This final chapter is the hardest to write, because it is not yet history. It is the present — unfinished, contested, and changing — and it must be told with the dates attached and the uncertainty admitted. What follows is the state of the question as of this writing in June 2026; on the points where the matter is still moving, that is said plainly.

What is not in doubt is that the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV opened a new chapter in the story this series has traced from a ruined French priory in 1833 to the present hour.

A New Pope

Pope Francis died on April 21, 2025 — Easter Monday — at the age of 88. The conclave that followed elected, on May 8, 2025, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV. A Chicago-born Augustinian who had spent many years as a missionary and bishop in Peru before serving as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, he is the first pope born in the United States. His first words from the loggia of St. Peter’s were a greeting of peace. The choice of name was itself read as a signal. Leo XIII, the last pope to bear it, is remembered for joining fidelity to tradition with engagement of the modern world. Whether the new Leo would bring the liturgical war to a peace, or merely a pause, was the question every party now watched.

Continuity, with a Lighter Hand

The first and most important fact is a negative one. As of this writing, Pope Leo XIV has not revoked, abrogated, or modified Traditionis Custodes. No new motu proprio has replaced it; the law of 2021 remains the law. Those hoping for an immediate restoration of Summorum Pontificum have not received it. What has changed is not the law but its application. The posture of the present pontificate has been characterized by observers as one of “pragmatic leniency” — keeping Francis’s legislation in place while administering it with a markedly gentler hand. The Dicastery for Divine Worship has continued to grant the two-year, renewable dispensations by which bishops may permit the 1962 Missal, and it has reportedly done so more readily. The result is a kind of détente: the restrictive framework stands on paper, but the enforcement that made it bite under Francis has eased.

Signs of a Thaw

Two gestures in particular signaled the change of climate. In October 2025, Pope Leo authorized Cardinal Raymond Burke to celebrate the traditional Mass at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter’s Basilica, during the annual Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage to Rome — a permission the Vatican press office confirmed in September 2025. The significance was sharp: that same pilgrimage had been denied the use of that altar in 2023 and 2024 under Francis. For the traditional world it was the first concrete sign that the door, slammed in 2021, had at least been unlatched. Then, in November 2025, the apostolic nuncio to Great Britain, Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, told the bishops of England and Wales that Pope Leo had said he would not abrogate Traditionis Custodes but would be generous in granting the two-year exemptions bishops request. Honesty requires the caveats the reporting itself carried: this was the nuncio’s account of a private conversation, not a papal document, and the Vatican press office did not confirm it. It is a reliably reported straw in the wind — not a change in law. Still, the direction of the wind was unmistakable.

The SSPX Crisis

Against these signs of thaw stands the hardest and most dangerous knot of all: the Society of St. Pius X. A theological dialogue between the Holy See and the SSPX, begun in 2025, stalled. Then, in February 2026, the Society’s superior general, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, announced that the SSPX would consecrate new bishops on July 1, 2026, without a papal mandate — the very act that, in 1988, had brought excommunication on Archbishop Lefebvre and his successors. The Holy See’s response was grave. On May 13, 2026, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — through its prefect, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández — warned that to proceed without a pontifical mandate would constitute “a schismatic act,” and that “formal adherence to the schism constitutes a grave offense against God and entails the excommunication established under Church law.” Pope Leo himself, responding to journalists outside his residence at Castel Gandolfo on June 16, 2026, said he was weighing one more appeal — and then, if it went unheeded, that the Church would have to go on: It must be said clearly, because the matter is still unfolding: as of this writing, the consecrations have not taken place. They have been announced and warned against, not carried out; no new excommunications have been declared. Whether the SSPX will step back from the brink, or repeat the rupture of 1988, is unknown as these words are written. The reader who comes to this page after July 2026 should seek the outcome elsewhere; here it can only be reported as the open and perilous question it remains.

The Question Still Open

And so the story this series has told — from Guéranger’s ruined priory, through the golden age and the capture, the Council and the Consilium, the rupture of 1969 and the camps that followed, Benedict’s reconciliation and Francis’s reversal — arrives at an ending that is not an ending. The central question is exactly the one Pius XII foresaw, the one the Ottaviani Intervention pressed, the one Benedict tried to answer and Francis reopened: whether the rite that fifteen centuries of saints had prayed can be received again as the treasure it is, or whether the rupture engineered in the name of renewal will be made permanent. That question is not resolved. But the facts on the ground tell their own story. The communities devoted to the traditional Mass remain, in diocese after diocese, among the youngest and most fertile in the Church — full of children, converts, and vocations, exactly where the wider Church is most barren. A liturgy that was supposed to fade has instead drawn the young. Whatever the lawyers and dicasteries decide, the inheritance is alive, and it is being handed on. The Liturgical Movement began as an act of love for the Roman Rite — a desire to draw the faithful into the Church’s own prayer. For a century that love built and recovered; then, for a season, it was turned against the very thing it had cherished. What this generation does with the inheritance — whether the breach is widened or healed — is still being decided. But the deepest instinct of the movement at its origin, the instinct of Guéranger and Beauduin and Guardini, is alive again in the young families kneeling at the old altars: not to remake the Mass, but to be remade by it. That instinct outlived the men who turned from it. And an inheritance still being handed on, lovingly, from one generation to the next — prayed by the young today as it was prayed by the saints — is not, in the end, a thing that dies. This final chapter reports an unfolding situation and reflects the state of the question as of June 2026; it will be updated as events develop.