Summorum Pontificum

For most of the period after 1969, the traditional Latin Mass lived on sufferance. Where it survived in communion with Rome, it survived by indult — a special, revocable permission, granted narrowly, hedged with conditions, and dependent on the goodwill of the local bishop. John Paul II had widened the opening: in 1984 the indult Quattuor Abhinc Annos permitted limited use of the 1962 Missal under episcopal control, and in 1988 Ecclesia Dei adflicta appealed for unity and established a commission to shelter those attached to the older rite who wished to remain in full communion. These were real mercies. But the framework remained one of exception and permission: the old Mass was tolerated, not freed.

Then a man was elected pope who had spent his whole life thinking about exactly this question. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI had written with unusual frankness that a rite the Church had held sacred for centuries could not simply be prohibited — that to treat the Church’s own ancient worship as forbidden was to wound her sense of continuity with herself. When he became pope in 2005, he was uniquely placed to act on that conviction.

The Pope-Theologian Acts

On 7 July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and changed the legal and spiritual standing of the traditional Mass at a stroke. Its central claim was the one traditionalists had pressed for four decades: the 1962 Missal “was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.” The old Mass had never been forbidden, because — on Benedict’s reading of the Church’s own law and life — 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 he named the ordinary form of the Roman Rite; the 1962 Missal, its extraordinary form — two uses of the one Roman Rite, each legitimate. This was the decisive move. He did not pit the new against the old, nor the old against the new. He kept and celebrated the reformed Mass himself. What he refused was the idea that the two could not stand together within the one continuous tradition that had produced them both.

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 Continuity

Summorum Pontificum did not come from nowhere. It was the liturgical expression of the governing theme of Benedict’s pontificate, announced in his first Christmas address to the Roman Curia in December 2005: that the Second Vatican Council must be read not as a rupture with the Church’s past but as renewal in continuity with her living tradition — one subject-Church enduring across time. This was the “hermeneutic of continuity,” set against a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.”

Steelmanned on its own terms, Benedict’s act was not nostalgia and not a concession wrung from him by pressure. It was an act of healing: an attempt to reconnect the Church organically with her own liturgical past, to let the reform and the tradition it grew from breathe the same air again, and so to close — slowly, by coexistence rather than by decree — the breach that 1969 had opened.

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 older rite; seminaries and religious houses dedicated to it filled. Most strikingly, the congregations gathering for the traditional Mass skewed 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.

What It Left Unsettled

For a decade and a half it seemed the breach of 1969 might slowly close — that the two forms might coexist, that the continuity Benedict envisioned might take root. Yet the settlement rested on a delicate balance it could not itself guarantee. It depended on goodwill: on bishops welcoming rather than resisting, on traditional communities receiving the gift without weaponizing it against the reform, on a reading of the Council that not everyone shared. Benedict had answered the juridical question — is the old Mass permitted? — but the deeper ecclesial question of how the two forms should relate, and whether the reformed Mass alone expressed the Council’s intent, he left open.

Summorum Pontificum remains the high-water mark of the “reform of the reform” — the moment a Pope-theologian put the weight of his office behind the claim that the Church’s ancient worship was never lost, never forbidden, and never anything but sacred. Whatever followed, that act of recognition cannot be unsaid.