Traditional Latin Mass Feud: What Will The Outcome Mean For The Future Of Catholicism?

(ANALYSIS) “What’s the deal with all the emotional meltdowns about the traditional Latin Mass? I mean, no one speaks Latin anymore.”

It sounds like a line that could have come out of the mouth of comedian Jerry Seinfeld during one of his stand-up acts. It isn’t part of his act, but it is a more than symbolic question that Catholics have been pondering over the past year.  

It was last summer when Pope Francis signed a “motu proprio” — Latin for a papal document personally signed by the pope to signify his special interest in a topic — on this very subject. In the July 16, 2021, decree, the pope approved clarifications regarding restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass in an effort to ensure that liturgical reform is “irreversible” and that bishops strive to enforce changes made after the Second Vatican Council.

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Specifically, bishops were told to ban ordinations of priests and confirmations using the old rite. They also were instructed to limit the frequency of rites by priests who have managed to receive a dispensation to celebrate Mass in Latin.

What’s the deal with the traditional Latin Mass? It turns out, a lot.

The Novus Ordo Mass, which has been celebrated since 1965, is the norm among Catholic churches in this country and around the globe. Coverage, particularly last year, of the traditional Latin Mass took on a political twinge in the pages of The New York Times. This is how its story from July 16 of last year framed the debate:

Pope Francis took a significant step toward putting the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgy solidly on the side of modernization on Friday by cracking down on the use of the old Latin Mass, essentially reversing a decision by his conservative predecessor.

The move to restrict the use of an old Latin rite in celebrating Mass dealt a blow to conservatives, who have long complained that the pope is diluting the traditions of the church.

Francis placed new restrictions on where and by whom the traditional Latin Mass can be celebrated and required new permissions from local bishops for its use.

The key words to look for in mainstream news reports are “modernization” and “conservative,” as if this pope were doing something positive and that former Pope Benedict XVI had been somehow stuck in the past. This is how the press generally champions Francis, but this issue is a bit more nuanced and, as some of the recent coverage reveals, not really political (see this podcast and tmatt post on that topic).

Here’s some background: The Roman Missal, the book containing the text and instructions for the celebration of the Mass, dates back to 1970 and was put into effect after the Second Vatican Council.

News coverage of this topic, over the past year and in recent weeks, has been sparse — while the Catholic internet has been on fire.

This is where a news organization having a regular on the religion beat would be extremely useful. Instead, we have sporadic coverage of this issue and limited largely to when the pope is asked about it by reporters or when the Vatican issues a document about it.

That limits the voices in news stories — often to the pope or church officials — and does little to explain the issue to non-Catholics and even Catholics who don’t normally attend Mass where the traditional Latin rite is used. Catholic media, as is often the case with such topics, has done a much better job.  

Nonetheless, this is an issue that matters to those who attend the traditional Latin Mass and goes to the very heart of the battle between Pope Francis’ progressive reforms and those who identify as traditional Catholics. 

The issue has come to light once again 13 months later because bishops at the local levels are now starting to limit its use. Again, news coverage has been scant, but there’s lots we can learn from the attention the traditional Latin Mass has received.

The issue became part of the news cycle in some parts of the country, specifically Washington, D.C., after Cardinal Wilton Gregory started to enact Francis’ decree. This is how The Washington Post opened its well-reported July 24 story:

Standing before his parishioners holding the sacred bread of Communion in his hands, Father Vincent De Rosa, the pastor of St. Mary Mother of God Parish, solemnly intoned in Latin, “Ecce Agnus Dei.”

The English translation of those words: Behold the lamb of God.

Those kneeling in the church responded with ancient words of their own, “Domine, non sum dignus.” Lord, I am not worthy.

An air of earnest contemplation hung over Sunday Mass, tinged by sadness.

This would be one of the last weeks the church’s parishioners would be able to celebrate using a traditional Latin form that traces its roots back more than a millennium.

Last year, prompted by ideological wars between conservative and liberal wings, Pope Francis said he wanted to limit use of the old Latin form of Mass.

This week, the consequences of that papal letter — issued halfway across the world — landed here in Washington with heavy consequences for this small parish in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood.  

By Sept. 21, the parish was told, they were to cease use of the Latin rituals that had been part of St. Mary’s history almost since its founding in 1845.

Friday’s local decree, written by Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who oversees the archdiocese of Washington, allows only three non-parish churches in the region to perform the Latin Rite. That means hundreds of Catholics who attend that type of Mass at roughly six parishes in the D.C. area — including St. Mary Mother of God — will be forced to overhaul their ritual or abandon their spiritual homes to attend the three locations in the area allowed to perform it.

The news account would go on to include interviews with parishioners upset with the decision now that it had hit home. Francis’ argument for reversing a course that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, had endorsed remains this big idea — that the Latin Mass had become a wedge issue in the Catholic culture wars between traditionalists and progressives.

Has it? This is how the piece ends:

Roughly 60 percent of the church’s collection money comes from parishioners who attend its 9 a.m. Latin mass on Sundays, said Sylvester Giustino, who serves on the parish finance council.

“I do worry about our parish and what happens in September,” he said. “I’m planning to stay. St. Mary has become a home to me. But for others who leave, I can understand that too. We’re not just losing the Latin Mass. We are going to be losing a lot of families and people who have been part of this community for years.”

If anything, this fair account of the situation put into focus what the Latin Mass means to so many, but also what it will do in regard to parish coffers in the future.

The city’s other newspaper, the conservative Washington Times, took a more blunt approach to the story in a July 26 opinion piece under the headline, “‘Woke’ Pope Francis bans ‘divisive’ Latin Mass” by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., founder and editor-in-chief of the politically conservative publication The American Spectator. This is what he argued:

Pope Francis is up to his old tricks again. He has banned the Latin Mass. Beginning this autumn Roman Catholics will be greeted every Sunday — and for the truly devout every day — with the modern post-Vatican II Mass. They will have no alternative. The Latin Mass has been put out of commission. Did you know it was divisive? I did not know that, but Francis did, and now he is banning it in a move that is meant, he says, to increase global unity. That is to say, the pope is going to unite Catholics by banning an alternative mass that has been practiced by millions of the faithful for centuries. Possibly the pope will decree that Catholics goose-step into Sunday services or better yet wear uniforms.

Actually, I did not know that I was making a political statement on those rare occasions when I attended Latin Mass. I just thought I was going to a particularly decorative and dignified mass, hoping to get some exposure to the Gregorian chant that dates back to the ninth century with some beautiful choral music thrown in. From now on I shall consider the political consequences of my choice of mass, and if that offends the head of the Roman Catholic Church I apologize, but he brought the subject up. Moreover, he audaciously injected politics into where I choose to go to Mass.

I have always thought that my friends who have insisted that Francis is a liberal or even a socialist were being a bit extreme. I thought it was unfair to stigmatize the pope in this way, but by eliminating an alternative form of worship — not even for theological reasons but for the sake of conformity — that certainly sounds like cancel culture to me. What would you call a man who practices cancel culture but a man of the left?

In the newspaper’s news story posted four days earlier, there were no interviews with people pro or con the Latin Mass. Instead, it provided these nuggets of information:

Traditionalist Catholics have blasted Francis’ move as a clampdown on worship that attracts many faithful, including young adults, a cohort often found leaving religion.

How great an impact this will have on the majority of Roman Catholics in the D.C. area, let alone the U.S., remains unclear. In a 2021 survey, the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of U.S. Catholics had heard “nothing at all” about Francis’ restrictions on the traditional rite.

Of those who had heard about the change, 9% said they approved of the pope’s move, and 12% disapproved, with 14% holding “no opinion.”

For a real taste of what the Latin Mass means for Catholics, but also society in general, Michael Brenden Dougherty’s analysis in National Review offered plenty of crucial insights, and it could be jumping off point for editors and reporters looking sources and themes as they cover this story. Here’s his major takeaway:

A few non-Catholic Christians have reached out to me and asked: Why do Catholic leaders hate the Latin Mass? Others have posed the opposite question: “Why do you like it?” (I’ve been attending a TLM for 20 years.)

There are superficial answers to these questions that would be easy for most other Christians to understand. There is generational conflict in every church. Pope Francis and many of his peers were formed in a Church they desperately believed needed to modernize to appeal to modern people. Often for understandable reasons, they associated the TLM and other traditional practices with spiritual aridness and rigidity. They felt that the Second Vatican Council and the reformed liturgy that emerged in the 1970s liberated them and the Church. Younger generations were bound to question this, wishing to reconnect with the vast artistic and devotional treasury that was built around and upon the TLM, from Gregorian chant to the polyphony of Thomas Tallis and the compositions of Claudio Monteverdi and Mozart.

At some point, however, conflicts are — to some degree — rooted in clashes over doctrine and theology.

The modern Catholic liturgy and the TLM are not just two styles of the same thing. The modern liturgy is not a direct translation of the old. It changes the vast majority of the TLM’s prayers and readings, as well as much of the TLM’s ritual. And these changes implicate the most basic truths of Catholicism and Christianity itself. We often say in the church, “Lex orandi, lex credendi”: The law of prayer is the law of belief. How we worship determines what we believe.

Broadly, there were two lines of thinking that informed the creation of the New Mass. One was motivated by ecumenism. Reformers had genuine hopes that “our separated brethren” in other Christian denominations would reunite with the Catholic Church once the New Mass was implemented. Critics of the reformed liturgy such as Cardinal Ottaviani noticed that it systematically suppressed Catholic belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. In this Ottaviani was guarding peculiarly Catholic doctrines from revision and change, most important among them the idea that the Holy Mass is the same one-for-all sacrifice Christ made on Calvary. As Ottaviani himself wrote, the New Mass “does not, in a word, imply any of the essential dogmatic values of the Mass which together provide its true definition. Here the deliberate omission of these dogmatic values amounts to their having been superseded and therefore, at least in practice, to their denial.”

As noted earlier, coverage of debates about the traditional Latin Mass has been extensive in the Catholic press, where activists on both the doctrinal left and right are often at play,

The National Catholic Register, on the doctrinal right, published this great primer loaded with numbers, statistics and locations — all of which are helpful for reporters looking to write about this issue as either a national trend story or one focused on their local churches. The piece even includes a wonderful tool, linking to an online tracker, a website called Traditionis Custodes — which calculates where traditional Latin Masses are celebrated.

Over at Crux, the site did a great job, as it typically does, reporting what’s happening in Rome that ultimately affects churches across the globe. This is what it reported on Aug. 5:

While Pope Francis was on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Canada last week, most of the focus was on his effort to heal historic wounds with Indigenous peoples related to Canada’s residential school system. The hope is that the Catholic Church can turn over a new leaf – rather than represent an assault on Indigenous cultures and traditions, it will help to defend and preserve them.

Now, only days after returning to Rome, attention has turned to the remarks the pope made in Canada out of the spotlight, about the church’s own tradition, especially the liturgy and the ongoing battle over the Traditional Latin Mass.

“It is important to have respect for tradition, the authentic one,” Francis said, speaking to members of the Jesuit order in Canada during a private conversation July 29. He described tradition as “the living memory of believers,” whereas “traditionalism” means “the dead life of our believers.”

Tradition, the pope said, “is the life of those who have gone before us and who go on. Traditionalism is their dead memory. From root to fruit, in short, that is the way.”

It’s true that papal trips are easy to cover, for newsrooms with the resources to do that.

The ongoing issue of the Latin Mass, at the local level? That’s hard and complicated, and key players have much to lose if they are quoted. There are resources out there and past news articles that can guide reporters and editors looking to get into this ongoing story that affects so many people but also focuses a spotlight on this papacy and so many issues that divide Catholics at the moment.  

This post originally ran at GetReligion.