For fourteen years, Summorum Pontificum governed the traditional Mass, and under it the old rite quietly flourished. Then, on July 16, 2021, that settlement was reversed — not modified, but reversed — by a single document. Traditionis Custodes is the most consequential act against the traditional liturgy since 1969, and it is the hinge on which the present moment turns.

This chapter must be handled with particular care. The temptation, for one who loves the old Mass, is to answer a hard act with a hard heart. But the editorial standard of this whole series — and the duty of any Catholic — is to remain in communion: to render the reigning pontiff his due respect and to state his reasons fairly, even while grieving honestly what was done and counting its cost. Both are required. Neither may be sacrificed to the other.

Traditionis Custodes

Traditionis Custodes — “Guardians of the Tradition” — took effect the day it was published. Where Benedict had spoken of two forms of one Roman Rite, both legitimate, Francis reversed the framing in his very first article: From that premise the restrictions followed. The diocesan bishop was made the sole regulator of the 1962 Missal, with “exclusive competence” to authorize it according to the guidelines of the Apostolic See. Celebrations were barred from parish churches; the erection of new personal parishes and the formation of new groups were forbidden. And priests ordained after the document’s publication were required to submit a formal request to their bishop, who must in turn “consult the Apostolic See” before granting it. The freedom Summorum Pontificum had given was, point by point, taken back. That a pope has the authority to legislate for the Church’s liturgy is not in dispute, and it is not disputed here: Francis acted within his power. The question this chapter weighs is not whether he could act, but what the action cost, and whether it was prudent and charitable in its effect.

The Pope’s Stated Reasons

Francis set out his reasons in an accompanying letter to the bishops of the world, and fairness requires that they be stated as he gave them. He had, he wrote, instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to survey the world’s bishops on how Summorum Pontificum was working in practice; the responses, he said, revealed “a situation that preoccupies and saddens me.” (The survey’s actual contents were never published, and how representative the responses were of the world’s bishops remains contested — a fair reader should hold the pope’s characterization of them, and his critics’ doubts about them, side by side.) His central charge was that a generous concession had been abused: His concern was unity. Francis judged that attachment to the old Mass had become, in some quarters, a banner for rejecting the Second Vatican Council and the legitimacy of the reformed liturgy — and behind that, the authority of the Council and the Pope. “To doubt the Council,” he wrote, “is to doubt the intentions of those very Fathers… and, in the final analysis, to doubt the Holy Spirit himself.” In defense of the Church’s unity, he concluded, “I am constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my Predecessors.” This much should be granted plainly: the abuse Francis named was real in places. There were corners of the traditional world where the old Mass had indeed become a flag of rebellion — where the Council was treated as a heresy, the new Mass as invalid, and the reigning pope as an impostor. Against that distortion, a pope’s concern for unity is legitimate and even necessary. An honest traditionalist does not pretend the problem was invented.

The Cost

And yet the remedy fell hardest not on the disobedient few but on the faithful many. The communities most affected by Traditionis Custodes were overwhelmingly those in full, unquestioned communion with Rome — the families, the young priests, the converts, the Ecclesia Dei parishes that had accepted the Council, affirmed the validity of the new Mass, prayed for the pope by name, and asked only to worship as their grandparents had. They were punished, in effect, for the sins of others, and the wound was real. Nor did it stop with the motu proprio. A Responsa ad dubia from the Congregation for Divine Worship in December 2021 tightened the screws further; a rescript of February 21, 2023 reserved to the Holy See itself the power to permit the use of parish churches and to authorize newly ordained priests — removing even those discretions from local bishops. And across the United States the restrictions came down diocese by diocese: in Arlington and Washington in 2022, the traditional Mass confined to a handful of approved sites; in Detroit, where in 2025 permission to use parish churches was allowed to expire; in Charlotte, where in 2025 the old Mass was restricted from four parishes to a single chapel after a public outcry forced a delay. Whatever one makes of the policy, its human texture is not in dispute: devout Catholics, guilty of nothing, found the Mass they loved pushed to the margins of the Church’s life — to a single chapel, an inconvenient hour, a basement, a gymnasium — by the authority they were striving to obey.

A Wound, Honestly Named

How should a Catholic hold this? Not with rupture, and not with rage. The validity of the new Mass is not in question; the authority of the papal office is not in question; the duty of respect and obedience to lawful authority is not suspended because a law is painful. The sedevacantist exit — declaring the see vacant, the pope no pope — is a false one, and this series has rejected it from the first page. Validity is the floor; communion is not negotiable. But communion does not require pretending that nothing was lost. It is possible — it is necessary — to hold two things at once: filial respect for the office of Peter, and honest grief at a decision that contradicted, in tone and substance, Benedict’s assurance that “what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too.” The traditional Catholic’s task under Traditionis Custodes was the hardest kind of fidelity: to suffer a wound from a father’s hand without ceasing to honor the father, and without ceasing to love the inheritance. That was where the matter stood when the pontificate ended. In April 2025, Pope Francis died — and the question he had reopened passed, unresolved, to his successor.