Among the documents of the recent magisterium, few have been received with such open hostility as the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, issued by Pope Francis on the sixteenth of July, 2021, the memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It has been called cruel and vindictive, a settling of scores against faithful Catholics who wished only to worship as their grandparents had. Five years on now — and in the wake of Pope Leo XIV’s July excommunication of six Écône bishops following their unauthorized episcopal consecrations — the document remains, for a vocal minority, the great grievance of the age: the proof, as they would have it, that Rome has turned against a portion of her own children. Any hope that this pontificate might reopen the question was answered on July 29, in a wide-ranging interview in The Tablet, by Cardinal Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, speaking with Maggie Fergusson: Pope Leo, Roche said plainly, is not going to change Traditionis Custodes, and he is not going back to Summorum Pontificum.
I wish to make the contrary case. Read in the light of its own title, its own text, and the tradition it means to guard, Traditionis Custodes is neither cruel nor novel nor punitive, but an act of pastoral charity and magisterial continuity — and much of the anguish it has occasioned rests upon a misreading of what the document actually is and does. It is not a beautiful document; legislation rarely is. But it is a faithful one, and I have come, after reflection, to be grateful for it.
A Document Rightly Named
Begin with the title, for the title is the argument in miniature. Traditionis Custodes — “Guardians of the Tradition.” The document opens by naming the bishops as the guardians of tradition who, in communion with the Bishop of Rome, constitute the visible principle and foundation of the unity of their particular Churches. This is the interpretive key to everything that follows.
The controversy over the older rite has turned, for two generations, on the meaning of a single word: tradition — quietly kidnapped by the reform’s fiercest critics to mean a moment, a missal frozen in the form it happened to possess in 1962, with “guarding” it meaning defending that moment against the Church’s living authority. Traditionis Custodes reclaims the word. The tradition the bishops guard is not a fixed point in the past but a living stream carrying its source within it; their guardianship is not the curatorship of a museum but the shepherding of a communion. To guard the tradition, in the Catholic sense, is to keep the Church one.
Once this is seen, the supposed paradox of the document dissolves. It restricts not the most traditional Mass but a particular use of a particular missal that had come, in too many places, to function as a banner of separation — and it does so precisely to guard the tradition, which is the communion of the Church at prayer, from being torn.
What the Document Actually Is
Traditionis Custodes is a legislative act of the supreme authority in the Church over the sacred liturgy. Canon 838 reserves to the Apostolic See the ordering of the universal liturgy, and the Roman Pontiff exercises that authority fully, ordinarily, and immediately. This is not a contested opinion; it is constitutive of our theology of the Church.
Nor is it new. The romantic notion that the liturgy developed for two millennia by purely organic process, untouched by the deliberate hand of authority, until the reformers of the 1960s intervened, is simply false. Saint Pius V imposed the Missal of 1570 by Quo Primum, suppressing regional uses. Pius XII reformed the whole of Holy Week in 1955. Saint Paul VI promulgated the reformed Missal in 1969. Each was an exercise of the identical authority Francis exercised in 2021. To accept the first three and reject the fourth is not to defend tradition — it is to defend one’s preferences and call them tradition.
Indeed, the truly novel act in this affair was not Traditionis Custodes but the document it superseded. Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum of 2007 introduced the unprecedented notion that one Roman Rite could subsist in two forms, “ordinary” and “extraordinary,” each an equal expression of the Church’s law of prayer. There had never been such a thing before in the West. Benedict offered it, generously, to secure peace; it did not work. Traditionis Custodes is, in the strict sense, the more traditional of the two documents: it returns the Roman Rite to a single rite with a single law of prayer.
Father John Paul Kimes of Notre Dame Law School offered OSV News a useful gloss on this history in a fifth-anniversary retrospective this month. Benedict and Francis, he observed, confronted the identical problem — division arising from the two liturgical forms — but answered it oppositely. Benedict’s conviction was that the liturgy had become politicized, a sign of division rather than unity, and Summorum Pontificum was his attempt to depoliticize it. Francis, judging that attempt to have failed, rescinded the broader permission. I would only add: a law of prayer either unites or it does not, and when a generous accommodation begins manufacturing rival camps, the guardians of tradition are bound to act.
What Occasioned It
Why disturb an arrangement that seemed to be bearing fruit? The answer is written into the document’s own history. In 2020 the CDF conducted a worldwide consultation of the bishops on the reception of Summorum Pontificum, asking what the provision had actually produced in their dioceses thirteen years on. Traditionis Custodes is the fruit of that consultation — not the act of a Roman autocrat imposing his taste, but of a pope who asked the bishops what they were seeing and acted on what they told him. In the accompanying Letter to the Bishops, Francis wrote of his sadness that the faculty Benedict had granted for reconciliation had so often been exploited to widen the very divisions it was meant to heal.
A note on the 2020 consultation. Readers familiar with recent reporting will know that portions of the CDF’s internal assessment of that consultation were leaked in 2025, and that the leaked material was read by some as showing a body of episcopal responses considerably more favorable to Summorum Pontificum than the decree’s framing might suggest. I do not think this should be waved away, and I do not intend to. But three things bear on how much weight it can carry here.
First, what was leaked was, by the Vatican’s own account, partial — spokesman Matteo Bruni described it as an incomplete reconstruction of a process that drew on other material never included in what surfaced. We are arguing, at best, from a fragment of uncertain completeness and unverified provenance, and a fragment cannot settle a question it was never meant to answer in full.
Second, and more importantly, Francis’s own letter to the bishops does not claim to be executing a majority mandate. It describes a situation that had come to trouble him — language compatible with a survey that showed real division, or even a numerical majority content with the status quo, provided the minority in difficulty was serious enough to warrant a universal response. A head count of satisfied versus concerned bishops tells us how many were troubled. It does not tell us, and was never going to tell us, whether what troubled them was grave enough for the successor of Peter to act. That judgment belongs to the pope, not to the count.
Third, and finally, my argument in this essay does not rest on the consultation having produced a majority for restriction, and readers should not mistake it for doing so. It rests on the consultation having happened at all — on Traditionis Custodes being a considered response to a reported and real division rather than an arbitrary exercise of will. Even a minority of dioceses in which the older rite had become a vehicle for rejecting the Council is sufficient warrant for a bishop charged with guarding the whole Church’s unity to act against that danger before it spreads. Those who wish to relitigate the survey are welcome to; the case made here does not depend on the outcome.
This is the crucial point: the document does not invent a phenomenon, it names one. In too many places, celebration of the older rite had become the liturgical expression of a rejection — of the reformed Mass as defective, of the Council as rupture, of the legitimacy of the popes who had governed the Church for sixty years. Paul VI himself had diagnosed the missal of 1962, as early as 1976, as “the expression of a warped ecclesiology, and a ground for dispute with the Council.” Francis did not innovate upon Paul VI; he applied him.
Not everyone attached to the older rite thinks this way, and I have written elsewhere with empathy for those who kept faith with the Church while cherishing the ancient forms. But Summorum Pontificum made no distinction between the faithful son attached to the old Mass and the ideologue using it as a weapon, and in the absence of that distinction the weaponizers flourished. Traditionis Custodes restores the distinction.
One Rite, One Law of Prayer
The heart of the document is its first article: the liturgical books of Paul VI and John Paul II are the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite — not the “ordinary” expression, as Benedict had said. This single word has been treated as aggression. It is theological hygiene.
The lex orandi is not a matter of taste; it is the law of prayer that is also, per Prosper of Aquitaine, the law of belief. A single Church, professing a single faith, cannot coherently possess two laws of prayer, for two will in time produce two laws of belief — two theologies of the Eucharist, two ecclesiologies. This is not hypothetical; it is precisely what had begun to happen. The “two forms” had begun to shelter two Churches.
To declare the reformed books the unique expression of the Roman Rite’s law of prayer is not to disparage the older missal, which nourished the saints for centuries. It is to insist the Roman Rite has one law of prayer, one faith, one communion. The older rite may still be celebrated under the bishop’s care — but not as a rival lex orandi. There is one river.
The Bishop at the Center
Here is the document’s deepest and least appreciated achievement: it returns the bishop to the center of the liturgical life of his Church. Article 2 entrusts to the diocesan bishop, as moderator and guardian of the whole liturgical life committed to him, the regulation of his diocese’s celebrations. This sounds like centralization; it is the opposite — a ressourcement reaching back to the sub-apostolic age.
Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom around the year 107, taught that the Eucharist is valid which is celebrated under the bishop or one to whom he has entrusted it — the bishop as the visible center around whom the Eucharistic community gathers. Vatican II recovered this same conviction in Sacrosanctum Concilium: the liturgical life of the diocese centered on the bishop is the preeminent manifestation of the Church.
Summorum Pontificum, however unintentionally, bypassed this principle. By granting the individual priest faculty to celebrate the older rite without his bishop’s permission, it detached the Eucharist from its diocesan guardian, fostering exactly the parallel, bishop-averse communities now lamented. Traditionis Custodes repairs the breach — not by concentrating power in Rome, but by restoring the bishop as moderator of his own household of faith. The custodian of tradition is not the freelancing priest or the YouTube polemicist, but the bishop in communion with Peter.
The Charge of Cruelty
I do not wish to evade the hardest objection, which is not doctrinal but human: that Traditionis Custodes has wounded real people — families, young Catholics, communities in full communion who never rejected the Council and now feel punished for sins that were never theirs. The pain is real, and a pastor may not wave it away.
It is worth being precise about scale, too. A June 2025 Pew survey found that only about two percent of American Catholics attend the older form weekly, and Stephen Cranney, co-author of the forthcoming Oxford study Trads: Latin Mass Catholics in the United States, told OSV News he suspects the true figure is lower still — and that Traditionis Custodes itself likely reduced overall attendance by narrowing available venues. The grievance is deeply felt by those who feel it. It is not, demographically, a mass wound to the Church.
Nor should we minimize what marginalization can do. Richard Rymarz, who was studying young adult Latin Mass communities when the document was promulgated, found his subjects “blindsided,” and told OSV News it is close to a sociological axiom that a marginalized group runs a heightened risk of radicalization. I take that warning seriously — and I think it argues for the careful, bishop-mediated accompaniment Article 2 envisions, not against it. A wound tended by the bishop heals; a wound left to fester unattended in an online echo chamber is very nearly the pathology that produced the Écône consecrations themselves.
Which brings me to a providential point. Shaun Blanchard of the University of Notre Dame Australia has observed that Pope Leo’s excommunication of the SSPX bishops offers traditionally minded Catholics who remain in communion a timely, public occasion to demonstrate exactly that loyalty, as distinct from the schismatic society’s defiance. The line the document draws was never between the old Mass and the new. It was always between communion and its rejection — and the SSPX’s bishops have now shown, publicly, which side that rejection leads to.
Cardinal Roche made much the same point to Fergusson, from his own vantage as the man who fields the complaints. Groups seeking the older liturgy are given exactly what they ask for, he said, and when he asks them what the trouble is, they cannot answer — yet they go away insisting they are still being persecuted. That is not the language of access denied. It is the language of a grievance that access was never going to satisfy, because the grievance was never really about access.
Three things follow. First, the document does not abolish the older rite; it restores its care to the bishop, who may grant faculties for its celebration. Accommodation continues — what ends is the default entitlement that had escaped the bishop’s discernment entirely.
Second, we must be honest about where the deepest wound to the young actually lies. I will concede a real complication: Massimo Faggioli of Villanova rightly observes that the older rite is now multigenerational — there are young Catholics, born after Summorum Pontificum, for whom it is simply the faith of their childhood rather than an ideological stance. Granted. But there remains a graver tragedy: forming a generation to regard the Mass of their own Church — of Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict, Francis, Leo — as a defective counterfeit, and the popes who have governed their whole lifetimes as objects of suspicion. Rescuing the young from that formation, wherever it occurs, is not cruelty; it is the very mercy the guardians of tradition exist to extend, and it is a formation entirely distinct from the inherited, unchosen piety Faggioli describes.
Nor is this rescue owed only to the young. Fergusson put to Roche the case of an elderly woman who had grown up with the Tridentine Mass: was he telling her that the way she had practiced as a child had been wrong? He said no — the Council asked the Church to become more missionary, and nourishing that mission meant opening believers to a richer diet of Scripture than the older form had offered them. Nothing in her childhood piety was in error. What changed was not the truth she had been given, but the fullness of what the Church had since learned to give. A defense of Traditionis Custodes that cannot say this plainly to that woman has failed at the one thing pastoral charity requires.
And third: the firm word is sometimes the charitable word. The physician who declines to name the disease is not merciful; he is negligent. Traditionis Custodes names a disease of division allowed, for fourteen years, to advance under the anesthetic of a well-meant generosity. To name it, and move to heal it, is an act of love — harder, less popular, more paternal, but love nonetheless.
The Guardians and the River
Traditionis Custodes is rightly named. The guardians of the tradition are the bishops in communion with the Successor of Peter, and the tradition they guard is not a rubric fixed at a single hour of the Church’s long life, but the living river of her prayer, bearing its source within it, carrying the baptized toward one sea. To guard that river is to refuse to let it be diverted into a rival channel that would water a different faith.
I have loved the reformed liturgy for the whole of my priestly life, and I have loved, too, the ancient forms from which it flows and out of which I was myself formed. I do not read Traditionis Custodes as a blow struck against beauty or the past. I read it as its first sentence declares it to be: an act of the guardians of tradition, exercised cum Petro et sub Petro, for the sake of the one thing the liturgy exists to build and can never be permitted to destroy — communion. Cardinal Roche said it more simply, and no less truly, to Fergusson: the Eucharist is the sacrament of unity, the one place where all should be able to gather and celebrate together, and when it begins to divide instead, something is seriously amiss. That is the whole case, in a single sentence, from the man who now guards the guarding. That document, however contested, however unlovely in its legislative prose, deserves not our grievance but our gratitude, and our sentire cum Ecclesia.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L. retired rector, Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano Diocese of Orange, California.
Reproduced with permission from Liturgy & Truth.
