For most of the period after 1969, the traditional Mass lived on sufferance. Where it survived in communion with Rome, it survived by indult — a special, revocable permission, granted narrowly and often grudgingly, hedged with conditions and dependent on the goodwill of the local bishop. The Mass of the ages had become, in the eyes of the law, an exception to be tolerated.

Then a man was elected pope who had spent his whole life thinking about exactly this question — and who believed, profoundly, that a rite the Church had held sacred for centuries could not simply be cast aside.

The Years of the Indult

The first crack of light came in 1984, when John Paul II, through the indult Quattuor Abhinc Annos, permitted limited use of the 1962 Missal under strict episcopal control. After Archbishop Lefebvre’s illicit consecrations in 1988, John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei adflicta, appealing for unity and establishing the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei to provide for those attached to the traditional rite who wished to remain — or return to — full communion with Rome. These were real mercies, and the communities they sheltered were the seedbed of everything that followed. But the framework remained one of exception and permission. The old Mass was tolerated, not freed; its legitimacy was conceded as a pastoral accommodation, not affirmed as a right. That framework is precisely what the next pope would overturn.

Summorum Pontificum

On July 7, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, and with it changed the legal and spiritual standing of the traditional Mass at a stroke. Its central claim was the one traditionalists had pressed for forty years: the 1962 Missal “was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.” The old Mass had never been forbidden, because it never could have been. Benedict framed the two rites not as rivals but as two expressions of a single tradition: the Missal of Paul VI as the ordinary form of the Roman Rite, and the 1962 Missal as its extraordinary form — two uses of the one Roman Rite, each legitimate. Any priest of the Latin Church, he declared, was free to celebrate the older form without needing anyone’s permission. And in his accompanying letter to the bishops of the world, he gave the traditional cause the sentence that has become its moral center of gravity: It is hard to overstate what those words meant to Catholics who had spent decades being told that their devotion to the Mass of their forefathers was at best an embarrassment and at worst a rebellion. A pope had now said, with the full weight of his office, that what the saints had prayed remained holy — and could not be treated as if it were harmful.

The Hermeneutic of Reform

Summorum Pontificum did not come from nowhere. It was the liturgical expression of the great theme of Benedict’s pontificate, announced in his very first Christmas address to the Roman Curia in December 2005: the hermeneutic of reform — that the Council must be read not as a rupture with the Church’s past but as renewal in continuity with her living tradition, the one subject-Church enduring across time. Applied to the liturgy, that principle was decisive. If the Church is one continuous subject through history, then her ancient worship cannot become suddenly forbidden or harmful; the rite of Gregory and Trent and the rite of Paul VI must be capable of standing together, because they belong to the same Church. Summorum Pontificum was the hermeneutic of reform made law. It was an act of healing — an attempt to reconcile the Church with her own past.

The Years of Flourishing

The effect was immediate and, to many, astonishing. Freed from the indult system, the traditional Mass spread. New communities formed; existing ones grew; young priests learned the old rite; seminaries and religious houses dedicated to it filled. Most strikingly, the congregations gathering for the traditional Mass were disproportionately young — families with many children, converts, students — exactly the demographic the wider Church was losing. What had been a remnant began to look like a renewal. For a decade and a half it seemed that the breach of 1969 might slowly close — that the two forms might coexist, that the continuity Benedict envisioned might take root, that the long contention over the liturgy might give way to peace. It was not to be. Within little more than a decade, the reconciliation Benedict offered would be reversed by his successor. The most painful chapter of the story was still to come.