The promulgation of the new Mass in 1969 did not end the liturgical crisis. It institutionalized it. The Church did not simply adopt a new rite and move on; it split into camps whose disagreement was, and remains, fundamental — not about taste or rubrics, but about what the Second Vatican Council was and what the Church is.

Those camps are still contending today. To make sense of the present moment — of Benedict’s liberation of the old Mass and Francis’s reversal of it — you have to know who the parties are.

Three Reactions to the Reform

Broadly, the Catholic world after 1969 sorted itself into three responses. The progressive camp — the heirs of the Consilium and the self-described party of the “spirit of the Council” — welcomed the reform and pressed for more, reading Vatican II as a rupture with the past and a mandate for continual change. The traditionalist camp refused the new rite, holding fast to the Mass of the ages, and ranged from communities in full communion with Rome to those in canonically irregular situations. Between them stood a third group, harder to label but enormously consequential: the “continuity” theologians, who accepted the Council and the validity of the new Mass but insisted that both must be read in unbroken continuity with the Church’s tradition — and who often quietly loved the old liturgy.

Concilium and Communio: The Theological Divide

The deepest division ran along a fault line visible in two theological journals. In 1965, the progressive wing founded Concilium, whose original circle included Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Yves Congar, and Johann Baptist Metz — theologians who, however different, read the Council as the dawn of a new and ongoing reformation. In 1972, a group that had grown alarmed by that trajectory founded a rival review, Communio, as a deliberate alternative. Its three principal founders were Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — with Louis Bouyer among its founding collaborators. Where Concilium read Vatican II as discontinuity, Communio read it as renewal in continuity with the living tradition; de Lubac would witheringly describe the post-conciliar agitation as a “para-council,” a phantom council conjured in the name of the real one. This was not a quarrel about liturgy alone. It was a quarrel about whether the Church of the 1970s was the same Church, in unbroken continuity, as the Church of the centuries before — or something newly begun. Decades later, as pope, Ratzinger would give that quarrel its definitive formulation: The traditional cause belongs, by its deepest logic, to the hermeneutic of reform — to continuity, not rupture. That is why its strongest champion would turn out to be one of the founders of Communio.

The Institutes: Where the Old Rite Survived

While the theologians argued, the old Mass had to survive somewhere concrete — in the chapels and seminaries of those who kept celebrating it. The most prominent and most controversial of these was the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — a former missionary archbishop in Africa, superior general of the Holy Ghost Fathers, and a Council Father at Vatican II. (He was an archbishop, not, as is sometimes wrongly said, a cardinal.) Convinced that the traditional priesthood and rite had to be preserved against suppression, Lefebvre in 1988 consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate — an act that incurred the penalty of excommunication and left the Society in a canonically irregular situation in which it substantially remains, neither sedevacantist nor in full regular communion. (The excommunications of the four bishops were themselves lifted by Benedict XVI in 2009, in a gesture of reconciliation; the Society as such, however, still has no canonical status.) But the SSPX is not the whole story, and to many it is not the best part of it. When Lefebvre proceeded to the 1988 consecrations, a number of his priests declined to follow him out of communion and instead founded, with Rome’s blessing, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) — dedicated to the traditional rite in full canonical communion with the Holy See. Others followed: the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, traditional Benedictine monasteries such as Le Barroux and Fontgombault, and a network of communities that became known collectively as the “Ecclesia Dei” institutes, after the document by which John Paul II provided for them. This is the crucial point for anyone drawn to the traditional Mass today: the old rite did not survive only on the far side of canonical regularity. It survived, and flourished, in full communion with Rome — in the FSSP, the Institute of Christ the King, and the monasteries. Validity is the floor; communion is not negotiable. The traditional movement at its healthiest has always sought the old Mass and the unity of the Church, not one at the price of the other.

The Unfinished War

By the turn of the millennium the situation had hardened into a stalemate. The progressive camp held the institutions; the traditional camp held a small but fervent and growing remnant; the continuity theologians waited and wrote. The dispute was unresolved at every level — doctrinal, liturgical, canonical, pastoral — and it showed no sign of resolving. And then something unexpected happened. One of the founders of Communio, the theologian who had spent forty years arguing for continuity against rupture, was elected pope. For the traditional Mass, the long winter was about to break.