# Traditionis custodes: Five years on

**By:** Joseph Shaw  
**Published:** 2026-07-16T13:00:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/traditionis-custodes-five-years-on)

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 As the fifth anniversary of Traditionis custodes (“ TC”) restricting the Traditional Latin Mass comes round, what can be said of its operation?
The Apostolic Letter given motu proprio (“by the Pope’s own initiative”) was published on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Pope Francis liked using Marian feasts for important occasions. This was a Friday, and it was to come into effect immediately: there was no time allowed for preparation (the usual vacatio legis). Since it required bishops to make all sorts of arrangements and either prohibit or give explicit permission for Masses which might be happening on that very Sunday, this was quite a challenge. Then again, the text was unclear in a number of ways, and there was no official Latin version.
Confusion continued over the next five months, during which, like HMS Dragon, the new document kept having to go back to dock for essential repairs. One fault of drafting was corrected by the Latin text which was published in December. This was quickly followed by a Responsa ad dubia from the Dicastery which addressed other ambiguities. It did so with such zest, however, that canonists around the world felt obliged to point out that the Dicastery could interpret the law, but not add to it. To resolve these and other problems, yet another document emerged in February 2022, the Rescripta ex audientia, with the authority of Pope Francis himself. In the meantime – 10 days before the Rescript, and on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes – Pope Francis had signed a Decree affirming the right of priests of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, who only celebrate the Traditional Mass, to continue to do so unmolested.
This Decree reaffirmed the “particular law” with which the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter was founded. All the institutes and communities established since 1988 to celebrate the Traditional Mass – the “Ecclesia Dei communities” – have such laws, which are not repealed by changes to the universal law of the Church unless this is made explicit. This reality undercut the stated aim of Traditionis custodes to eliminate the Traditional Mass completely. Also at odds with this objective were the concessions made to the traditionalist but canonically irregular Society of St Pius X (SSPX) by Pope Francis in 2015, which also remained in place, authorising them to hear Confessions and celebrate the sacrament of Matrimony.
On the one hand, the Holy See was officially seeking to suppress the celebration of the ancient Mass, in stages, and this policy was indeed being carried out: American bishops who asked for guidance from the Dicastery were allowed a smaller and smaller number of celebrations in successive rounds of permissions, each lasting two years. On the other hand, the Traditional priestly institutes and even the SSPX continued to be officially encouraged.
Some have suggested that the real plan of TC – contrary to the official explanation – was not the elimination of the Traditional Mass, but stopping diocesan clergy from celebrating it. There might be some logic to this approach, if bishops found diocesan Traditional Masses harder to control and more likely to provoke complaints. At the same time, the Ecclesia Dei communities have not been entirely immune from difficulties caused by TC, a notable example being Cardinal Blaise Cupich’s prohibition of public Masses in the Chicago church owned by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, in August 2022. Many observers predicted that the Ecclesia Dei communities would feel the squeeze when the Dicastery for Religious, which had been given responsibility for them by TC, got round to organising visitations. A visitation of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter was finally announced in September 2024, and has not yet concluded.
During the five years of Traditionis custodes, there has been a steady trickle of sad stories coming out of the United States about long-established Traditional congregations being thrown out of parish churches. In other places, however, where bishops have been less zealous, or where the Traditional Mass had been provided by Ecclesia Dei communities, or where diocesan clergy have offered it in non-parish churches, it has made no discernible difference. In another kind of case, celebrations have been transferred from parish churches to an alternative venue, with the approval of the Dicastery, a change which is not always for the worse. Overall numbers are difficult to judge, but while the number of celebrations has certainly declined, the size of congregations has significantly increased, not least because the controversy over TC has put the Traditional Mass back into the centre of Catholic commentary, in a way it had not been since Pope Benedict XVI liberated it with his own Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum in 2007.
To illustrate the conflicting signals, last month Bishop William Medley of Owensboro, Kentucky, suppressed the only regular Traditional Mass being celebrated in his diocese, declining to request an extension to the permission previously granted for it. Last November, on the other hand, Britain’s papal nuncio Archbishop Miguel Buendía told the bishops of England and Wales that such requests would be granted. Then again, Pope Leo himself gave permission for the celebration of the Traditional Mass in St Peter’s by Cardinal Burke, with a congregation of some 2,000 people, last October.
On its first day of publication, Bishop Declan Lang of Clifton in England prohibited all celebrations of the Traditional Mass in his diocese with immediate effect. That same day another English Ordinary – who will be nameless – telephoned every priest who celebrated it in his diocese to reassure them that they could carry on. Confusion about the nature of the Holy See’s policy, and about the meaning and the force of the provisions of TC and subsequent documents, has continued from that day to this. The spiritual and liturgical lives of many thousands of Catholics loyal to the Papacy have been seriously harmed, and those of tens or hundreds of thousands have been publicly condemned as a source of disunity in the Church. Any confidence that the Society of St Pius X might have been gaining that the Holy See had made its peace with the Traditional Mass has been destroyed, and they have now, according to the Holy See’s own analysis, gone into schism. The Eastern Orthodox have witnessed Western Catholics apparently hating their own tradition, and Protestants have witnessed an act of arbitrary papal power that can be described charitably as reckless of its pastoral consequences. The world’s bishops have witnessed their contribution to the consultation exercise which supposedly lay behind TC – the official summary of which has been comprehensively leaked – being manipulated and ignored.
An awful lot of eggs have been broken, but it remains unclear what omelette is being prepared. I write this not just as an armchair commentator, but one who has privately asked curial officials and many others in Rome simply to explain the motivation and the hoped-for outcome of TC. I betray no confidences by saying that everyone I asked had a different answer, and it was those furthest from the centre of things who answered with the greatest clarity and confidence.
Cardinal Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, will forever be associated with his Dicastery’s explanation of why details of Traditional Masses should be excluded from parish newsletters:
“There is no intention in these provisions to marginalise the faithful who are rooted in the previous form of celebration: they are only meant to remind them that this is a concession to provide for their good (in view of the common use of the one lex orandi of the Roman Rite) and not an opportunity to promote the previous rite.”
 If the aim of Traditionis custodes was indeed to marginalise the faithful rooted in the Traditional Mass, then it might be said to have had a measure of success, though this has come at the expense of promoting the “previous rite” by putting a bright spotlight on it. Otherwise it is much more difficult to see what it has achieved, or still might achieve, that Pope Francis and his advisers might actually have wanted to achieve.
It is time for Pope Leo to clear up the mess.

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