The welcome post said what this house is for. It did not say what we hold. Those are different questions, and the second one deserves a plain answer rather than an inference drawn from our adjectives.
Anyone who writes about the liturgy in this century is read for signals. A phrase gets weighed, a silence gets measured, and within two paragraphs the reader has filed the writer somewhere. That is a reasonable instinct in a confused age, and we would rather answer directly than be sorted by guesswork. So here is the whole position, including the parts that will disappoint somebody.
The Church
Jesus Christ founded one Church, visible and indivisible, and that Church is the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him. She is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. She is necessary for salvation and is the universal sacrament of salvation. And she has been preserved, and will be preserved to the end, from ever binding the faithful to error in matters of faith and morals.
She has not failed and she has not defected. Her visible structure is not a counterfeit, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against her in our lifetime merely because we have lived through a hard chapter of her history. A Church that could be lost was never the Church Christ promised.
The Pope
Leo XIV is the Pope: the true and lawful successor of Saint Peter, Vicar of Christ, visible head of the Church on earth. So was every lawful occupant of that chair in every century of the Church’s life, including the centuries when the man who held it was a scandal to it.
We are not sedevacantists. The See is not vacant, the conciliar popes were not antipopes, and a Catholic may not sit in private judgment over the validity of a papal election. We owe the Holy Father filial obedience and our prayers, and our prayers are of more use to him than our opinions.
Not everything a pope says binds a Catholic in the same way. To what a pope defines, we give the assent of faith. To his authentic teaching short of definition, we owe a religious submission of intellect and will, which is a real obligation and not a formality. Acts of governance are a third thing. The First Vatican Council was careful about the difference. Pastor Aeternus, chapter 4, teaches that the Holy Spirit was promised to Peter’s successors “not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.” A pope is preserved from binding the Church to error. He is not promised that every judgment of governance will be prudent, and Catholics have said so respectfully in every age. Saint Catherine of Siena wrote to Gregory XI in those terms; Saint Bernard wrote so to Eugene III; Saint Paul withstood Peter to his face. Where we think a decision of governance is mistaken, we will say so as sons and not as adversaries, and we will keep a policy and the Faith in separate places.
The Council
The Second Vatican Council was a valid ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Its documents are acts of the Church’s magisterium and are to be read in continuity with everything that preceded them, not as a new beginning that set the previous nineteen centuries aside. The serious traditionalist objection is not about reception but about content, and chiefly about Dignitatis Humanae on religious liberty and the ecumenical texts. We think those are answerable and we will take them up separately rather than wave at them here. What we will not do is treat a council of the Church as optional.
A great deal of what people mean by “Vatican II” is not in the documents of Vatican II. Sacrosanctum Concilium did not abolish Latin. Article 36 §1 lays down that the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites; §§2 to 4 then allow the limits of the vernacular to be extended and leave the extent of it to territorial authorities. Latin is the norm in that text and the vernacular the permitted exception, and what followed reversed the two. On music, article 116 says the Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy, and that “other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services”. That qualifier is the hinge the reform turned on, and we quote it rather than hide it.
Neither the priest facing the people, nor the removal of altar rails, nor the suppression of the pre-Lenten season appears anywhere in the text. An informed reader will answer that the Council authorised revision in general terms, and he is right: article 25 on the books, article 128 on the laws governing altars and sanctuaries, article 107 on the liturgical year. The specific decisions were taken afterwards and by others. Note what article 107 also required of the revised year, that the sacred seasons retain “their specific character”, and then consider Septuagesima.
So when we criticise what was done to the liturgy, we are not criticising the Council. We are measuring the reform against the Council that authorised it and finding a distance between them. Anyone can check the comparison, because the Council’s text and the books that followed it are both public.
The Society of St. Pius X
On 1 July 2026 four priests were consecrated bishops at Écône without a pontifical mandate. On 2 July the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree and, alongside it, an explanatory note. Both are on the Holy See’s website in Italian, and we link them here so that anyone can check what follows against the text rather than against us.
The decree. It calls the consecration “an act of a schismatic nature”. The principal consecrator and the four consecrated incurred, by the fact itself, the penalties of canon 1387 and canon 1364 §1; Bishop Fellay, as co-consecrator, those of canon 1364 §1. For those named the excommunication is latae sententiae and reserved to the Apostolic See. Clerics and lay faithful are admonished not to adhere to the schism, and those who adhere incur excommunication by the fact itself. The decree says nothing about the sacraments.
The note. That is where the rest is. It states that “the sacred ministers belonging to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X are in schism and must therefore be considered schismatic”, that those ministers “administer the sacraments illicitly”, and that “the sacrament of penance administered by them and the marriage assisted by them are invalid”. It exhorts the faithful “to refrain from participating in the celebrations and activities promoted by the aforesaid Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X”. On the way back, it says the Apostolic Nuncios will provide procedures that Ordinaries may use in individual cases.
Neither document declares the Mass invalid. The Society’s priests hold valid orders, and the note’s word for their sacraments is illicitly, not invalidly. Confession and marriage are the two singled out, because those are the two that depend on something a priest has to be given rather than something he is.
On confession the note is not ambiguous. Since 2 July 2026 the judgment of the Holy See is that absolution given by a priest of the Society is invalid. If you have confessed at one of their chapels since that date, the plain course is to treat those sins as still to be confessed and to bring them to a priest in communion with your bishop. He will not be surprised and it will not take long. Nothing further down this page qualifies that. One exception belongs to the law itself and not to us: in danger of death any priest whatever absolves validly, faculty or none.
Before that date is a different matter, and the answer there is equally plain. Those confessions were valid. Pope Francis granted the priests of the Society the faculty to hear confessions on 1 September 2015, and in Misericordia et misera, on 20 November 2016, he extended it beyond the Jubilee so that the faithful attending their churches would validly and licitly receive absolution. That grant was in force until this July, and nothing in these documents reaches backwards. If you are sitting up tonight re-examining ten years of your life, stop. That is not what any of this says.
Marriage was provided for in a similar way. A letter of 27 March 2017 authorised local Ordinaries to grant a delegation, ordinarily to a diocesan priest who receives the consent, after which a priest of the Society could celebrate the Mass. If you were married at a chapel of the Society, whether that route was followed in your case is a question of fact, and it is one your diocese can answer. Ask, rather than assume in either direction.
There is a canonical difficulty underneath all of this, and a reader will reach it whether we raise it or not. The faculty for confessions was given by a Pope, in an apostolic letter, Misericordia et misera. The declaration that those confessions are now invalid comes in an explanatory note of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, signed by the Prefect and the two Secretaries. We have looked: neither the decree nor the note carries any clause of papal approval. There is no in forma specifica, no record of an audience, no statement that the Holy Father approved the text or ordered it published. Both are presented as acts of the Dicastery. Neither mentions faculties at all, or names the 2016 letter, or says that the concession is revoked.
So the question a canonist will put is a fair one. Can a dicastery extinguish, by a note, a faculty the Roman Pontiff granted by apostolic letter, without saying that it is doing so and without an expressed papal mandate? Some hold that no revocation was needed, because a concession of that kind lapses of itself once its subjects are declared schismatic. Others hold that a papal grant is undone by the Pope and not otherwise. That argument is live, it is being had by people competent to have it, and we are not among them. We are not going to pretend it is settled, in either direction.
The argument does not change what a penitent should do, and that is the part that matters tonight. A Catholic does not rest on a doubtful absolution. If there is a serious question whether sins were forgiven, they are brought again to a priest, and that is the ordinary counsel of the Church in every case of doubt, long before anybody thought of this one. So the advice above stands whichever way the canonists land: since July, take it to a priest in communion with your bishop. If the faculty did lapse, you needed to. If it somehow did not, you have lost a quarter of an hour and gained a confession.
Reports that everything at a Society chapel is invalid are wrong, then, and so are reports that nothing has changed.
As for the laity generally, excommunication attaches to those who formally adhere to the schism, not to everyone who has ever attended. But we are not going to soften what the note actually asks, which is that the faithful stay away from the Society’s celebrations. That is Rome’s counsel and not merely ours, and a reader is entitled to have it straight.
We are not the Society, and we will not pretend the documents were never issued. Neither will we tell a reader that his grandmother is damned for where she has gone to Mass. Excommunication is a medicine, not a verdict on a soul, and it is not incurred by someone who never intended the thing it punishes. Both of those are true at once, and the documents themselves hold them together.
The Mass we promote
This site exists in large part for the Traditional Latin Mass, and we make no apology for that. Our reason is neither nostalgia nor taste. It is that the Roman Rite was handed down before it was ever drawn up.
Its Canon is substantially the prayer the Roman Church was already offering in the sixth century. Pope Vigilius sent that Canon to Profuturus of Braga in 538; Fortescue’s judgment is that by the time St. Gregory became pope it was fixed in its present order, and that no pope has added to it since. Ambrose, writing around 390, already quotes the substance of several of its prayers, so the fourth century is not a stretch. The word substantially is doing honest work there: Gregory added a clause, the lists of saints grew, and no complete manuscript of the Canon survives before about the year 700. What cannot be produced is the committee that composed it, because there was none.
What St. Pius V promulgated in 1570 he did not invent. Quo primum describes the work as restoring the Missal to the ancient form of the Fathers, collated against the oldest codices available. He did prune: the sequences were cut to four, the prefaces to eleven, and uses of less than two hundred years’ standing were suppressed. That is the difference between editing what you have received and composing something new.
There is a complication here that traditional sites tend to leave out. The book we mean is the Missal of 1962, and it already contains Pius XII’s reformed Holy Week of 1955, which was itself the work of a commission and the first substantial modification of the Missal of St. Pius V in three hundred and eighty-five years. A Catholic at a Latin Triduum today is attending that reform, not the rite it replaced. We have written about this at length elsewhere on the site.
One more thing follows from all of that. We believe the older Mass should be freely available to any Catholic who desires it, and current law does not provide that. Traditionis Custodes stands, and while it stands we obey it. We also ask, publicly, for it to change. Canon 212 §§2 and 3 provides for exactly this: the faithful are free to make their needs and desires known to their pastors, and according to their knowledge and competence they have the right, and at times the duty, to make their opinion known on matters pertaining to the good of the Church. The canon attaches conditions, and we accept them: without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to the common advantage and the dignity of persons. Asking a father for something is not defying him. We will argue for the older rite here, from the sources and at length, and we will do it inside the law rather than around it.
The Novus Ordo
The Mass of Paul VI is a valid Mass. Offered by a validly ordained priest, with valid matter and form, and with the intention of doing what the Church does, it is a true Mass and a true offering of the one Sacrifice of Calvary, and Our Lord is truly present under the appearances of bread and wine. We hold that without reservation, without a wink, and without a qualifier hidden in a footnote. A Catholic who assists at it fulfils his obligation, and if he communicates he receives Our Lord Himself.
We also hold that it came into being differently. It was assembled by a commission over a few years, working to a brief, composing new texts and selecting among old ones, and published as a finished book. Ancient orations that had stood in the Roman sacramentaries for well over a millennium were reduced, relocated or dropped, and the sequence of the Mass was rearranged in ways no organic development had produced.
What happened between 1964 and 1970 has no parallel in the history of the Roman Rite. Earlier reforms had codified what was received, or trimmed an accretion, or revised a single season. This one put the entire Missal into the hands of a commission at once: the Order of Mass, the calendar, the lectionary, the orations, the prefaces, the whole book, and what came back was a new one. Orations that had stood in the Roman sacramentaries since before the Anglo-Saxons were Christian were rewritten or dropped. The received order of the rite was rearranged on a committee’s judgment of what the faithful of that decade required. Liturgical continuity was broken. We take that continuity to be the one thing a generation holds in trust rather than owns, and we say so as a conviction rather than as a law anyone had written down. Something handed down and something drawn up are not the same kind of thing, even when both are valid, and even when both are the Mass. Validity is the floor, not the ceiling.
So we will argue here that the older rite is richer, that the newer one was impoverished in the making, and that it stands in need of recovery. We will argue it from the documents. We will argue it without hinting that the Novus Ordo is invalid, or doubtful, or not quite the Mass. It is the Mass.
The rite, never the people
This is the one that gets misread.
When we criticise, the object is a rite, a text, a decision, or the governance of the Church’s worship. It is never the soul kneeling in the pew, and never the priest at the altar. Most Catholics alive have known only the newer Mass, and among them are the holiest people we have met: parents raising large families in a culture that punishes it, priests worn down by parishes too large for them, religious who gave away everything they had, and the ordinary faithful who turn up on a Tuesday morning because they love God. Sanctity is not distributed by rite. Were it otherwise, the traditional world would have a great deal to answer for.
So there are things this site will not do. We will not sneer. We will not caricature an opponent to make the argument easier. We will not treat a Catholic’s parish as evidence about his soul. And when we get something wrong, we will correct it in public, under the original piece, where the people who read the error will see the correction.
Every rite, and every Catholic
The Latin Church is not the whole Church. There are Catholics in communion with Rome who have never prayed a word of Latin, whose liturgies are older than the vernacular quarrel and richer than most Latins realise, and who kept what the West let go. The Byzantine, Maronite, Chaldean, Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Armenian and Italo-Albanian traditions, among others, are not exotic variations on Catholicism. They are Catholicism, in their own tongue and their own rite, and their patrimony belongs to the whole Church.
We love the Catholic faith, and we love Catholics of every rite within her. That is the reason this house exists, not a diplomatic line appended to a partisan document.
In short
- The Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded, and she has not failed.
- Leo XIV is the Pope. We are not sedevacantists, and we owe Rome obedience: the assent of faith to what is defined, religious submission to authentic teaching, and filial respect in matters of governance.
- The Second Vatican Council was a valid council. Much of what is blamed on it is not in its documents.
- By the decree and note of 2 July 2026 the Society’s ministers are in schism, and Rome asks the faithful to refrain from their celebrations. Since that date the Holy See judges absolution given by their priests invalid, and the note says the same of the marriages they assist. Confessions made before it, under the faculty Pope Francis granted in 2015, were valid; whether a particular wedding was covered by the delegation of 2017 is a question for your diocese. Neither document declares the Mass invalid, and attendance alone excommunicates no one.
- Whether those two sacraments are in fact invalid is disputed among canonists and theologians, and the reason is on the face of the documents. The faculty for confessions came from a Pope and was extended in an apostolic letter, Misericordia et misera; the declaration of invalidity comes in a note of a dicastery that carries no clause of papal approval, never mentions faculties, and never says the concession is revoked. Some hold that a concession of that kind lapses of itself once its subjects are declared schismatic; others hold that a papal grant is undone by the Pope and not otherwise. That argument is live and we do not settle it here, and it does not change the counsel: a Catholic does not rest on a doubtful absolution, so since July take it to a priest in communion with your bishop.
- The Roman Rite was handed down before it was drawn up. The older Mass should be freely available to every Catholic who desires it, and until the law says so we obey the law and keep asking.
- The Novus Ordo is a valid Mass. It was also produced by a method whose nearest precedent was a generation old, and we think that difference deserves examining honestly.
- We criticise rites and the governance of worship. We do not put souls on trial.
- We love the Catholic faith, and Catholics of every rite in communion with Rome.
That is where we stand. If you find us departing from it, hold us to it.
If you are new here, start with Welcome to Domus Dei. On what the older rite claims for itself, see Why is the TLM called the “Mass of the Ages”? On validity, Is the Novus Ordo a valid Mass? And on how the reform came about, How did the Liturgical Movement lead to the Novus Ordo?