Five years after Traditionis custodes, and more than a year into the pontificate of Leo XIV, the older form of the Roman Mass is still being rediscovered, much of it by Catholics born long after it was set aside. Its friends often speak of explosive growth; its critics, of a small movement in decline. Neither description fits the evidence as it stands in 2026. The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter has added about a sixth to its priests in five years while the number of American priests and seminarians falls, and the Chartres pilgrimage is large, young and growing. The number of parishes offering the older Mass, however, has fallen since 2021, and how many Catholics attend it on a Sunday is not known. Its growth was explosive once, in the years after 2007.
Archbishop Bugnini and the reform
The man most associated with the reform of the Roman rite is Annibale Bugnini, a Vincentian priest born in Umbria in 1912. In 1948 he became secretary of the commission Pius XII set up to reform the liturgy, which produced the restored Easter Vigil of 1951 and the new rites of Holy Week of 1955. From 1960 he was secretary of the commission preparing the Council’s text on the liturgy. In October 1962, as the Council opened, he was passed over for the corresponding post on the conciliar commission and lost his teaching post at the Lateran, although he remained one of the Council’s official experts; Cardinal Arcadio Larraona, the new prefect of the Congregation of Rites, justified the decision by calling him “excessive” (è troppo spinto). In January 1964 Paul VI made him secretary of the Consilium charged with carrying out the Council’s constitution, and from 1969 he was secretary of the new Congregation for Divine Worship. The Missal of Paul VI was prepared by the Consilium and the Congregation while he was their secretary. His biographer Yves Chiron finds that he “played a decisive role in the preparatory commission and in the Consilium,” though on Pius XII’s commission he “never exerted a decisive influence.”
His own words show how he approached the Council’s text. Opening a meeting of the subcommission redrafting the first chapter of the constitution, before a small number of the commission’s members and consultors, on 11 October 1961, he said that “it would be most inconvenient for the articles of our Constitution to be rejected by the Central Commission or by the Council itself,” and advised that proposals be “formulated in such a way that much is said without seeming to say anything: let many things be said in embryo (in nuce) and in this way let the door remain open to legitimate and possible postconciliar deductions and applications,” and: “let nothing be said that suggests excessive novelty and might invalidate all the rest.” The words come from the commission’s records, as translated in Chiron’s biography, which calls this approach “the Bugnini method.” It can be read as a strategy of ambiguity, as Peter Kwasniewski argues, or as a drafter’s prudence about what a council would accept. On either reading, by his own account he meant the text to leave open more than it said.
A sentence often attributed to him is a later paraphrase. It circulates in English as “We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is for the Protestants.” He wrote about the revised solemn prayers of Good Friday, in a section of an article in L’Osservatore Romano of 19 March 1965. He asked how one could not regret losing the old prayer’s petition that God “deign to call them back to holy Mother Church, Catholic and Apostolic,” and continued: “And yet the love of souls and the desire to smooth in every way the path of the separated brethren toward union, by removing every stone that could even remotely be a stumbling block or a cause of unease, have led the Church to make even these painful sacrifices.” The paraphrase is not baseless: the motive is his, and so is the word “every.” But it widens a sentence about one set of Good Friday prayers into a programme covering “our Catholic prayers” and “the Catholic liturgy,” turns an account of what the Church had done into “We must,” adds “that is for the Protestants,” and drops his regret.
Six observers from Protestant communities attended the Consilium’s meetings. Bugnini wrote that they “never took part in the discussions, never asked to speak”; Chiron judges that account incomplete, since the observers also made their views known privately and in writing. In July 1975 Paul VI merged the Congregation for Divine Worship with the Congregation for the Sacraments, and Bugnini lost his post. He was named pro-nuncio to Iran in January 1976 and died in Rome in 1982. No reason for his removal was made public. The charge, made public in 1976, that he was a Freemason has never been proved. The documents published in the press in support of it are, in Chiron’s judgment, “inconclusive and do not resist historical criticism”; Bugnini denied it, and Chiron concludes that it “was not the determining factor in Bugnini’s dismissal.” The liturgical historian Alcuin Reid, a critic of much in the reform, has written that the reform “must stand or fall on its own merits, not on his.”
Against the tide
The clearest figures come from the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, which publishes its statistics every November. It was founded in 1988, in its own words, “by a dozen priests and a score of seminarians.” It had 287 priests in 2017, 330 in 2020 and 387 in 2025, an increase of about 17 per cent in the last five years. Over a comparable five years the number of diocesan priests in the United States fell from 24,653 to 23,259, and annual ordinations from 495 to 426, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Worldwide, by the Vatican’s statistics, the number of priests has declined slightly for five years, to 406,996 at the end of 2023, and major seminarians fell from 109,895 at the end of 2021 to 106,495 two years later.
This year the Fraternity ordained twelve priests in Omaha in May and thirteen at Lindenberg in Bavaria in June. According to the German Catholic news agency KNA, the Fraternity reported this as the largest ordination class in its history. In July the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest ordained four priests, and InfoVaticana reported that it has more than one hundred seminarians.
Not every measure rose. Counting its deacons, the Fraternity’s seminarians went from 174 in 2020 to 192 in 2025; below the diaconate they numbered 162 in 2020, 182 in 2024 and 162 again in 2025. Its members fell in the last year from 583 to 579, its lay Confraternity from 10,515 to 8,776, and its Mass centers declined over five years from 260 to 251. American graduate-level seminaries, by comparison, enrolled 3,110 seminarians in 2020–21 and 2,686 in 2024–25, a fall of 14 per cent in four years. These are small numbers: the Fraternity’s priests are fewer than one in a thousand of the world’s priests. The number of its priests has risen every year, though by only one, from 386 to 387, in the last.
The Pentecost pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, organized by Notre-Dame de Chrétienté, drew about 16,000 people in 2023 and about 18,000 in 2024, according to the Catholic Herald, and 19,000 in 2025. In 2026 nearly 20,000 took part; in recent years the organizers have turned applicants away once it reached capacity. The organizers’ survey of 4,610 participants put their average age at 22, against 57 for practising Catholics in France, according to IFOP data cited in the study. In England, organizers of a Walsingham pilgrimage in August reported almost 250 walkers and 500 at the closing Mass.
In American parishes as a whole, weekly Mass attendance fell, by CARA’s survey-based estimate, from 30.8 per cent of Catholics in 2000 to 17.3 per cent in 2020, and stood at 17.6 per cent in 2025. None of the figures for the older Mass measures its Sunday attendance. The Chartres survey points to a young constituency.
When the growth was explosive
If any period has earned the word, it is the five years after Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum took effect in September 2007. Mary Kraychy of the Coalition in Support of Ecclesia Dei counted 235 Sunday Masses in the older form in the United States that month and 475 five years later. “If you take the previous five-year period [2002-2007], there was a net gain of 55 Sunday Masses, while in the last five years, there was net gain of 240,” she told the National Catholic Register in 2012. On a different measure, the number of parishes offering the older Mass at all, the sociologists Stephen Cranney and Stephen Bullivant count more than 800 in the United States before Traditionis custodes took effect in 2021.
Where diocesan access has contracted
By the same authors’ figures, nearly 500 parishes outside the Society of St. Pius X offered it afterward, although the two figures may not have been compiled on the same basis. In Arlington, Virginia, it went from 21 locations to 8 in 2022. In Detroit it was confined from July 2025 to one shrine and three non-parish churches. In Charlotte, four parishes gave way in October 2025 to a single chapel, which the bishop described as “not a parish, nor is it a parish-like community being formed for those who desire to celebrate the TLM.”
The contraction has continued this year. The Bishop of Owensboro, Kentucky, ended the only traditional Mass in his diocese on 28 June, while allowing the parish to offer the Novus Ordo in Latin and ad orientem. Having waited to see whether Pope Leo would change course, he said he “felt obligated to act in accord with the direction of the Holy See.” He also cited the January consistory of cardinals, whose agenda had listed the liturgy among four themes, only two of which were to be discussed, “due to time constraints, and in order to encourage a genuinely in-depth analysis”; the two discussed were synodality and Evangelii Gaudium. In Pittsburgh the last diocesan celebration took place on 4 September. The bishop wrote that the permission had been “only ever meant to be temporary,” and encouraged the faithful to attend the Institute of Christ the King’s parish, about half an hour away.
Some bishops have widened access
On 28 August the Bishop of Wheeling-Charleston announced that he had appointed an episcopal delegate for the older rite, and that the Wheeling celebration would move from monthly to weekly from 20 September. The Diocese of San Angelo added a monthly Mass at St. Ann’s in Midland from 30 August. In Arlington a chaplaincy of the Fraternity of St. Peter was established on 1 July, formalizing an arrangement already in place.
The Dicastery for Divine Worship’s published index of its 2025 decrees lists 34 grants allowing the 1962 Missal in named parish churches, most of them two-year renewals, and about three-quarters of the churches named are in the United States. By our count, 27 of the 34 were issued after Pope Leo’s election. The Dicastery issued the same number in 2024, 29 of them after April, and 55 in 2023, so the concentration after May is not in itself evidence of a change of policy.
What no one knows
In June 2025 the Pew Research Center reported that 2% of American Catholics say they attend the Traditional Latin Mass at least weekly. Taken at face value, that would mean roughly a million people. Stephen P. White, who has advised Pew, has pointed out that the shares of Pew’s respondents reporting attendance at the older Mass “are so small that they are similar to (or, in some cases, smaller than) the margin of error.” Cranney and Bullivant, whose study of the movement is due from Oxford University Press later this year, estimate between 100,000 and 110,000 on a typical Sunday. Pew itself noted that it had never asked the question before, and that attendance “may have declined in recent years because the TLM is less widely available now than before Traditionis Custodes took effect.” Cranney has said: “It’s hard to get solid numbers for this, but I do strongly suspect that it decreased the total number of traditional Latin Mass-attending Catholics, just because it made it so much less convenient.” Pew’s figure does not separate Catholics who attend the chapels of the Society of St. Pius X.
The number of parishes offering the older Mass has fallen since 2021. Total attendance is unmeasured, and credible estimates differ tenfold.
Rome under Pope Leo
Pope Leo has not changed Traditionis custodes. He has at times applied it more generously. He authorized a Mass at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter’s Basilica for the annual Ad Petri Sedem pilgrimage, celebrated by Cardinal Raymond Burke on 25 October 2025; the pilgrimage had not been permitted one there in 2023 or 2024. According to the Catholic Herald, this year’s pilgrimage will not have a Mass in St. Peter’s.
In a book-length interview published in September 2025 he said of the question between the two forms of the Mass: “I’m not sure where that’s going to go. It’s obviously very complicated.” He said that people “have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate,” and added: “I think sometimes the, say, ‘abuse’ of the liturgy from what we call the Vatican II Mass, was not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass.”
In March 2026 a letter sent on his behalf to the bishops of France took up the question “in the context of the growth of communities attached to the Vetus Ordo,” called it troubling that “a painful wound continues to open within the Church concerning the celebration of the Mass, the very sacrament of unity,” and prayed for “concrete solutions enabling the generous inclusion of those sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo, while respecting the orientations desired by the Second Vatican Council regarding the liturgy.”
In a letter dated 29 June 2026 to Cardinal Roche for a conference on liturgical formation, he recalled “the respect that all those called to prepare the celebration of the divine mysteries, and priests in particular, must show toward the rites promulgated by Pope Saint Paul VI and Pope Saint John Paul II.” The letter does not mention the older Missal. In July Cardinal Arthur Roche, who remains Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, told The Tablet: “Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis Custodes, and he’s not going back to Summorum Pontificum.”
The Society of St. Pius X after 1 July
On 1 July 2026 the Society of St. Pius X consecrated four bishops at Écône without a papal mandate. Pope Leo had written to its Superior General two days earlier: “please turn back!” On 2 July the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that the consecrating bishop, Alfonso de Galarreta, “having performed an act of a schismatic nature,” and the four men he consecrated had incurred excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See, and that the co-consecrator, Bishop Bernard Fellay, had also incurred excommunication. Its explanatory note states that the act “constituted the delict of schism,” that the Society’s ministers “are in schism” and “administer the sacraments illicitly,” and that the confessions they hear and the marriages at which they assist are invalid. It exhorts all the faithful to refrain from participating in the Society’s celebrations and activities. Neither document declares the Society’s Masses invalid. The Society has lodged a recourse against the decree, and no response has been published.
Bishops have applied the note in their own dioceses. The Archbishop of San Antonio instructed Catholics to stop attending the Society’s Mass and other activities at St. Joseph Chapel, urged them “to refrain from financially contributing to the Society of Saint Pius X, including participation in their capital campaign to construct a church in Schertz,” and encouraged those who want the traditional Mass to attend Saint Timothy Catholic Church, which, he wrote, offers it each Saturday and Sunday. In early September the Society’s Italian pilgrimage was refused use of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi for public prayer; the Society’s own statement said its members were denied access “as ‘schismatics and excommunicated.’”
Some bishops have argued that the restrictions themselves feed the division. Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland said in July that he had warned the Vatican before 2021: “If you want to see division, put more restrictions on this Mass within the church.”
The Fraternity, Institute and pilgrimage figures in this article concern communities in full communion with Rome. Our page on the Society’s canonical status today sets out the documents in full.
What the evidence supports
The Fraternity of St. Peter has grown while American ordinations and seminary enrollments decline, and the Chartres pilgrimage is large, young and growing. The growth of the older Mass was explosive in the years after 2007. Since 2021 diocesan access in the United States has contracted, from more than 800 parishes to nearly 500 by the sociologists’ figures, which may not be strictly comparable, and total attendance, never measured, may have fallen. A book-length study by Stephen Cranney and Stephen Bullivant is due from Oxford University Press later this year. The letter sent to the French bishops on the Pope’s behalf spoke of “the growth of communities attached to the Vetus Ordo” and prayed for “the generous inclusion of those sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo, while respecting the orientations desired by the Second Vatican Council regarding the liturgy.”
This article was rebuilt on 13 September 2026. The earlier version, first published in June 2025 as “Rediscovering Apostolic Faith: The Explosive Growth of the Mass of St. Gregory the Great” and republished on 11 September 2026, attributed to Archbishop Annibale Bugnini three quotations: one appears in no source we could find, one appears to garble a 1961 remark about saying things “in embryo,” and the third is a later English paraphrase of a 1965 article presented as his own words. It described three dioceses as expanding the traditional Mass when all three had restricted it, and presented three communities of the Society of St. Pius X as signs of growth without identifying them as the Society’s. This version quotes his 1961 remarks from the commission’s record as translated in Chiron’s biography and his 1965 article from the printed page, and confines the claim of explosive growth to the years after 2007.
References
- Yves Chiron, Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy, trans. John Pepino, foreword by Alcuin Reid (Angelico Press, 2018): chronology, the Pian commission (pp. 40–41), the declaration of 11 October 1961 (p. 82, translated from Angelo Lameri’s edition of the commission’s documents, p. 433; the text on p. 82 reads “November 11,” but the note on the same page and p. 81 give 11 October), Larraona (p. 84), the observers (pp. 163–65), the removal and the Freemasonry charge (pp. 167–74).
- Annibale Bugnini, “Le ‘Variationes’ ad alcuni testi della Settimana Santa,” L’Osservatore Romano, 19 March 1965, p. 6 (our translation), from the scan of the page reproduced by Queen of Martyrs Press; Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Liturgical Press, 1990), p. 200; Peter Kwasniewski, “Sacrosanctum Concilium: The Ultimate Trojan Horse,” Crisis Magazine (June 2021).
- Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, presentation (founding); statistics updates for 2025, 2024, 2020 and 2017 (each as of 1 November); 2026 priestly ordinations (Omaha, 28 May 2026); Lindenberg ordinations as reported by KNA in Kirche+Leben (23 June 2026).
- Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Frequently Requested Church Statistics (priests, ordinations and Mass attendance; figures for the beginning of each year); graduate-level seminary enrollment as reported by OSV News (29 September 2025).
- Agenzia Fides, Catholic Church statistics 2024 and 2025, from the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae.
- Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, 2026 ordinations and seminarians, as reported by InfoVaticana (9 July 2026).
- Chartres pilgrimage: 2023 and 2024 figures as reported by the Catholic Herald; 2025 and 2026 figures, capacity and the participant survey as reported by EWTN News.
- Walsingham pilgrimage (August 2026), organizers’ figures as reported by America / OSV News (4 September 2026).
- Trent Beattie, “Summorum Pontificum, 5 Years Later,” National Catholic Register (24 September 2012), with the counts of the Coalition in Support of Ecclesia Dei.
- Stephen Cranney and Stephen Bullivant, parish counts and attendance estimate, as reported by America / OSV News (5 March 2026) and America / RNS (4 August 2026); Cranney quoted in America / OSV News (27 July 2026).
- Diocese of Arlington, instruction of 29 July 2022; FSSP chaplaincy as reported by CNA.
- Archdiocese of Detroit, letter of Archbishop Weisenburger (June 2025).
- Diocese of Charlotte, implementation of Traditionis custodes; chapel as reported by CNA.
- Diocese of Owensboro, as reported by EWTN News in Catholic World Report (25 June 2026); Leo XIV, address opening the Extraordinary Consistory (7 January 2026); Diocese of Pittsburgh, letter of Bishop Eckman (7 August 2026), as reported by the Catholic Herald.
- Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, as reported by the Catholic Herald; Diocese of San Angelo, as reported by the Catholic Herald.
- Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Index decretorum anni MMXXV (counts ours); 2023 and 2024 totals as reported by Catholic Culture.
- Pew Research Center, “Catholic practices and devotions” (16 June 2025); Stephen P. White, “Is the Traditional Latin Mass Booming?,” The Catholic Thing (26 June 2025).
- Cardinal Burke’s Mass at the Altar of the Chair, as reported by America / CNS and CNA; 2026 pilgrimage, Catholic Herald.
- Leo XIV, interview with Elise Ann Allen for León XIV: ciudadano del mundo, misionero del siglo XXI (September 2025), conducted in English, as transcribed by Rorate Caeli.
- Pietro Parolin, letter on behalf of Pope Leo XIV to the Plenary Assembly of the Bishops of France, 18 March 2026; English by OSV News in America, except “in the context of the growth of communities attached to the Vetus Ordo,” our translation of “dans le contexte de la croissance des communautés liées au Vetus Ordo.”
- Leo XIV, Letter to Cardinal Arthur Roche (29 June 2026, published 14 August 2026); Letter to Fr. Davide Pagliarani (29 June 2026).
- Arthur Roche, interview with The Tablet (July 2026), as reported by the Catholic Herald and OnePeterFive.
- Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Decree and Explanatory Note (2 July 2026); our translations from the Italian (“atto di natura scismatica”; “riservata alla Sede Apostolica”; “ha configurato il delitto di scisma”; “sono nello scisma”; “amministrano illecitamente i sacramenti”).
- Archdiocese of San Antonio, letter of Archbishop García-Siller (July 2026); Assisi, as reported by the Catholic Herald (9 September 2026); Archbishop Sample, as reported by America / RNS (3 August 2026).