What is the Traditional Latin Mass?

The Traditional Latin Mass — also called the Roman Rite, the Tridentine Mass, the Vetus Ordo, or simply the Mass of the Ages — is the form of the Mass that grew organically from the apostolic age, was codified at Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, and was promulgated definitively by Pope St. Pius V in 1570 with the bull Quo Primum. Its prayers, gestures, calendar, and silences were not invented by Pius V; they were inherited. He standardized what generations of saints had already prayed.

It is offered in Latin, the universal sacred language of the Western Church. The priest faces the altar — ad orientem — leading the faithful in the same direction. Most of the Canon is prayed silently. Communion is received kneeling and on the tongue. The texts shift each day with the propers, and the calendar is woven through with octaves, vigils, and saints whose feasts have been kept for over a thousand years.

This is the Mass that converted Europe, evangelized the New World, and nourished the saints. It is the Mass St. Thomas Aquinas heard, that St. Therese of Lisieux loved, that Padre Pio offered. For most of the last 1,400 years, when a Catholic in the West said “the Mass,” this was what they meant.

And the line runs further still. Behind those 1,400 years, the Roman Rite traces in unbroken succession through the early Roman liturgies of the catacombs, through the Apostles themselves, all the way back to the Upper Room. This was and is THE Mass of all ages — along with its Eastern sister liturgies, the Byzantine, Coptic, Syriac, Maronite, and Armenian rites that share the same apostolic root.

Go deeper → The Mass of the Ages