompaniment™ for the bishops, in regard to the governance of their faithful who love the traditional Roman Rite. And make no mistake – it is the bishops and their authority which will be assaulted and undermined, if a follow-up to Traditionis Custodes is indeed in the works, as a certain kind of ideologue grows increasingly frustrated with Their Excellencies’ paternal charity. As we pray the Lord to avert such a calamity, let us remember also to pray especially for our bishops, who may soon find themselves constrained to treat their faithful with a shabbiness not of their own doing.

Some of the 850 faithful who attended the last Sunday traditional Mass in the cathedral of Melbourne, Australia, which the DDW has recently forced the local archbishop to end.

By coincidence rather than design, I am sure, the man who is thought by many to have been the mind behind the previous assault, the Italian liturgy professor Andrea Grillo, has just given an interview to the website Messa in Latino, which has been translated into English by the excellent Rome-based journalist Diane Montagna, and published on Rorate Caeli. I pause to note that I disagree with Rorate’s wording for their headline, which calls the interview “astonishing”. Prof. Grillo has never allowed the law of charity to temper his disdain for all and sundry, and there is nothing new or astonishing about it. (See the profile picture on his blog for further details: I do not insert it here, since the algorithms that govern social media platforms disapprove of the behavior which it shows, and tend to delete links to articles that contain such pictures.)

I pause also to note that Prof Grillo himself has denied that he was in any way involved in the issuing of Traditionis Custodes; if this is the case, the similarities which it bears to his writings on the subject are so notable that he should sue the DDW for plagiarism. On the other hand, the Italian academy is a house built on envy, and it would be career suicide for any Italian academic, but especially one working for the Church, to admit that his work had had any sort of impact on the real world.

Since the publication of the interview yesterday, I have received more than one exhortation to write a response, to which I can only reply that I do not see the point. I trust that most people will be repulsed by the frantic lack of empathy that seethes through his every word; those who are not so repulsed are unlikely to be persuaded in any direction by anything I might choose to write.

The internet has given us a number of useful terms to describe its various epiphenomena, one of which is “gish-gallop – a rhetorical technique in which a person ... attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the(ir) accuracy or strength.” (Wikipedia) I propose that in our intra-ecclesiastical discourse, we rename this “the grillo-gallop” in honor of this interview, and the professor’s work in general. A similarly useful and related term is Brandolini’s Law, more colorfully and amusingly known as the “b—s— asymmetry principle”, which states that it takes far more time and effort to refute a specious or absurd argument than it does to make one; and in this case, that means time that I simply do not have.

Fortunately, someone else has taken the time. Back in March, Mr Kevin Tierney published an article on his excellent Substack about the reception (or lack thereof) of the post-Conciliar liturgical reform, which I asked his permission to reprint as soon as I read it. Again with his permission, I reproduce here some of his observations on the Grillo interview made in foro privato. (You can also find Kevin on Twitter at https://x.com/CatholicSmark, and hopefully be inspired to offer him some encouragement to keep up his excellent work.) I have added quotations from the interview in italics.

“As with many others, Professor Grillo should be thanked for his honesty. He’s insane, but he’s honest. And the Pope has a madman for a courtier.

It’s not just that he hates the Latin Mass with a passion that is tough to decipher. He views the shrinking of the Church as something to be celebrated, not bemoaned, as a necessary transition to purity. (...“the ‘dearth of seminarians’ and ‘young people fleeing’ is not just a negative fact: is the sign of a necessary travail for the entire Church.”)

When most people see others who have violated no doctrines but are Catholic in a different way, they shrug their shoulders. Even if they don’t like it, they don’t lose sleep over it.

Professor Grillo has not slept in years. He is kept perpetually awake by this, and seems to have inflicted a similar insomnia on the Pope. The traditionalists are an irrelevant sect, nothing compared to the wider Church. (“What are [the] 18,000 people [at Chartres this year] compared to the great multitude of the Catholic Church? Little more than a sect that experiences infidelity as salvation...”)

Dangerous counter-revolutionaries, undermining the unity of the Faith!

But we are also such a mortal danger to the Church that we must be forcefully suppressed. Even one Catholic who experiences spirituality differently from Grillo is a danger to the entire Church. (“Praying ‘una cum Papa’ isn’t achieved with mere chatter, but by sharing with the Church, and above all the Pope, the one Ordo in force. Otherwise, one chatters but lives in opposition to tradition.”)

When it is pointed out to him that this kind of theology can’t allow things such as Eastern liturgies or diverse movements within the Church, he doesn’t shy away from it, but doubles down. The end goal is that all Catholics must worship and understand the Faith exactly the same as whoever currently occupies the see of Rome. If we aren’t doing this, then we aren’t praying in communion with the Pope.

Most importantly, he develops a tension not between traditionalists and Church authorities, but between ordinary Catholics and ideologically-motivated revolutionaries. Professor Grillo wants a Church of perpetual revolution, one that is always attacking the foundations of the past, preparing for a glorious future. (“Tradition is not the past, but the future.”) Even most of those who aren’t traditionalists eventually get tired of the constant uprooting.

That this is an academic, divorced from interactions with everyday people, is not surprising. Only an academic or someone high in authority thinks like this.”