The memories are still vivid, even though it was a long time ago. Having been born in 1956, I’m just old enough to remember the confusing and tumultuous era of “the changes” that came after the Second Vatican Council, particularly regarding the Mass. One elderly couple in my neighborhood mused aloud to my teenaged self that it was like the father not being home and the children playing how ever they liked.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the full gamut of Church teaching, from morality to the exercise of authority to dogmatic truths of the faith, were doubted and even outright denied—and religious vocations plummeted. The old maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (to which some have added lex vivendi) proves itself true all the time. The era of the “liturgy wars” was not about rearranging ornamentation; at a time of confusion and dissent in all areas of Church life, it was foundational to all that happened.
We seemed at one point in the recent past to have come to a peaceful coexistence with what Pope Benedict referred to as the two forms of the Roman Rite, after he issued his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. However, after Traditionis Custodes and then the even more severe restrictions from the Dicastery for Divine Worship on the celebration of the Roman Rite according to the 1962 Missal, the liturgy wars have been revived. While liturgy was not a focus of the cardinals in the conclave that elected Pope Francis after the resignation of Pope Benedict, it will undoubtedly be a central focus in this upcoming one.
With all of the issues facing the Church at this time, none is more important than how we worship. God created us for worshipping him. Divine worship, if it is truly to deserve the name “divine,” relies on a sense of the sacred, which in turn springs from the sacramental vision of reality: Physical reality mediates and makes present the spiritual, transcendent reality lying beyond it. If we lose this, we lose everything.
And there have been losses. There can be no argument that the very visible loss of the sense of the sacred in the way we worship is a fundamental cause (even if not the only one) of the massive disaffiliation of young people from the Church. According to a 2015 Pew Research study, 40 percent of adults who say they were raised Catholic have left the Church. And it is not getting better. A 2023 survey of 5600 people found that “Catholics have experienced the largest decline in affiliation of any religious group.”
Clearly not enough young people are meeting Jesus in the Eucharist; otherwise, they would not be abandoning him for other religious experiences or losing faith in God altogether. And just as clearly, the hunger for tradition among the next generation of Catholics who do remain is palpable.
As Francis X. Rocca wrote on April 9 in The Atlantic:
In 2023, Cranney and Stephen Bullivant, a sociologist of religion, surveyed Catholics and found that half expressed interest in attending a Latin Mass. . . . Perhaps counterintuitively, this return to tradition seems to be led by young Catholics, who make up a disproportionate share of Latin Mass devotees. According to a recent survey . . . 44 percent of Catholics who attended the old rite at least once a month were under the age of 45, compared with only 20 percent of other members of those parishes.
This rings true to me. Most of the devout young Catholics I meet grow up with the typical parish fare on Sundays, only later discovering the beauty of our authentic Catholic liturgical patrimony. Their reaction? Wonder, mixed with anger. They tell me—and this is a literal, word-for-word quote—“I’ve been deprived of my Catholic birthright.”
Pope Francis’s purpose in issuing Traditionis Custodes was to unite the Church in one form of worship. It has to be admitted that having two forms of the Mass for the universal Church is anomalous in the history of the Church. In reality, though, there are not simply two “forms” of the Mass, but a whole variety of forms due to priests taking liberties to do things their own way in violation of the liturgical norms—a clear vulnerability of the ordering of the Mass currently in force, and one that risks bringing great harm to souls.
Now we have extremely divergent forms of the Roman Rite. A video of a German priest rapping at the Mass recently went viral. On the other hand, for example, there’s the Mass of the Americas, which I celebrated as a Solemn High Pontifical Latin Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., in November 2019.
Many good and devout Catholics upset by the liturgical confusion blame “Vatican II.” It would take a whole other article to explain what people mean by that term, but for now, it is necessary to distinguish three levels at which the Council was and continues to be operative: (1) the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council themselves; (2) the documents on their implementation, which among themselves are of different levels of authority (the Roman pontiff, the dicasteries of the Holy See, national conferences of bishops, and individual bishops in their own dioceses); and (3) the way the Council was actually implemented in our parishes and other faith communities. The problems that erupted after the Council lie at those lower levels, which took advantage of certain ambiguities in those sixteen documents rather than reading them in continuity with the tradition that led up to them. For example, the movement to renew and revitalize the sacred liturgy had been gaining momentum for decades before Vatican II, and so Sacrosanctum Concilium must be read as giving further impetus and direction to this movement, especially with regard to active participation of the assembly, and not diverging from it.
The critical point that concretized the sense of rupture in the liturgical tradition was the historically unprecedented decision to convene a committee of scholars to dramatically rewrite the liturgy and impose it on the entire Catholic world in a top-down fashion. Again, I’m old enough to remember when that happened, and to remember the resistance of more well-seasoned Catholics in the pews. But Catholics were more obedient to their pastors in those days, and they accepted changes they didn’t like, ones that seemed even to contradict what they had been taught about the Catholic faith for their whole lives.
Many of us understand that this is a problem that needs to be fixed. But we must not make the same methodological mistake: The sense of ruptured unity in the liturgy cannot be healed by simply imposing a new set of rules from above. Instead, now is an opportune time to revive Pope Benedict XVI’s vision for healing this breach, an “interior reconciliation” of the two forms of the Roman Rite (as he put it in his letter Con Grande Fiducia to bishops on the publication of Summorum Pontificum). His genius with Summorum Pontificum was to create a third way to liturgical reform by permitting the free use of the pre-conciliar Roman Missal, thereby allowing these two expressions of the same Latin Rite to influence each other in a way that would be “mutually enriching.” And we are already beginning to see a sort of cross-fertilization of these two forms of Catholic worship in parishes that celebrate both of them: Parishioners typically will experience both, even while retaining a preference for one over the other. That is why it is a mistake to try to sequester off those who are devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass, as if they were a danger to the faith of the vast majority of their fellow Catholics.
This points to what Pope Benedict foresaw when we allow the two forms to co-exist: a process of true mutual enrichment, in which each form influences the other. And, in my own personal experience, I see how this is already beginning to happen. For example, preaching at a Traditional Latin Mass—a least for priests who celebrate both forms—will typically center on the readings. Before the Council, however, preaching was seen as more of an extra-liturgical action, and so something added onto the Mass and, therefore, not necessarily related to the liturgical texts. It was Vatican II that saw the homily as being integral to the liturgy and so exhorted preachers to preach from the Scriptural and liturgical texts of the particular Mass being celebrated. I also notice that, at celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass, more and more people in the pews pray their parts of the Mass and sing the responses and the chants of the Mass Ordinary in Latin. This reflects the desire of the faithful to understand the texts and rites of the Mass and to be actively involved in it. While this kind of active participation was encouraged, and even growing, well before the Council, it has now become more commonplace thanks to habituation received in the revised Order of Mass. The essential point here is that these changes are happening organically, not by fiat, and so they contribute to an authentic development of Catholic worship.
Summorum Pontificum largely put an end to the liturgy wars in the lived experience of United States Catholics, a process that Pope Benedict XVI foresaw as continuing: “The most sure guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI can unite parish communities and be loved by them consists in its being celebrated with great reverence in harmony with the liturgical directives. This will bring out the spiritual richness and the theological depth of this Missal.”
Calls from every post-conciliar pope, from Paul VI to Francis, to correct liturgical abuses and sloppiness have had practically no effect in the lived experience of Catholics in the pews. Something more needs to be done. A comfortable familiarity with the Traditional Latin Mass has great potential for serving this purpose. It also provides a path forward that avoids the hermeneutic of rupture, something else that Pope Benedict pointed out: “There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. 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.” He then goes on to apply this logic to help us understand the true meaning of organic development: “It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”
Such a continuity in the development of the liturgy clearly stands out from reading the conciliar and post-conciliar documents on the liturgy in light of the received tradition. For example, Sacrosanctum Concilium says nothing about changing the orientation of the altar. In fact, the current edition of the Roman Missal directs the priest to turn and face the people at three points during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, clearly presuming that he and the assembly are facing in the same direction: “ad orientem,” facing (liturgical) east, east being the source of light and a symbol of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, which dispels the darkness of sin and death, as well as of his return in glory. The east is also symbolic of paradise since, at creation, God put the Garden in the east (Gen. 2:8).
Because the need is so urgent, I invited select cardinals and brother bishops along with prominent theologians and lay leaders to contribute to the Fons et Culmen Liturgy Summit, which will take place July 1–4 at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California. Cardinal Sarah, a shining light among prelates who understand the importance of recovering the sacred in our liturgical practices, will be there. So will Seán Cardinal O’Malley, whom I invited to speak about how important the order and beauty of Mass can be to the souls and psyches of the poor, whose environments are so often marked by chaos and ugliness. Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith has long been a leader in urging Pope Benedict’s vision and will offer valuable insights on his understanding of actuosa participatio (active participation).
I am convinced that the future of liturgical renewal requires listening and responding to the felt needs of all the people of God, including those who have been inspired to love Jesus by the beauty and order of the Traditional Latin Mass. Its organic development from ancient times reflects our deep roots in the worship and practices of our Jewish ancestors in the faith. The high altar under the canopy descends directly from the design of the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, which was reminiscent of the Jewish bridal chamber: The Mass is the consummation of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. Also, after finishing the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the priest ascends to the high altar with a prayer acknowledging this continuity of the two Covenants: “Take away from us our iniquities, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that we may be worthy to enter with pure minds into the Holy of Holies.”
What is classically Catholic is not nostalgic or backward but timeless. This is how it attains the status of classical: It has withstood the test of time, and speaks to all ages and cultures, including our own.
The path of interior reconciliation is the antidote to both the schismatic and the bureaucratic impulse, providing the healing remedy for rupture and a catalyst for the restoration of the sacred, as Pope Benedict XVI envisioned. But for this to happen organically, it will take a long time—generations, perhaps even centuries. We cannot sit down and chart out the course; it has to come from the lived experience of the people. Thus, we cannot predetermine which treasures of the two forms will be retained and integrated into one form: the Scripture readings in the vernacular from the ambo? The Canon recited in silence? The old offertory prayers restored? Priest and people praying the Our Father together, and making together the response before Communion, “Domine, non sum dignus” (“Lord I am not worthy”)? We don’t know. Only time will tell. And that is how it is supposed to work.
Let us have enough confidence in the wisdom of the Second Vatican Council to no longer fear the Mass as it was celebrated before—and during—that Council. Let us instead take confidence from tradition. Tradition is a protective: It provides reliability, predictability; it protects us from the wiles and personal preferences and likes and dislikes of whoever is in charge, be it the pope, the bishop, the priest celebrating the Mass, the musicians planning and singing the music at Mass, the local liturgy coordinator, and so forth. In other words, tradition guarantees that we are all equal, equal servants and observers of the tradition we have received, and not at the mercy of the arbitrary judgments of whoever happens to be in charge at a particular time and place.
Let us, then, treasure the tradition as we have received it, and so from it learn who we are as the people of God: connected transcendently in the communion of saints not only across space but indeed across time, today and for all eternity.