A question arises when reading the item below.
Thirty-four dioceses received Vatican permission to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass in parish churches in 2025, matching the 2024 total and remaining broadly consistent with previous years despite the election of a new pope. The United States accounted for 24 of the 34 decrees issued.
Pope Francis restricted the use of the 1962 Roman Missal with the 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes. Under subsequent Vatican regulations, diocesan bishops must obtain permission from the Holy See to authorize celebrations according to that missal in parish churches.
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This blogger’s question is: to what benefit to Holy Church is so severely restricting the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, or Usus Antiquior, or, in plain English, the Latin Mass? The question is not just rhetorical, as this blogger truly cannot fathom the reason the Holy Father (similarly for his late predecessor) is so reluctant to let more of his flock experience the joy of Catholic worship as it was celebrated for over a millennium, ratherthe bland, insipid text of Novus Ordo and, it almost seems a corollary, the mediocre music accompanying it.
It might be understandable the insistence of Rome that Novus Ordo be the only mass celebrated in most churches, were it responsible for increasing numbers attending mass at most churches, but reality is the antithesis; mass attendance has generally been dropping since NO became the “lingua franca” of worship.
As many readers of this blog already know know, your Tatler is a Catholic convert, coming from the Episcopal Church, in particular, the so-called “high church, or Anglo-Catholic tradition, whose worship resembles in many ways, pre-Vatican II Catholic worship, liturgically and musically (perhaps even excelling in the latter), and whose worshippers included the likes of T S Eliot, C S Lewis, John Henry Newman, Christina Rosetti, and Frances Perkins. While the Anglicans did not have the Latin Mass, they did have for their use one of the greatest works of English literature, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (the 1962 Episcopalian BCP is essentially the same). Its author, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer may have been an odious character, but was a brilliant wordsmith.
Sadly, the Episcopalian Church and Church of England, just like the Catholics, dumb-downed their sources, but wisely, unlike Holy Church, do permit dissenters (e.g., my former church, Resurrection, on Manhattan’s Upper-East Side) to continue using the earlier sources. Not so, of course, in the Holy Catholic Church, with but a few being permitted to return to the Old Mass. Additionally, permission to use TLM may only come from the Pope, not the bishops. That strikes this blogger as folly. What are the dangers of allowing observant Catholics to hear the mass in the official language of the Holy Catholic Church?
As noted in the headline of this blog post, your Tatler is still a relative newcomer to the Catholic Church. Presumably, the Vatican must have good reasons for such severe limitations on celebrations of the Mass in the Extraordinary Form (as well that clumsy verbal formation by which it is known). Thus blog will be happy to post all defenses of the present, severe limitations against popularizarion and desemination of the Traditonal Latin Mass.
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