Traditionis Custodes at Five Years and the Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios for the Future
I am not a liturgical scholar, nor, happily, have I ever really participated in the “liturgy wars,” at least not publicly. However, I was still transfixed by the controversy that blew up on the morning of the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes (TC), five years ago (16 July 2021). I penned a fairly quick reaction to Pope Francis’s “atom bomb” (as one wounded priest called TC) and sent it to Artur Rosman, the intrepid editor of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal. My short essay sought to interpret Francis’s motu proprio primarily through an ecclesiological lens, and to see it from a long view.
This longue durée perspective cast TC as the most recent example of a consistent papal drive to assert interpretive control over the reception and implementation of ecumenical councils, a process I noted went back at least to the fraught Council of Constance (1414–1418). I even used a clunky German word to describe this dynamic: Deutungshoheit (literally “interpretive sovereignty”).
I enjoyed writing this piece, but I thought, like most of my attempts at trendy commentary, it was eccentric and contained too many obscure references to early modern Catholicism. I was surprised when the article became probably the most-read thing I have ever written. I think the essay was helpful for people because it mapped responses to TC into four basic camps, it showed that the real dispute was ecclesiological and not liturgical, and it put the controversy into a historical context that went beyond the issues that Francis and his supporters and critics typically circled around: Vatican II and its implementation/reception, Lefebvrist and traditionalist resistance to the Council, and whether Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum had been good or bad for the Church.
Five years later, I stand by virtually everything I said in this essay. The four basic camps I plotted were: (1) “celebration” of TLM crackdown; (2) seeing TC as a “sad necessity”; (3) “mourn and move on”; (4) “reject and resist.” These camps still exist, albeit in mutated form. Certainly, the controversy TC addressed (and contributed to) is still only about liturgy in a surface-level way. The most outspoken advocate for the TLM in the hierarchy is definitely still Cardinal Burke, and while he is obviously deeply, piously devoted to the old liturgy, it is no accident that he also led the charge against Pope Francis’s “ambiguities” in general and synodality in particular, finally generating the formal Roman response to his dubia he so desired.
The “TLM movement” that Archbishop DiNoia argued had “gotten completely out of control” has, if anything, become even more radical after—and surely in part due to—Traditionis Custodes. Indeed, it is now difficult to see much theological (as opposed to prudential or disciplinary) difference between SSPX and the leading traditionalist spokesmen, or at least the ones who make the most noise.
Undoubtedly, the two most important ecclesial events pertaining to these questions in the last five years have been the election of Pope Leo XIV (May 2025) and the SSPX excommunications (July 2026). We no longer need to wonder what Leo will do about SSPX. His reaction was decisive and rigorous. But what will the first (North) American pope do about the TLM? I have my guesses, and they are surely much less educated than those of anyone close to the pope. My prognostication is also, presumably, much less educated than any predictions my friend and collaborator Stephen Bullivant might venture: he spent thirty minutes in private conversation with the pope on his forthcoming co-authored book on traditionalist Catholics.
Botched football and basketball predictions have taught me the perils of saying what will happen in the future. Let me offer instead a plausible best- and worst-case scenario for traditionalist Catholics at the five-year anniversary of TC.
Let us start with the worst-case scenario. Assuming TC is not rescinded, more and more bishops, especially those appointed by Francis and Leo, could restrict the TLM fairly rigorously, either because they have lost patience with trads, they feel pressure from Rome, or both. Most will probably seek to avoid flurries of negative press (e.g. the diocese of Charlotte), but if bishops are committed to the “long game” clearly envisioned by TC—that is, that traditionalists “need to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II”—it is they who possess the institutional machinery to make this happen. Traditionalists who brag about their unbeatable arguments and churn out reams and reams of apologetical material will look even more quixotic than they do now. A further doomsday scenario would involve Rome turning on FSSP and ICKSP, who, unlike the SSPX, do not (and presumably will never) possess their own bishops.
Trads should, however, take comfort in the fact that it is extremely unlikely that Pope Leo will merely continue the program of Pope Francis verbatim. Indeed, the first American pope has already, at least symbolically, broken with Francis on some things. It seems clear to me, however, that Pope Leo shares Francis’s basic reception of Vatican II. I am confident Leo would subscribe to this key formulation in Francis’s cover letter to TC:
To doubt the Council [Vatican II] is to doubt the intentions of those very Fathers who exercised their collegial power in a solemn manner cum Petro et sub Petro in an ecumenical council, and, in the final analysis, to doubt the Holy Spirit himself who guides the Church.
I also think it likely that Leo would endorse the following statement by Francis on the reformed liturgy, a statement that strikes at the heart of postconciliar traditionalism, or at least at the radical traditionalist movement: “Whoever wishes to celebrate with devotion according to earlier forms of the liturgy can find in the reformed Roman Missal according to Vatican Council II all the elements of the Roman Rite.” Consequently, I suspect that Pope Leo’s comment to the effect that if someone wanted Mass in Latin they can attend the Novus Ordo in Latin reflects a principled ecclesiological stance rather than ignorance of the traditionalist worldview.
I think it is naïve to believe (or hope) that Leo is simply uninformed about the TLM and traditionalism and has not yet devoted much thought to either. While he probably does not have the same first-hand familiarity of many bishops (especially in the US, UK, and France), the man Pope Francis tapped to lead the Dicastery for Bishops, and who oversaw thorny cases such as the deposition of the renegade Bishop Strickland, is certainly well-versed in the basic problems and tensions.
I do not believe that Pope Leo will formally rescind TC, although of course he could do so. The best-case scenario for traditionalist Catholics, then, is probably the motu proprio dying a death-by-a-thousand-cuts. That is, Pope Leo and his advisors could decide that “exceptions” to TC become the norm, while TC technically stays in place as a safety valve so that bishops (or Rome) can corral and control renegade traditionalist communities. Those hoping for a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario could point to significant gestures of goodwill from Pope Leo, like permitting Cardinal Burke to celebrate the TLM in St. Peter’s basilica—an unthinkable scene in the latter days of Pope Francis. One could also point to the relative peace that TLM-only communities like the FSSP and ICKSP have been left in after TC, which seems to have been most effective at (and aimed at) suppressing diocesan celebrations of the TLM.
Ironically, the temerity of the SSPX might be a godsend for traditionalists within the Church. The SSPX excommunications provide a timely chance for trads to publicly and vehemently assert their loyalty to Pope Leo and their disapproval of schismatic actions and mindsets in a tangible rather than an abstract way. Prominent traditionalists like Taylor Marshall took this chance, drawing a clear line in the sand after the SSPX consecrations, a line that was, to put it mildly, much fainter during the pontificate of Francis. Organizations like the FSSP and the ICKSP, which form TLM enclaves but are in full communion with Rome, are currently a win-win both for “loyal” trads and for the hierarchy, who need to be able to point to stable homes for anyone wishing to flee the SSPX and reconcile with the Church.
How many souls avail themselves of this succor is probably less significant than the symbolic value of the presence of a pastoral option for traditionalists, especially those who know nothing but the Latin Mass, or who would be tempted to break communion with the Church if no approved TLMs were available. Rome, and bishops with SSPX communities in their dioceses, need to be able to show that at issue is schism, disobedience, and theological deviance, not liturgical preference or reverence.
SSPX is often credited by traditionalists, even many who bemoan their schismatic actions, with “preserving” the Latin Mass during the dark ages of postconciliar persecution, perhaps even saving it from being wiped out by the forces of Bugninian innovation. Under this “best case” scenario, the SSPX might have yet again helped to “save the Latin Mass”—though this time inadvertently and, in an additional irony, by furthering divisions in the traditionalist Catholic world.
16 July 2026
