I have been saying it all along: I cannot see how any priest, any bishop, or any pope, would want to see fewer Catholics in the pews.

Pope intervenes again to restrict celebration of Latin Mass

Story by By Nicole Winfield | Tuesday, February 21, 2023

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis has intervened for the third time to crack down on the celebration of the old Latin Mass, a sign of continued friction with Catholic traditionalists.

Via Edward Pentin on Twitter.

Francis reasserted in a new legal decree published Tuesday that the Holy See must approve new celebrations of the old rite by signing off on bishops’ decisions to designate additional parish churches for the Latin Mass or to let newly ordained priests celebrate it.

The decree states that the Vatican’s liturgy office, headed by British Cardinal Arthur Roche, is responsible for evaluating such requests on behalf of the Holy See and that all requests from bishops must go there.

For weeks, Catholic traditionalist blogs and websites have reported a further crackdown on the old Latin Mass was in the works, following Francis’ remarkable decision in 2021 to reimpose restrictions on its celebration that were relaxed in 2007 by then-Pope Benedict XVI.

Francis said at the time that he was acting preserve church unity, saying the spread of the Tridentine Mass had become a source of division and been exploited by Catholics opposed to the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church and its liturgy.

Yes, it’s true: there are a few, few! Catholics who have rejected Vatican II. Those few will not attend a Novus ordo Mass, so the Holy Father is, in effect, casting them out of the Church altogether.

More, I would guess, are attracted to the Tridentine Mass because of the grandeur of that Mass, in the same fashion that many Protestants cling to the King James Bible, the lofty, Elizabethan English. They will attend Novus ordo Masses, but I suspect that they might not attend as frequently, being disappointed with the services.

The primary mission of the Church is, and always has been, to bring more people to God. But the Holy Father seems to be doing his best to run off some of the most devout Catholics around, and he’s doing it for political rather than religious reasons, to try to disarm the critics who oppose him on the ‘social justice’ issues.