By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Pope Francis has said in the past that he does not fear a schism. He must not, or he would never have issued his motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, in English, “Guardians of Tradition” (!!!), a document which attacks Pope Benedict’s document Summorum Pontificum by hemming in the practice of the Traditional Latin Mass with so many restrictions as, for most practical purposes, to prohibit it.
Several things need to be said about this.
Reversing Pope Benedict’s decision as to what needed to be done about the Traditional Mass for the good of the Church, and doing so while Benedict is still living is an egregious insult to him. It almost seems as if he is telling Pope Benedict he thinks he is an idiot — not exactly filial respect.
Implicitly, Pope Francis is rejecting Benedict’s call for a hermeneutic of continuity. For many centuries, until the 1960s, the Traditional Mass gave us a deep sense of continuity and stability in a world where there is constant change, much of it largely for the sake of change and much of it the kind of change the Evil One delights in. When the Traditional liturgy passed largely into disuse during the 1960s and 1970s, that opened up a huge hole of discontinuity in the Church and it has never been filled. What we need to be working on today is a serious effort to fill that hole. Pope Francis seems to want to deepen it.
A closely related issue is universality. The vernacular liturgy is one of these things that sound good in the abstract but can have unexpected consequences that aren’t so great. It can lead to something like a tower of Babel, a situation where we lose the ability to understand one another, where Catholics of a particular nation may come to see themselves as members of a national Church rather than of the universal Church, also known as the Catholic Church (and here I am thinking particularly about the Church in Germany).
So what does Pope Francis really want? A Church universal in space and continuous in time, the Church that loves and serves “Christ yesterday, today, and forever?,” or one that changes with every place and time it encounters, with every wind of doctrine, what some satirist once called “the Church of what’s happenin’ now?”
Whatever some people might think, this is not just some nostalgic, sentimental attachment to something from the past — it is about the Church’s need for a continuity, a universality, which are of her very essence and without which she cannot live.
And then there is the question of authority: Does Pope Francis, or any Pope, for that matter, actually have the authority to do what he is doing now? It seems to me that the Pope’s authority to teach and govern the Church is the authority to protect and defend the Church’s teachings and traditions, especially against those who lust to change them radically, like certain German bishops, and certainly not to throw them (the traditions, not the German bishops) into the trash can because they have not managed to stay in step with the modern world.
The Pope’s authority is an authority to conserve, not to destroy or mutilate. Pope Benedict had the authority to protect the Traditional Mass, and he exercised that authority in Summorum Pontificum. He also stated unequivocally in that document that no one has the authority to suppress the Traditional Mass. That sounds very much like magisterial teaching to me, something Pope Francis needs to reflect on, because in that case it is he who is attacking Catholic Tradition.
Pope Francis claims that Summorum Pontificum has been exploited by those who reject Vatican II, in order to widen existing divisions within the Church, and as a result he has had to reverse Summorum Pontificum to counter this and restore unity to the Church. Here I cannot help being reminded of the Democratic Party’s habit of blaming all its misadventures on vast right-wing conspiracies. If anyone is responsible for widening existing divisions within the Church today, it is Pope Francis himself.
Now if Pope Francis lacks authority to promulgate such a document as Traditionis Custodes, then it is a reasonable inference that we are not obliged in conscience to obey what it commands, and may in fact, be required to disobey. Here I would like to suggest an analogy with civil disobedience, which we may call ecclesial disobedience. With regard to the former, St. Thomas held that if a law is contrary to right reason, citizens are not morally obliged to obey it. By analogy, we are, I believe, justified in holding that the Catholic faithful are not obliged to comply with Traditionis Custodes.
(© George A. Kendall 2021)
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