Traditionalists push Pope Leo to resurrect the Latin Mass

ROME - Inside the frescoed nave of a church near the Colosseum, women in black veils and clean-cut young men listened in reverent silence to a largely forbidden rite: a Roman Catholic Mass in Latin.

A celebrant in exquisite robes knelt with his back to the congregation, muttering in the ancient tongue. Later, he spoke of angels and demons, and bemoaned the state of an overly permissive church.

If the recent celebration of the Tridentine Latin Mass sounds like a throwback, it is. An ancient rite codified in the 16th century, the Latin Mass was phased out in the 1960s in favor of the modern Catholic Mass said in common vernacular. Nearly a half-century later, Pope Benedict XVI facilitated its revival, giving oxygen to ultraconservatives in the church, only for his successor, Francis, to reimpose strict limits, describing the Latin Mass as a “backward” service for “ideological” Catholics.

Now, the arrival of a new pontiff, Leo XIV, has reinvigorated the campaign to turn the tide again, with influential conservative cardinals and other traditionalists strongly lobbying him to more broadly permit the old rite.

For the new Chicago-born pope, the church’s internal war over the Latin Mass is a test as explosive as it is arcane. Rightly or wrongly, the Mass has become toxically politicized, its power to divide seeping into secular culture wars. In the call to widely permit the Latin Mass, opponents see a Trojan horse - filled with Catholics who pine for the absolutism and severity of a bygone church.

The old and new Mass amount to “two incompatible visions of the church,” said Andrea Grillo, a liberal Italian theologian widely seen as having influenced Francis’s crackdown.

Yet at a time when Leo’s increasingly outspoken stances - favoring migrant protections and criticizing capitalism - have some traditionalists fretting about the rise of another “liberal” pope, proponents of the Latin Mass say lifting restrictions could be an easy way to extend an olive branch to conservatives who felt ostracized by Francis.

“We have turned the Mass into a battlefield between traditionalists and progressives,” Cardinal Robert Sarah, a staunch conservative who recently raised the issue in an audience with Leo, told the French news outlet Tribune Chrétienne. The most devout Catholics today, Sarah argued, are those who attend the old rite. “Everyone must be given space,” he said. “I think [Leo] will try to act in this way.”

The controversy predates the polarization of the Trump era. A polemic passage in previous versions of the old rite, which experts say is still said in hidden services despite tweaks made by Benedict, outraged Jewish groups for its references to the “blindness” of Jews and overt call for their conversion.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Latin Mass became a symbol of resistance for breakaway ultraconservatives led by the excommunicated French bishop Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre and his supporters rejected the historic changes of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s - the abandonment of the Latin Mass, the church’s détente with other faiths, and its empowerment of the laity - as blasphemous.

Leo may feel compelled to weigh in. On each side of the Atlantic, but nowhere more than in the United States, the Latin Mass is pitting priest against bishop and parishioner against parishioner in increasingly heated clashes.

In the Diocese of Charlotte, for instance, Bishop Michael Martin, whom Francis appointed last year, has faced an outcry from traditionalists, including some local priests, for his move this month to bring the diocese into compliance with the Vatican by curbing the Latin Mass.

On social media and blog posts, proponents of the Latin Mass have dubbed him “a woke Protestant Catholic,” a “tyrant wolf” and a “Birkenstock-wearing Franciscan.” Supporters argued that the Latin services had inspired more young men to join the priesthood and were a touchstone for the devout.

Debate, Martin said in an interview, is healthy in any diocese. But he said he worried that passions over the Latin Mass were reaching a “fevered pitch.”

“The things I’ve been called, or the ways in which my intentions have been interpreted by people that could bump into me on the street and wouldn’t know that it was me … I’ve found surprising,” he said.

Martin ended regular celebrations of the old rite in four parishes, consolidating them into two services in a single retrofitted chapel that some traditionalist worshipers argue is too far away to regularly attend. In a diocese of 565,000, fewer than 2,000 parishioners a week were attending a Latin Mass. The new chapel can seat 350.

The bishop’s decision “reflected the will of the prior Holy Father,” said Brian Williams, an active Catholic blogger in Charlotte who regularly attends Latin Mass. “It doesn’t sit well with us because we just feel like the pastoral approach would have been to say, ‘Let me grant further dispensation [and wait and see] what Pope Leo does.’”

As recently as July, Leo said he was willing to “sit down and talk” with Latin Mass supporters. But he made no promises and seemed to echo Francis’s concerns.

“People have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate,” Leo said in an interview for a book published last month.

Some conservative backers of the old rite nevertheless see a window of opportunity.

Leo has embraced traditional vestments and chants in Latin more than Francis ever did, a sign, they say, that he is open to the “old ways.” They also point to a concrete example of an opening. Following an audience with Cardinal Raymond Burke - the American cleric and prominent critic of Francis - Leo personally authorized him to celebrate a Pontifical Mass in Latin.

That service, at St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, will mark the high point of a Vatican pilgrimage being made this week by supporters of the old rite. The kind of Latin Mass that Burke will celebrate was prohibited during the last two years of Francis’s papacy.

Monsignor Marco Agostini, a papal master of ceremonies and official in the Vatican secretariat of state who is one of the leading advocates of the Latin Mass in Rome, said Burke undoubtedly had a green light from the top: “Clearly, because the pope said: ‘Let them do it.’”

The current status of the Latin Mass is deeply entwined with the legacies of the past three popes. After Latin Mass was widely banned in the 1960s, John Paul II issued an order in 1984 allowing very limited exceptions. In 2007, Benedict’s four-page order, “Summorum Pontificum,” kicked the door open far wider. Arguing that the Latin Mass was “loved” by traditional Catholics who rightly lamented the “deformation” of the liturgy, he effectively ruled that priests should be able to offer the service to parishioners who wanted it.

Then came Francis, who overturned Benedict in a 2021 order, “Traditionis Custodes.” Latin Masses, he said, should not be celebrated in parish churches. He required priests already celebrating them to obtain special permission from their bishops, who had to confirm that participants accepted the changes of the Second Vatican Council. New priests ordained following the release of the 2021 order needed explicit permission of the Vatican to perform the service - which, officials say, was rarely granted.

In 2023, Francis said Catholics who longed for the old rite suffered from “nostalgia disease.”

“I know the resistance to [my decree] is terrible,” Francis said. “There is incredible support for restorationism, what I call backwardness.”

“But,” he added, “we do not belong to those who shrink back.”

Even Francis, however, made exceptions.

Agostini appealed and received special permission from Francis to celebrate a weekly Latin service at Rome’s St. Anne Lateran Catholic Church. Agostini said he received permission only because Francis “liked” him. “He granted me what he forbade others,” he said.

That service today is a staple not just for veil-wearing Italian grandmothers, but, as in other parts of Europe and the United States, also for a new generation of conservative Gen Zers. Many of them are men, active on the political right and significantly more devout than their parents. In the Latin service, they see a lost art of reverent worship and a bridge to a past era of moral certitude.

“When I went to the old Mass, I was left breathless, both because of the liturgical beauty, but also because I felt so much more in touch with the Blessed Sacrament, and with Our Lord,” said Giacomo Mollo, 24, a university student and former youth activist in the right-wing Brothers of Italy party.

In Europe, where Catholics have abandoned the pews in droves, Mollo argued that young conservative Catholics have become enraptured by the beauty, solemnity and “profound spirituality” of the old rite.

“It’s the best way,” he said, “to bring young people back to the church.”