Traditional Latin Mass successfully coexists with the Church remaining faithful to the Pope and Rome

 

As Pope Leo faces traditionalists’ schism, a Minnesota church merges old customs with fidelity

By:  GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO

July 3, 2026

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — With incense wafting to an elevated pulpit and 13 altar boys looking on, the priest at the Church of Saint Agnes preached about merging old Catholic customs with fidelity to the Vatican this week — as Pope Leo XIV tackled a major challenge from a traditionalist breakaway group.

“Our Catholic faith is a living tradition, and there is a difference between being rooted and being stuck,” the Rev. John Ubel said in homilies Sunday at English-language and Latin Masses.

Since the Second Vatican Council modernized the liturgy more than 60 years ago, celebrating Mass in the traditional Latin Rite that preceded those reforms has become a lightning rod of the theological, cultural and increasingly partisan divides among Catholics.

The conflict made global headlines when Leo declared Thursday that one traditionalist group — the Society of St. Pius X, founded to reject the Council’s reforms and celebrate exclusively the old Latin Mass — had formally broken with the Catholic Church.

The Vatican excommunicated the SSPX bishops and priests and warned its thousands of faithful after the society consecrated four men as bishops in defiance of Leo.

While the Latin Rite was not the cause of the rift, the acrimony and the lingering suspicion that all those who like it are ultraconservative rebels is an open wound at Saint Agnes, which isn’t affiliated with SSPX and has the church’s permission to celebrate Mass in Latin.

“For all who are attached to Tradition, I pray that they seek to maintain full ecclesial communion with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV,” Ubel said Thursday.

A congregation continues to pray for unity

Saint Agnes, a historic church founded for German-speaking immigrants in what’s now a diverse, central neighborhood in Minnesota’s capital, offers one traditional Latin Mass per weekend, with the archbishop’s permission. It also has a modern version of the Mass in Latin and four in English.

“I believe that Saint Agnes is an example where the different forms of Latin Mass, and English, peacefully coexist, and, in many ways, I think it’s a model for how the church can respect various liturgical traditions and do so in full charity,” Ubel said in Sunday’s homilies.

Peter Draganowski, a 15-year-old incoming sophomore at Saint Agnes’ school, has been an altar boy at both English and Latin services for years. He prefers the latter despite the extra preparations and rituals.

“It’s really not hard, it just has a lot more moving parts,” he said in the parish hall as hot dogs and doughnuts were served after Sunday’s first English Mass. “The sacred mysteries deserve that beauty.”

The archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Bernard Hebda, expressed hope that local Catholics who had been attending SSPX chapels would now turn to approved services.

“We are blessed that the same traditional Eucharistic liturgy beloved by those who have worshiped with the SSPX in the past continues to be celebrated in six locations throughout the Archdiocese,” Hebda said in a statement. “I am confident that those who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass could find a home here.”

Latin Mass supporters are a small but vocal group

In addition to being celebrated in Latin, the old rite Mass diverges from standard services in other ways: The prayers are different and longer, the priest celebrates at the altar with his back to the congregation, and Communion is given out only on the recipient’s tongue, instead of in the hand, while kneeling at the altar rail. The priests also wear shorter “Roman-style” vestments and a black biretta hat.

Very few U.S. Catholics regularly attend Sunday Mass in the “extraordinary form” that predates the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s, according to Stephen Cranney, a lecturer at Catholic University of America in Washington, and co-author of an upcoming book on the Latin Mass in the United States.

He estimates that 510 such Masses are celebrated on Sundays in the United States, where there are more than 16,000 active parishes. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate said they don’t track the data.

Most American Catholics he surveyed who like this Mass say they do so because of the elaborate esthetics, the deeper sense of reverence, and the continuity with centuries of tradition, Cranney said. Only a small percentage said they oppose the Vatican II reforms, let alone support defying the pope, he added.

But the challenge has remained over the decades for popes that the threat of schism, or a rupture within the church, might lurk behind a preference for a more solemn liturgy.

“How do you … try to be accommodating to the people who might prefer the traditional Latin Mass while not giving fuel to the fire of people that want to split off?” Cranney said.

Two popes have taken different approaches

Leo’s two predecessors tried different approaches. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI upheld the validity of the Latin Rite and urged priests to offer such a Mass if their parishioners demanded it.

But Pope Francis cracked down on the practice in 2021-23, requiring individual bishops to give their approval for celebrating the traditional Mass and to determine if the faithful who wanted it had accepted the Vatican II reforms. He also restricted the use of parish churches for these services.

Francis said he acted because the old Mass had become a source of division in the church — although Vatican documents leaked last year after his death suggested most bishops actually had expressed general satisfaction with the practice.

Last fall, Leo allowed a U.S. cardinal to celebrate the old Latin Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, which many traditionalists saw as an encouraging sign.

In the year since his election, Leo has spoken often of the need for unity. On Tuesday, before the SSPX consecrations, he again pleaded with the society not to proceed. Once they did, however, the Vatican warned the faithful to stop going to the society’s Masses, declaring “those who adhere formally” to the society are considered themselves schismatic and excommunicated.

“Not a competition” – Minnesota traditional Catholics hope to model a way forward

Parishioners at Saint Agnes said they were saddened by the schism and would continue to pray for a united church.

Nell O’Leary Alt, who grew up in the parish, said her family attends both Latin Masses, as well as English services.

As a mother of five children aged 5 to 16, she joked that she initially found the silent moments of the traditional Latin Mass intimidating, with nothing to cover the fussing and giggling of her growing family in the pews.

But they love the Latin worship: “It’s the same the saints knew all through the ages.”

Tom Graff, another “cradle Catholic” at the church who chants in the choir, said he’s drawn to the rites’ solemnity. But this week’s events highlight the importance of what he teaches his four children, about not falling into the trap of believing one form of worship is superior to another.

“I can appreciate both the ordinary and the extraordinary forms of Latin Mass, and Schubert’s Tantum Ergo as well as On Eagle’s Wings,” Graff said, referring to a centuries-old and a modern Christian hymn. “It’s about the holy sacrifice of Mass, regardless of the parish or the type of liturgy.”

Ubel believes having multiple Mass options is about inclusion rather than division.

“It’s not a competition to see who’s more Catholic,” he said.

Vatican sends instructions to Bishops on how to welcome back SSPX members who want to return to Catholic Church

 

Facade of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith 

Vatican

• catholic church
• dicastery
• faith

Lefebvrite priests and lay faithful: Procedure to return to Catholic communion

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has sent a communication to bishops around the world outlining what must be done to welcome back those who decide to leave the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X following the schismatic act that led to excommunication.

Vatican News

Following the schismatic act of July 1, a return to Catholic communion will not require repeating the experience of special commissions, such as Ecclesia Dei in the past, because the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has already established a procedure for both priests and lay faithful, directly involving diocesan Ordinaries and the leaders of the fraternities that follow the ancient rite and are united with Rome.

The instructions are being transmitted in these days through Apostolic Nunciatures, as already announced in the Explanatory Note published by the Dicastery on July 2.

Reconciliation for priests

The procedure set out by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, beginning on July 1, 2026, provides that a priest who has decided to leave the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X — and who is willing to accept the Second Vatican Council and the legitimacy of the Novus Ordo Missae, while remaining attached to the ancient rite — must “find an Ordinary — a diocesan Bishop, a Major Superior of clerical religious institutes of pontifical right or of clerical societies of apostolic life of pontifical right, etc. — willing to receive him ad experimentum.”

The priest must then “write by hand a letter to the Holy Father in which he presents himself and asks for the remission of the censures incurred because of the ordination he received from an excommunicated or irregular Bishop, or because, having been validly and legitimately ordained, he subsequently became a member of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X.”

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Profession of faith and Formula of adherence

The priest must also attach his certificate of priestly ordination and enclose, signed and dated, “the Professio fidei and the Formula adhaesionis.”

These are the Profession of Faith, which summarizes the content of the Catholic faith, and the Formula of Adherence, by which the priest promises fidelity to the Pope and commits himself not to attack him or his magisterium publicly.

He must accept the teaching of number 25 of the conciliar Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium on adherence to the Church’s magisterium. He must also declared that he considers the celebration of Mass according to the rites promulgated by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II to be valid, and that he adheres to the norms of the Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope John Paul II.

The priest must have these documents — the letter with the certificate, the Profession, and the Formula of Adherence — sent by the Ordinary, “who will state in the accompanying letter his willingness to receive him ad experimentum in his Diocese or Institute.”

As soon as it receives the documents from the Ordinary, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith will draw up a Rescript remitting the censures and authorizing the Ordinary to receive the priest making the request “for a probationary period of at least one year and no more than three, at the end of which his incardination may proceed.”

Reconciliation for lay faithful

The procedure, the Dicastery explained, “concerns the question of imputability, or the degree of subjective responsibility, of lay faithful who have formally adhered to, or who attend, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X and who ask to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.”

It notes that the imposition of a penalty on lay people belonging to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X, in fact, “cannot be presumed automatically, but must be assessed case by case.”

“Since imputability requires full awareness and deliberate consent,” the document of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith states, examples of proven imputability may include “lay people who belong to the Third Order of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X; lay people who habitually participate in celebrations of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X and formally share its doctrinal positions.”

The procedure to be followed

The procedure to be followed for lay people belonging to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X on whom a penalty has been imposed, and who ask to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, “implies a formal act of full adherence to Catholic doctrine and obedience to the Catholic hierarchy, under the jurisdiction of the local Ordinary, who is the guarantor of the unity of the particular Church.”

Therefore, a lay member of the faithful who has decided to leave the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X must present to his or her bishop the Professio fidei and the Formula adhaesionis, dated and signed.

“Once the documentation has been obtained, the local Ordinary will see to welcoming the lay member of the faithful at the times and in the manner, he deems most appropriate.”

Lay faithful who are not imputable

The document specifies that the following “are not to be considered imputable: lay people who have attended the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X only for liturgical or spiritual reasons; lay people who, while aware of the tensions with the Holy See, do not reject the Magisterium or the authority of the Roman Pontiff.”

As regards these latter cases, it will be sufficient for them to approach “a priest in full communion, with the decision not to attend the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X in the future.”

Changes in the Mass has happened often over time

 

From the Latin Mass to the Novus Ordo: How Did the Mass Change?

Among the most notable changes was the allowance of the use of modern, local languages in the Mass.

Daniel Payne/CNAFeaturesAugust 4, 2024

Catholics and even non-Catholics around the world have recently been imploring Pope Francis to refrain from implementing a rumored ban on the Tridentine Mass, also known as the traditional Latin Mass (TLM).

The Vatican has imposed restrictions on the TLM in recent years, with the Holy Father arguing that the centuries-old Latin Mass was being used in “an ideological way” by Catholics.

Rumors have circulated recently that the Vatican is preparing to impose an even stricter ban on the liturgy. A broad coalition of Catholics and non-Catholic advocates, both from the Americas and from Europe, have implored Francis to allow the TLM to continue. 

A Mexican archbishop emeritus, meanwhile, recently urged Pope Francis not to ban the ancient form, begging him: “Do not allow this to happen.”

What changed between liturgies?

The Tridentine Mass has long held a prominent place not just in Church history but in wider culture; many non-Catholics are familiar with its ornate liturgical processes, its high solemnity, and its use of ancient music, bells and incense. 

The official form of the Mass was codified following the Council of Trent in the 16th century. It remained the dominant form of Catholic liturgical worship until the promulgation of the Mass of Paul VI — also known as the Novus Ordo or the “Ordinary Form” — in 1969. (The TLM is also referred to as the “extraordinary form.”)

Among the most notable changes to the Mass was the allowance of “the vernacular” in the liturgy. Whereas the TLM is celebrated in the ancient Latin language, the novus ordo allows for the use of modern, local languages in the Mass. 

Jesuit Father John Baldovin, a professor of historical and liturgical theology at Boston College, told CNA that the linguistic revisions of the Mass stemmed from “a pastoral liturgical movement which sought to increase the people’s active participation in the liturgy.”

This “led to a desire for a liturgy in the language of the people,” he said. 

The Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy notes that “in Masses which are celebrated with the people, a suitable place may be allotted to their mother tongue.” 

The document does stipulate that “steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them.”

Advocates have claimed that permitting liturgies in vernacular languages allows for the faithful to become “actively engaged in the rite and enriched by its effects,” as the Second Vatican Council put it. 

Others have argued that the Latin language allows for a more constant and enriching liturgy.  Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze has written that the ancient and unchanging language “fits a Church which is universal, a Church in which all peoples, languages, and cultures should feel at home and no one is regarded as a stranger.”

Another major change was the allowance for priests to celebrate the Mass facing the congregation.

The Tridentine Rite dictated that the priest face ad orientem, or “to the east”; the current General Instruction on the Roman Missal, however, directs that it is “desirable whenever possible” that the celebrant faces the people.

In 2000, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, then-prefect of the then-Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, clarified that “the position toward the assembly seems more convenient inasmuch as it makes communication easier,” but that the present missal does not exclude facing ad orientem.

The priest’s facing toward the people remains the dominant celebration of the Mass today. Cardinal Estevez noted that the “spiritual orientation” of the act of worship should be distinguished from the priest’s physical direction. 

“If the priest celebrates versus populum, which is legitimate and often advisable, his spiritual attitude ought always to be versus Deum per Jesus Christum [‘toward God through Jesus Christ’], as representative of the entire Church,” he wrote.

Jimmy Akin, a senior apologist at Catholic Answers and Register contributor, told CNA that another major change was “the expansion of the liturgical readings from a single-year cycle to a three-year cycle for Sundays and holy days and a two-year cycle for other days.” 

“The new cycles also include a reading from the Old Testament, which was mostly absent from pre-Vatican II readings,” he said.

These cycles “do not cover every passage in the Bible,” he noted, but “the change was made to give the faithful a broader exposure to the contents of Scripture.”

Akin noted that the Church has periodically issued changes to the liturgy over the centuries. 

“There have always been minor revisions to the rites of Mass, such as the Leonine Prayers or ‘Prayers After Mass’ that were added to the celebration of low Masses by Leo XIII in 1884,” he said.

Other changes in the Novus Ordo arose from less direct yet still consequential revisions.

The ornate vestments and solemn processions of the Tridentine Mass, for instance, have faded in favor of much more simplified liturgical trappings. 

The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy directed that “the rites are to be simplified” and that “elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded.”

Though many ancient elements of the liturgy were discarded in the revised missal, several other notable practices were restored, including the “Prayers of the Faithful” and the Penitential Act.

Those elements of the liturgy had “suffered injury through accidents of history,” the Council noted, and were “now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers.”

Parish Pastor and Parochial Vicar dismissed by Bishop for teaching the irrelevancy of the Novus Ordo Mass

 

Kentucky bishop dismisses priests who derided novus ordo Mass as ‘irrelevant’

By Daniel Payne

CNA Staff, Jan 25, 2024 / 11:30 am

A Kentucky bishop this month announced the dismissal of two priests who he said had repeatedly denigrated the modern form of the holy sacrifice of the Mass in their parish. 

Covington Bishop John Iffert said in a letter to members of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Park Hills, Kentucky, that he had requested the resignation of parish pastor Father Shannon Collins while ordering the removal of parochial vicar Father Sean Kopczynski.

Iffert said he removed the priests — both members of the Missionaries of St. John the Baptist — after developing “serious concerns” about their pastoral leadership. The parish on its website says it is “home to the Traditional Latin Mass Parish for the Diocese of Covington.”

Iffert wrote that he had ordered the dismissals “after becoming aware that Father Collins had preached in the parish that the holy sacrifice of the Mass, as celebrated in the current Roman Catholic liturgy, is ‘irrelevant,’ preserves ‘literally nothing of the old,’ and that the reform of the liturgy was motivated by hatred towards traditional Catholics and the ancient liturgies of Rome.”

Both priests “maintain these errors and refuse the opportunity to renounce them,” the bishop said. “This disqualifies them from being granted permission to publicly celebrate the sacraments using the 1962 Missale Romanum and from leading a personal parish like Our Lady of Lourdes.”

“I did not take this action lightly,” the bishop said. “I consulted with the vicar general, the deans, the judicial vicar, and brother bishops before determining the action I must take in this situation.”

Iffert wrote that he intends “to provide for the pastoral and liturgical care” of the parish, although he noted there were “obstacles” to that goal, including that the Missionaries of St. John the Baptist own the building and are “no longer willing to permit the diocese or Our Lady of Lourdes Parish to use the building.” 

The bishop said he was exploring other locations for the parish’s liturgies.

“You are in my constant prayer as I work to resolve these difficulties and provide faithful and true pastoral leadership for Our Lady of Lourdes Parish,” the bishop told the parish. 

On its website, the parish says that “at this time there will be no public Masses, confessions, or other sacramental rituals offered at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Park Hills for the foreseeable future per order of His Excellency Bishop John Iffert.” 

“Other arrangements are being made for a future location for the Latin Mass and for a priestly ministry to the flock of this personal parish,” the website says. 

The missionaries, meanwhile, said on their own website that they “seek to be teachers of truth” and “have never, to the best of their knowledge, promoted any errors in regard to the holy faith or taught anything contrary to the perennial Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

The dismissed priests, meanwhile, said they “accept the limitations placed on their ministry and pray that a swift resolution to this difficulty may be found.” 

Essay on the ongoing fight between Pope Francis and the movement supporting the T.L.M.

 

What’s Behind the Fight Between

 Pope Francis and the Latin Mass

 Movement?

The discord has become a stand-in for conflicts over the decline in Catholics

 participation in Mass, over the progressive orientation of

 Francis’s pontificate, and over Vatican II itself.

Francis is not wrong to see the Traditional Latin Mass movement, even at its most benign, as a challenge to Catholic unity in general and to his pontificate in particular. 

On January 15, 2022, the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, celebrated Mass at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, at Mott and Prince Streets, in Manhattan. The cathedral, erected in 1815, is the predecessor to the present cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and it puts in mind the Catholicism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants settled in great numbers in New York City. The Mass itself also called Catholic history to mind: it was the “Mass for the Americas,” a work for choir and orchestra commissioned by Archbishop Cordileone and incorporating texts in English, Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl—the Indigenous language spoken by Juan Diego, whose visions of the Virgin Mary in Guadalupe, in 1531, figure into the foundation story of Catholicism in Mexico.

Cordileone, clean-shaven, wearing a white cassock edged with lace, offered the Eucharistic prayers in Latin while facing away from the congregation, as priests did prior to the Second Vatican Council, which concluded in 1965. In doing so, he took a stand in an unlikely pair of controversies. By facing the altar, he affirmed the prerogatives of a movement of Catholics devoted to the Latin Mass—a movement that has met resistance at the Vatican under Pope Francis. Cordileone, who was unvaccinated and did not wear a mask, was also defying a covid-19 city ordinance compelling venues hosting public gatherings to require masks or proof of vaccination.

Since then, the controversies have hardened into direct conflict. The Traditional Latin Mass, long a source of sustenance for Catholics leery of the reforms of Vatican II, is now a focal point for Catholics who disdain Pope Francis. The death, in December, of Benedict XVI, the Pope emeritus, left Catholic traditionalists without a champion in Rome. Benedict’s views on the Mass were complex, but his preference for Baroque vestments (red slippers, a gold-threaded cope) had made him a figurehead for old-school Catholicism; his long efforts to close a breach between the Vatican and the Society of St. Pius X—a cadre of Latin-reciting priests whose leaders were excommunicated in 1988—had emboldened the T.L.M. movement, and a directive he issued in 2007 had quickened the movement’s spread. Then, in early February, the publication of a leaked report from an F.B.I. branch office declaring that Latin Mass enclaves in Virginia harbored antisemites and members of the “far-right white nationalist movement” led traditionalists to claim that a religion-averse deep state was targeting them, and the Bureau’s retraction of the report soon afterward (it did “not meet the exacting standards of the F.B.I.,” the Bureau said in a statement) only sharpened their sense of themselves as a persecuted minority.

Above all, a pair of terse “instructions” issued by Francis have stirred opposition. In July, 2021, the Pope required priests who wish to celebrate the old Mass to seek permission from their bishops, compelled the bishops to get clearance from the Vatican (which Benedict’s directive did not do), and forbade bishops to authorize the founding of Latin Mass groups in individual dioceses, which would serve to build up the movement as an alternative form of weekly worship. In February, he reiterated that position. The instructions were meant to tamp down the T.L.M. movement lest it deepen, as Francis put it, “the peril of division” in the Church. But, by requiring a bishop’s permission, they gave fresh authority to the bishops who cherish T.L.M.—such as Cordileone and Michael F. Burbidge, in Arlington, Virginia—and prompted Latin Mass enthusiasts to decry a Vatican crackdown on true believers. They also undermined the image of Francis as a “pastoral” Pope who urges Catholics to go “to the margins” and uses a personal touch to bridge the gaps between doctrine and practice, and they drew the expressly forward-looking Pope deeper into a sustained conflict about the status of the Catholic past.

On the surface, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. Latin Mass adherents are a tiny minority of practicing Catholics, and most Church traditionalists—bishops, priests, and laypeople alike—are content to take part in Masses offered in the language they speak in everyday life. (In the Archdiocese of New York, Mass is offered in more than a dozen languages.) But the T.L.M. conflict has become a stand-in for other conflicts: over the decline in Catholics’ participation in Mass and the quality of the liturgy; over the outward-facing, progressive orientation of Francis’s pontificate; and over Vatican II itself, which traditionalists see not as a thoroughgoing reform but as something between a modest course correction and a betrayal of the Church’s patrimony.

For many centuries, especially after the Council of Trent concluded in 1563, the Latin Mass, celebrated according to strict rubrics under the supervision of Rome, was the main thing that all Catholics had in common, and a sign of their difference in the eyes of the wider world. During the suppression of Roman Catholicism under Queen Elizabeth I, Jesuits in England celebrated Latin Mass in secret—and some who were caught were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Charles Dickens, in “Pictures from Italy,” describes arriving in Modena on a Sunday in 1844 and stepping “into a dim cathedral, where High Mass was performing, feeble tapers were burning, people were kneeling in all directions before all manner of shrines, and officiating priests were crooning the usual chant, in the usual low, dull, drawling, melancholy tone.” In Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter,” Henry Scobie, at Mass with his wife while carrying on an affair with a younger woman, wonders whether he is damned: “Hoc est enim Corpus: the bell rang, and Father Rank raised God in his fingers—this God as light now as a wafer whose coming lay on Scobie’s heart as heavily as lead.” In “The Godfather,” the grisly murders of various dons are intercut with scenes from a baptism during a Latin Mass. The lyrics that Bono sang in U2’s breakthrough video “Gloria”—“Gloria, in te domine / Gloria, exultate”—echo the Latin Mass, and countless other baby-boom Catholics have characterized regular immersion in the old Latin rite as the formative experience of their childhood. “Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo,” Anna Quindlen wrote in the Times, in 1986. “These are my bona fides: a word, a phrase, a sentence in a language no one speaks anymore.”

By then, the Latin Mass was twenty years out of use. The vast renewal of Catholic life and practice brought about through the Second Vatican Council began with the reform of the liturgy, building on several decades of efforts inspired by historical research or trends in the arts. Moving the altar away from the far wall; turning the priest to face the people; shifting the proceedings from Latin to the vernacular (a Latinate word for the everyday language of a people or region); enjoining people to recite the prayers themselves, rather than just listen to the priest murmur Latin words they barely understood—all these reforms were meant to elicit a “full and active participation” in the liturgy. The new approach began to be instituted in 1965. Plenty of people complained. A 1969 papal document—with the Latin title “Novus Ordo”—reaffirmed the changes. A sense of grievance became a sense of loss, which Garry Wills described in his book “Bare Ruined Choirs” (1972): “Even the Mass, the central and most stable shared act of the church, had become unrecognizable to many—a thing of guitars instead of the organ, of English instead of Latin, of youth-culture fads instead of ancient rites.” The essayist Richard Rodriguez, a decade later, observed: “No longer is the congregation moved to a contemplation of the timeless. Rather, it is the idiomatic one hears. One’s focus is upon this place. This time. The moment. Now.”

Yet the new center held. The folk-Mass trend subsided. Tasteful, historically evocative vernacular Masses emerged, some flecked with Latin here and there. Pope John Paul II, who was deeply traditional in matters of doctrine and morality, led open-air Masses that were profoundly nontraditional: huge crowds, people waving banners and snapping photos, the Pope sporting regional garb (a headdress in Mexico, a staff and shield in Kenya) and reading from scripts in local languages. Two generations of Catholics came of age with no memory of the old ways. The ads in the Saturday Times announcing “Traditional Latin Masses” at a chapel on Long Island seemed like postings of a secret society.

In a way, they were, but the T.L.M. movement grew and came in from the cold, stimulated by forces akin to those which had led to the doing away of it in the first place. Some Catholics found the no-longer-new vernacular Mass rote and dispiriting. The thirty-five-year run of John Paul and Benedict tilted the clergy rightward, and many of the most ardent Catholics in those years were the most traditional ones, who sought out the Latin Mass for the qualities celebrated in literature, music, and art, as well as in the vast corpus of Catholic thought prior to 1965.

It was no surprise that many such people would be conservative politically or that they would see the government as hostile to religion—a tendency heightened during the pandemic, when New York and other states imposed stricter restrictions on gatherings at churches than in supermarkets or restaurants. Nor was it a surprise that the archbishop most prominent in the effort for liturgical restoration, Cordileone, was the one who tangled most visibly with a progressive Catholic politician, telling Nancy Pelosi, whose congressional district includes San Francisco, that he would withhold Communion from her at any Mass where he was presiding because of her support for legal abortion. Six months after celebrating the Mass of the Americas, in Manhattan, Cordileone led a simplified “parish version” at the Meritage Resort and Spa, in California’s Napa Valley, during the summer conference of the Napa Institute—a deep-pocketed traditionalist advocacy group that has sponsored and funded a range of T.L.M. initiatives alongside its own efforts to build Catholic support for an unregulated free-market economy and to reshape the Supreme Court along traditionalist Catholic lines.

And the T.L.M. movement’s association with antisemitism is not completely a figment of an F.B.I. field officer’s imagination: shortly after Pope Benedict welcomed the schismatic Society of St. Pius X back into the Catholic fold in January, 2009, an interview from a few days earlier surfaced, in which its leader, Bishop Richard Williamson, denied the reality of the Holocaust. “I believe there were no gas chambers,” he said. (The Vatican suspended him from priestly duties, and he was later ousted from the Society.) The broader movement is clearly distinct from the S.S.P.X., but Pope Francis is not wrong to see the movement, even at its most benign, as a challenge to Catholic unity in general and to his pontificate in particular. And yet it’s also true that a range of dynamic movements within Catholicism—for gay rights, for women’s ordination, for more open church governance—could be seen by some as threats to the unity of the Church. That’s not a sound reason to suppress them, and, more than those movements, the T.L.M. has a definite precedent in past Catholic practices.

What, then, should Francis do about it? His three-day stay in the hospital prior to Holy Week (he had bronchitis, a spokesman said) served to focus public attention on the limitations imposed by his age—he is eighty-six—and his precarious health. La Croix’s Vatican correspondent, Robert Mickens, mused that “perhaps it is time for him to start expending his energy more strategically.” In the past year, Francis has deepened ties with Muslim leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the government of China, among other entities. Now he could seek rapprochement with the T.L.M. movement, reaching out to traditionalists in the Church he leads.

There’s no need for Francis to make a journey or appoint a commission; he could do it right from his desk. In his role as the bishop of Rome, he could authorize a Latin Mass celebrated by a bishop who shares his outlook—say, Cardinal Arthur Roche, who leads the dicastery that oversees liturgical matters—thus decoupling the T.L.M. movement from the opposition to his pontificate. He could make sure the T.L.M. gets some attention at the synod in Rome this October, which is meant to be a space for dialogue among Church leaders. Or he could do the kind of things he has done to affirm the value of other movements—invite a Latin-loving bishop for a photo op at his desk, or make a vague but appreciative remark in an interview. At the moment, the T.L.M. movement is still on the margins of the Church; to keep it there, paradoxically, Francis has to go to the margins and engage with it personally. ♦