The much-publicized July 1 ordination by the SSPX of four new bishops without papal permission has created a schism, with the Vatican immediately declaring all the canonical consequences. This is a fait accompli.
But there is a situation still unfolding, and it concerns the overlap between the SSPX and the traditionalist voices in the Catholic Church in communion with Rome.
On July 30, the London-based Catholic magazine The Tablet published an interview with Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments since 2021, who stated that Pope Leo XIV is not going to reverse Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’ motu proprio of July 2021 on the use of the Roman rite liturgical form that existed prior to the Second Vatican Council.
Article 1 of Traditionis Custodes states: “The liturgical books promulgated by Saint Paul VI and Saint John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”
The liturgical question is the focal point of tensions and the most important front – for this “liturgical war” as much as for other wars – is in the USA.
In those same days at the end of July, prominent US Catholic bishops took to the media and social media to defend liturgical traditionalism and to pressure the Vatican to abrogate certain aspects of Traditionis Custodes and allow greater access to the pre-Vatican II “Latin Mass.”
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco (recently appointed by Leo XIV to the supreme tribunal of the Segnatura Apostolica) and Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland (Oregon) criticized the SSPX for its schismatic action but offered a defense of liturgical traditionalism and of Benedict XIV’s actions to expand access to the “Traditional Latin Mass.”
They share Pope Benedict’s conviction that the “Latin Mass” remains an important point of reference for the Church’s future liturgical development.
In light of recent events, from interviews like these one might draw the impression that if only those somewhat impatient leaders of the SSPX had obeyed the Vatican and the pope, Rome and the Lefebvrians would agree on almost everything: as if their well-known opposition against Vatican II (and not just on the liturgical reform) did not matter.
But maybe this – the value of Vatican II in today’s Church – is exactly the point in using the SSPX as an asset to deal with the Holy See from the inside. These interviews are indeed a symptom of the ongoing tensions between Rome and American Catholic traditionalism and exemplary of at least three different features of contemporary global Catholicism.
The first: behind the slogans typical of a law-abiding retro-Catholicism, liturgical traditionalism is a movement challenging the institution led by the papacy and the Vatican. Cordileone and Sample do not represent the entire US episcopate, but they also represent more than voices like Auxiliary bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana in Kazakhstan, one of the champions of Catholic traditionalism but without a significant ecclesiastical constituency behind him.
These US bishops speak on behalf of a movement that is small but no longer marginal, and like the most strategic of post-Vatican II Catholic movements, can magnify their influence way beyond their sociological significance.
The recovery of the idea of tradition must begin with a rediscovery of the Council of Trent.
A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that two percent of U.S. Catholics attend the liturgy, sometimes known as the traditional Latin Mass, weekly. “How many are they?” – it is not the real question here.
In a Church suffering the consequences of secularization, the promise of the movements to bring new energy and young people to the Church is an offer too tempting to refuse. In a smaller Church, even small but highly mobilized groups can have great effect in changing the direction of a local or national Catholic community.
The second concerns the dynamic between different actors in the Church when it is about governing change. During Vatican II and the early post-conciliar period, the dynamic was between the pope, the Roman Curia, the bishops (and bishops’ conferences), and the press and public opinion.
The liturgical reform became a top-down process guided by Rome, but it had been initiated by the bishops at Vatican II. For all the anti-modern traditionalism claimed by the advocates of the pre-Vatican II “Latin Mass,” they have capitalized on the new role of the (new) media in the Church, as a way of putting pressure on the pope, the Curia, and the bishops’ conferences.
They challenged Pope Francis directly, and we will see what they do with Pope Leo XIV. They have also interpreted to their own advantage, and without acknowledging it, the Vatican II principle of local inculturation and adaptation.
The parallelism between the disappearance of the legacy media environment that dominated before the internet and the rise of Catholic traditionalism is a specific sign of the times in contemporary USA. There is more than just a chronological overlap between the political-religious messianism of Trumpism and the revival of the “Latin Mass” in the Catholic Church (which is not to say that all Latin Mass goers are Trumpian).
The third has to do with the state of the tradition, or the way in which the bishops who support the “Traditional Latin Mass” talk about the tradition. It has become a totem, a fetish, a rhetorical expedient to offer the psychological comfort of something supposedly frozen in time and never subject to change.
This has to do with the particular syndrome affecting those who see in Vatican II a catastrophe (liturgical and otherwise) but also reflects a truncated idea of Church history. It reflects a Catholic culture and theology divided between the defining period between Augustine and Aquinas on one side, and the runaway child of Catholic modernity which was Vatican II and the post-Vatican II period.
There is an astonishing historical and hermeneutical illiteracy (even among some bishops) about the contributions of early modern Catholicism to the development of the tradition: the post-Reformation “Catholic reform”, the Catholic Aufklärung, the movements of theological reform (biblical, patristic, liturgical, ecumenical) in the 19th and early 20th century (I am not talking about the dreaded “modernism” here).
In the theological imagination of self-appointed defenders of the tradition, Saint John Henry Newman is the outlier in the terra incognita of early modern Catholicism – the Council of Trent included.
Once I believed that the rediscovery of the tradition in American Catholicism started with the history and theology of Vatican II, to overcome simplistic characterizations of the council and its aftermath.
I still believe that, but with a qualifier. The recovery of the idea of tradition must begin with a rediscovery of the Council of Trent. Tridentine Catholics – the Jesuits, the Inquisition, warts and all – were not afraid to create something new to address the theological and pastoral needs of their time.
With thanks to Global Catholic and Massimo Faggioli, where this article originally appeared.
