In Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis has given a command. He does this at a time when papal authority is unraveling as never before. The Church has long since advanced to an ungovernable stage. But the pope battles on. He abandons his dearest principles—“listening,” “tenderness,” “mercy”—that refuse to judge or give orders. Pope Francis is roused by something that troubles him: the tradition of the Church. ...
The Traditional Latin Mass also attracts young people, who have discovered and learned to love the “buried treasure in the field,” as Pope Benedict called the old liturgy. In Pope Francis’s eyes, this is so serious that it must be suppressed. ... The Tridentine Mass is no longer attended only by those who miss the liturgy of their childhood, but also by people who have discovered the liturgy anew and are fascinated by it—including many converts, many who have long been estranged from the Church. The liturgy is their passion and they know its every detail. There are many priestly vocations among them. ...
The pope's intervention may impede the growth of the liturgical recovery of tradition for a time. But he will be able to arrest it only for the remainder of his pontificate. ... Pope Francis's prohibition will arouse resistance in those who still have their lives before them and won't allow their futures to be darkened by obsolete ideologies. It was not good, but it was also not wise, to put papal authority to this test.
...
What was new and surprising about Summorum Pontificum was that it declares that the celebration of the old Mass does not need any permission. It had never been forbidden because it never could be forbidden.
One could conclude that here we find a fixed, insuperable limit to the authority of a pope. Tradition stands above the pope. The old Mass, rooted deep in the first Christian millennium, is as a matter of principle beyond the pope’s authority to prohibit. ...
[A]dherents to tradition must grant the pope this: He takes the traditional Mass, which dates back at least to the time of Gregory the Great, as seriously as they do. He, however, judges it to be dangerous. He writes that popes in the past again and again created new liturgies and abolished old ones. But the opposite is true. Rather, the Council of Trent prescribed the ancient missal of the Roman popes—which had arisen in Late Antiquity—for general use, because this was the only one that had not been spoiled by the Reformation. ...
For as long as the old Latin Mass is celebrated in any garage, the memory of the previous two thousand years will not have been extinguished.
This memory, however, cannot be rooted out by the blunt exercise of papal legal positivism. It will return again and again, and will be the criterion by which the Church of the future will have to measure itself.
[Full translated piece at First Things; above, the main excerpts, in our view, with emphases added.]
