This may be the most significant act of Francis’s pontificate; and it’s nothing more than bullying iconoclasm.
This may be the most significant act of Francis’s pontificate; and it’s nothing more than bullying iconoclasm.
L ast week, Pope Francis completely reversed the policy of his living predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, when it comes to the traditional Latin Mass. And he did it without warning his bishops, and while showily exhibiting his personal animosities and neuroses. One friend, commiserating with me, tried to make sense of what was happening in the Church. He wrote to me: “Some boomers got mad about Twitter and decided to abolish the Mass of the Ages. Extraordinary.”
Here’s the background. In 2007, Benedict declared that the liturgy as it had existed before the Second Vatican Council was sacred and good for Catholics today. He affirmed that it had never been forbidden, implying strongly that it never could justly be forbidden. He instructed bishops to make generous use of it, and to allow any of their priests to say it if they were serving a stable group of faithful who requested it. Numerically, this tiny movement grew a great deal, but it also remains small. Perhaps 4 percent of Catholic parishes in the United States have a regular traditional Latin Mass.
In 2021, Pope Francis now revokes all this permission, because he says that the traditional Latin Mass threatens the unity of the Church and is being used to weaken adherence to the Second Vatican Council. (What this adherence consists of is maddeningly unclear, and always has been.) In the recent apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes, he takes the extraordinary step of requiring every diocesan priest to essentially “reapply for permission” to his bishop. He obliges the bishops to be suspicious of Catholic laymen and priests who like the traditional Latin Mass. He demands that bishops who want to expand its use to another parish in their diocese first get permission from Rome. It’s almost impossible to overstate how audacious and invasive this regime of micromanagement and heresy-hunting is. It’s clerical McCarthyism. And his vision is to see the celebration of the old Mass eventually abolished.
Stunning, sad, weird, baffling, vengeful, and crazy barely begin to describe this situation. But the main thing to point out is that it’s abusive and paranoid. Pope Francis is abusing a group of Catholics, most of whom do not harbor ill will toward him, and most of whom don’t have any real doubts or opposition to the Second Vatican Council. He’s doing so because a few handfuls of radical Traditionalist Catholics have criticized him, or opposed his efforts to “evolve” the faith once delivered to the saints. He’s doing this to this small band of zealous, faithful Catholics at precisely the moment that German bishops are openly contemplating a revolution in moral teaching in their nation.
It’s true that there are handfuls of crusty old “Traddy” Catholics like me, who do have reservations about the Second Vatican Council and the new liturgy. But, contra Francis, Benedict’s peace terms drastically diminished our influence. Or at least our influence on this point.
We became drowned out of our own Latin Mass movement by young people who largely didn’t care about our old battles about ecumenical councils. That seems healthy. The Council of Vienne’s 14th-century ranting about the Knights Templar, when read today, evokes little more than a mood you’d associate with Dungeons & Dragons. Similarly, the Second Vatican Council’s ruminations on nuclear arms, or on modern man’s relationship to community life, are about as riveting as a slow-motion stage-reading of Hair. Sure, this was once important to some septuagenarians out there, somewhere. But a sensible reader now can only marvel at the obscene amount of money spent on the travel and accommodations that were used to produce and exhibit this guff. It’s irrelevant to most people.
Two things are striking about the letter that accompanied Traditionis Custodes: its bitterness, and the ultimate emptiness of its arguments.
Francis writes:
I am nonetheless saddened that the instrumental use of Missale Romanum of 1962 is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’
As a factual matter, this is almost provably wrong. The majority of priests who say the traditional Latin Mass are now diocesan priests, serving in ordinary parishes. They almost all say the new liturgy, which is precisely the thing that Pope Francis deems proof of adherence to the Church.
Francis argues that the liturgical books of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II “constitute the unique expression of the lex orandi (law of prayer) of the Roman Rite.”
In 2007, Benedict XVI had proposed a rather legible principle for allowing the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” Francis’s principle for abolishing it is simply a word salad. What does “unique expression” even mean? It has no legal or theological substance or weight. It’s just a giant “because we said so.”
The bishops do have some power to at least preserve the permission that their priests already have to say this Mass. For now. But is this the Church progressives want? Constant henpecking and paranoia from Rome? There is so much more to say in the days and months ahead; for now it’s enough to say this is unseemly and ugly. This may be the most significant act of Francis’s pontificate; and it’s nothing more than bullying iconoclasm. He needs help.