Honest answer first: this is contested, and faithful theologians disagree. What can be said with confidence is narrower — it has never plainly happened in the Church’s history, and even the harshest recent measures have restricted the older Mass without formally abrogating it. Traditionis Custodes itself does not declare the TLM abolished.

The case that a pope can suppress a venerable rite appeals to the universal jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff and his governing authority over the Church’s liturgy. It is a serious argument and should not be caricatured: the Pope is not a bystander to the liturgy, and discipline genuinely is his to order. The case against appeals to a deeper principle — that the Mass is not the Pope’s personal possession but the prayer of the Church, received and handed on; and that a long-sanctioned, saint-forming rite carries a weight no single act lightly overturns.

There is a telling precedent in the tradition itself. When Pius V codified the Roman Missal in 1570, he expressly preserved every use of more than two hundred years’ standing — the Ambrosian, the Mozarabic, the Dominican, and others. He did not treat his authority as extending to the abolition of what the Church had long received. Benedict XVI later made the point as a theological claim, not merely a procedural one: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

So we hold the tension honestly. The legal landscape today is harsh, and a Catholic should not pretend otherwise. But “restricted” is not “abolished,” and the deeper question — whether an ancient rite can truly be abolished at all — remains genuinely open. The Mass that nourished the saints has outlived harder seasons than this one.