We find ourselves in the early days of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, and there are reasons for cautious optimism. Several signs suggest that the Holy Father wishes to address some of the more pressing challenges inherited from his predecessor.
Among these is the thorny question of access to the Traditional Latin Mass (what was once called the Extraordinary Form or Tridentine Mass) and the restrictions imposed by Traditiones Custodes.
I approach this question with the disposition we ought to have toward any successor of Peter: giving the benefit of the doubt, assuming good faith, and trusting in his pastoral intentions. Thus far, I do not detect in Pope Leo XIV any ill will toward those attached to the Traditional Mass. Yet good intentions alone do not guarantee wise policy, and two proposals currently being discussed as potential ‘solutions’ to the current impasse give me serious pause. Both, I would argue, fail to address the underlying problems and may even compound them.
The Ordinariate Proposal: A Gilded Cage
The first proposal involves creating some form of personal ordinariate to oversee communities attached to the Traditional Mass. This has a certain administrative logic to it: provide a dedicated structure, remove these communities from the direct oversight of potentially hostile diocesan bishops, and create a stable canonical framework for their existence.But this apparent solution conceals a fundamental problem: it would create a liturgical ghetto. The genius of Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum was precisely that it refused this ghettoization. Pope Benedict recognized the Traditional Mass not as some exotic rite requiring special permissions and separate hierarchical structures, but as part of the Roman Rite itself: never abrogated, always legitimate, and available as a right to the faithful and to priests. The ordinary-extraordinary form distinction was meant to emphasize continuity, not division. It acknowledged that the Church prays in two forms of the same rite, both equally Roman, both equally Catholic.
An ordinariate structure, by contrast, would effectively declare: ‘This Mass is so problematic, so divisive, so other, that it cannot exist within normal diocesan structures.’ It would enshrine in canon law the very separation that Pope Benedict sought to overcome. Worse still, it would do nothing to address the problem of hostile bishops. In fact, it might embolden them. A bishop who has shown himself ungenerous—or outright antagonistic—toward the faithful attached to the Traditional Mass would simply have his prejudices validated: ‘See, these people and their liturgy are so different they need their own separate structure. They don’t really belong here.’
The faithful would be protected, perhaps, but at the cost of being formally marginalized. This is not a solution; it is an institutionalized retreat.
The “Reform of the Reform”: Necessary but Insufficient
The second proposal focuses on improving celebrations of the Novus Ordo; what is often called the ‘reform of the reform.’ Proponents argue that if the Ordinary Form were celebrated with greater reverence, solemnity, and attention to the sacred, many of the concerns driving people toward the Traditional Mass would dissipate.This is not entirely wrong. Much of what ails Catholic liturgy today stems not from the Novus Ordo itself in its official form, but from the liberties, innovations, and abuses that have become routine in its celebration. A more reverent Novus Ordo: celebrated ad orientem, with Gregorian chant, in Latin where appropriate, with careful attention to rubrics, etc. This would undoubtedly be a vast improvement over what many Catholics experience on a typical Sunday.
But this approach, while laudable, does not go far enough. It treats the problem as primarily one of implementation when there are also questions of structure and theology embedded in the rite itself.
The Novus Ordo was not the product of organic liturgical development but of committee design. This is not a polemical claim but a historical fact. The post-Vatican II liturgical reform, whatever its intentions, created a rite that was substantially different from what preceded it; not through the gradual, Spirit-guided evolution that characterized liturgical development for centuries, but through deliberate committee construction in a remarkably short period of time.
Pope Benedict XVI himself was deeply aware of this problem. In his writings both as Cardinal Ratzinger and as Pope, he expressed concerns about the rupture in liturgical continuity and the dangers of treating the liturgy as something we construct rather than something we receive. His whole project in Summorum Pontificum was, in part, to restore that sense of organic continuity.
More troubling still is the way the Novus Ordo, in its typical celebration, places the priest at the center of the liturgical action. The structure of the rite, particularly when celebrated versus populum, tends to make the priest’s personality, choices, and even charisma central to the experience. The priest becomes, whether he wishes it or not, a kind of performer. The liturgy becomes, to a troubling degree, his creation.
This is not to say that priests celebrating the Novus Ordo are acting in bad faith or that Christ cannot be encountered there; of course He can and is. But the structure of the rite makes the centrality of Christ dependent on the priest’s willingness and ability to efface himself, to suppress his own personality, to resist the temptation to innovate or ‘personalize’ the liturgy.
In the Traditional Mass, by contrast, the priest’s personality is structurally suppressed. Facing the same direction as the people, following a more fixed and detailed rubrical structure, praying large portions of the Mass quietly, the priest becomes almost anonymous; a mediator rather than a protagonist. Christ is at the center not because the priest is particularly holy or particularly skilled, but because the structure of the rite itself directs all attention away from the priest and toward the altar, toward the sacrifice, toward the Lord.
It is no accident that so many churches built or renovated in the Novus Ordo era look like stadiums or auditoriums rather than sacred spaces. If the liturgy is fundamentally about what the priest does, about the community’s celebration, about active participation understood primarily as external activity, then the architectural logic follows: create a space where everyone can see the action, where the priest is visible and audible to all, where the focus is on the human gathering rather than on the divine presence.
A more reverent celebration of the Novus Ordo can mitigate some of these problems, but it cannot fully overcome them without structural changes so substantial that we would be, in effect, creating a different rite.
The Pastoral Ends
The real solution is not complicated, though it requires courage and perhaps a willingness to disappoint certain constituencies who have grown attached to the restrictions of Traditiones Custodes. The solution is to return to the dispensation of Summorum Pontificum. Pope Benedict’s motu proprio was wise precisely because it addressed all the problems that the current proposals fail to solve:1. It dealt with hostile bishops. By establishing that priests have a right to celebrate the Traditional Mass without needing episcopal permission, and that faithful have a right to request it, Pope Benedict removed the question from the realm of episcopal whim and placed it on firmer canonical ground. A bishop could not simply forbid what the universal law of the Church permitted.
2. It refused ghettoization. By insisting on the ordinary-extraordinary form distinction, Pope Benedict kept the Traditional Mass within the normal life of dioceses and parishes. It was not an exotic import requiring special structures, but part of the Church’s living tradition.
3. It respected the freedom of the faithful. Pope Benedict understood that the faithful have a right (not merely a privilege) to access the Church’s liturgical heritage. The liturgy is not the property of bishops or popes to manipulate at will, but a sacred trust handed down through generations.
4. It created space for mutual enrichment. Pope Benedict hoped that the two forms of the Roman Rite would enrich each other: that the reverence and sacral character of the old would influence the new, while the new rite would encourage Catholics to engage actively with the liturgy, to better understand the texts, and to participate vocally in their appointed parts. These devotional habits, once cultivated, naturally enhance one’s experience of the traditional rite as well. But for this enrichment to work, it requires proximity, not separation.
Conclusion
Pope Leo XIV faces a difficult situation, and I do not envy him the task of navigating these troubled liturgical waters. But the path forward should not require novel structures or half-measures. Pope Benedict XVI, in his wisdom, already showed us the way. Summorum Pontificum was not perfect (no merely human legislation ever is) but it was fundamentally sound in its principles and generous in its pastoral vision.What is needed now is not innovation but restoration: restoration of the freedom Pope Benedict granted, restoration of trust in the faithful, restoration of confidence that the Church is big enough to hold both forms of her Roman liturgical tradition without one threatening the other.
The Traditional Mass is not a problem to be managed or a crisis to be solved. It is a gift to be received, a treasure to be preserved, and a heritage to be passed on. The sooner we return to treating it as such, the sooner we can move past these exhausting controversies and return to the real work of the Church: the sanctification of souls and the worship of Almighty God.
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