A dozen years after his resignation, and two and a half years after his death, Pope Benedict XVI continues to haunt the Catholic Church. Liberals and progressives regard him as a traitor because he dared to question some of the Church’s reforms of the 1960s. Conservatives suspect him on account of his intricately argued refusal to repudiate principles that, in some eyes, provoked chaos and destruction in the Church.
As a young priest, Pope Benedict was openly progressive. He served as a theological adviser at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), or “Vatican II”, which was meant to help renew the Catholic Church, but ended up precipitating its collapse in power, authority, influence and prestige, to say nothing of numbers of worshippers, clergy and nuns, and of young men and women wanting to enter religious life. The Church’s only obvious growth since the 1960s has been in molestation scandals involving boys between the ages of eleven and fourteen, as Leon Podles has chronicled in his 2008 study Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church.
Pope Benedict thought there was nothing wrong with Vatican II itself. The Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium [“This Sacred Council”], for example, called for a few moderate reforms, whilst explicitly spelling out: “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grown organically from forms already existing.” Sadly, that didn’t quite happen.
Many of the men delegated to carry out reforms were incompetent, emotionally unstable, intellectually vain midwits. They ignored entire sections of Vatican II documents, misread others, and imposed unsolicited innovations that radically contradicted the Council’s final decisions. The French historian Yves Chiron’s biographies of Pope Paul VI and the liturgical reformer Mgr Annibale Bugnini, Titular Archbishop of Diocletiana, are particularly informative in this respect.
According to Sacrosanctum Concilium, “the use of the Latin language is to be preserved” in Catholic liturgy. Also, the Council’s decree on priestly training makes clear that all seminarians must acquire “a knowledge of Latin which will enable them to understand and make use of the sources of so much knowledge, and of the documents of the Church”. But progressive Catholics have long feared that if people are able to understand Latin, they might read untranslated texts that will brainwash them into thinking that the 1960s reforms were a catastrophic failure.
Progressives want people to read progressive propaganda — nothing else. This is why reform-minded Catholics have worked so hard over the decades to ensure the disappearance of Latin, in seminaries, schools, universities, and above all in the liturgy. They react to Latin the way a vampire reacts to a crucifix. Latin gets in the way of “progress”.
In a homily on 7th March 1965, Pope Paul VI declared that the Latin language would have to be sacrificed in order to attain “greater universality” at the expense of “the unity of language among the various peoples”. Latin liturgy began to be suppressed. The Mass itself was radically rewritten under the guidance of Archbishop Bugnini, whom the theologian Fr Louis Bouyer described in his memoirs as “a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty”. The pope imposed the new rite on the Church in 1970, despite protests by churchmen who foresaw disaster.
Alas, translating the Mass into vernacular languages did nothing to make it more accessible to the faithful; it merely drove them out of the Church. This is because the Mass is not a teaching tool: it is a bloodless sacrifice. Yet the 1970 Mass was rewritten to minimise all of its sacrificial elements, and many of the more obviously sacred ones, as though they were in some way embarrassing or inessential. As a result, for decades, even educated Catholics have had no clear notion of why they are forced to go to church on Sunday mornings.
All in all, Archbishop Bugnini’s reforms seem misguided, if not pointless. The 1970 Mass lacks spiritual content. Priests usually face the congregation during the ritual, and talk nonstop throughout, as though it were a cooking show instead of a sacrifice. There is not enough silence to pray, even in churches that avoid using ghastly 1970s folk music.
Liturgical reformers claim that there is something unhealthy about fixating on aesthetic elements of the Mass. You wonder whether they read the final fifth of Sacrosanctum Concilium — the sections about sacred music and art. When you compare the 1970 rite to the ancient one, which altered little between the fourth and twentieth centuries, you begin to understand why people abandoned the Church after Vatican II.
Perhaps the only Catholics who wholeheartedly welcomed Bugnini’s liturgical reforms were those squat, dumpy schoolmarms who were suddenly everywhere during the 1970 Mass, reading out scripture passages, leading choirs in the chanting of the psalms, forcing people to sing awful hymns, and smugly distributing Holy Communion as “Extraordinary Ministers” of the Eucharist. The “traditionalist” movement in the Catholic Church began as a rebellion against the apparent takeover of the Church by these pantsuited harridans and their defeated-looking sons. Nobody hates the Latin Mass more than men whose overbearing mothers browbeat them into becoming priests.
After his election in 2005, Pope Benedict spent much of his energy trying to keep traditionalist Catholics from abandoning the Church. But since the 1960s, most of the disunity within the Church has come from those Catholics who bend over backwards to claim brotherhood and fellowship with Muslims, and with the sorts of Protestants who burn the pope in effigy and call the Church the Whore of Babylon. These progressive and liberal Catholics invariably want to stamp out traditionalists like cockroaches.
Liberal and progressive Catholics hated and feared Pope John Paul II. Luckily for them, Pope Benedict proved easier to bully, and had little control over his subordinates in the Vatican. In 2008, he quietly imposed strict sanctions on the notorious sex criminal Theodore McCarrick, the powerful former Cardinal-Archbishop of Washington, DC. McCarrick enjoyed humiliating him by openly ignoring the restrictions.
Under such conditions, it seems a miracle that Pope Benedict accomplished anything. He managed to issue a motu proprio (the Vatican’s equivalent of an American president’s executive order) in 2007 called Summorum Pontificum (“Of The Supreme Pontiffs”). This allowed any priest to celebrate the pre-1970 Latin Mass without seeking permission from his bishop. Pope Benedict’s reasoning was clear: “what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us, too, and it cannot be all of a sudden forbidden or even considered harmful”. Progressive and liberal Catholics wept with rage; meanwhile, the Church enjoyed a renaissance, at least in parishes where the ancient Mass was celebrated.
On 11th February 2013, Pope Benedict announced that he would resign “the ministry of the successor of Saint Peter” at the end of the month. God’s view of the matter was indicated when a bolt of lightning struck the dome of Saint Peter’s basilica a few hours after the announcement. Pope Francis was elected on 13th March. One of his most visible supporters was Godfried, Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop Emeritus of Brussels, who had been disgraced in multiple scandals involving molester clergy under his protection.
The most convincing psychological study of Pope Francis remains Henry Sire’s 2017 polemic The Dictator Pope. It argues that Pope Francis preferred to surround himself with men who were stupid, cowardly, and/or easily blackmailed, simply so that they were easy to control. The kindest interpretation of his behaviour might be that he was afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder. Otherwise it is hard to see why he rehabilitated Theodore McCarrick.
In June 2018, Timothy, Cardinal Dolan, Cardinal-Archbishop of New York, released a statement announcing that McCarrick had been suspended from public ministry on account of a credible and substantiated allegation of sexual abuse. Two months later, the former papal nuncio to the United States, Mgr Carlo Maria Viganò, Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana, released an explosive report laying out evidence that Pope Francis knew about McCarrick’s long list of sex crimes, and Pope Benedict’s attempt to punish them, yet brought McCarrick out of retirement anyway.
Like most people associated even vaguely with the Latin Mass, Archbishop Viganò has terrible PR instincts. But nobody has ever effectively refuted his initial report, and Pope Francis knew it. Since he could not retaliate openly, he directed his wrath against the people most inclined to listen to Archbishop Viganò — traditionalist Catholics.
Early in 2020, Pope Francis ordered a “consultation” of the world’s bishops regarding the Latin Mass. He was presented with a 224-page report in February 2021. According to the Vatican’s ‘Overall Assessment’ (executive summary), the overwhelming majority of bishops who allowed the ancient Mass in their dioceses were satisfied with it, and warned that any changes to Summorum Pontificum would harm the Catholic Church. To Pope Francis these were evidently insignificant details.
On 16th July 2021, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI found out from a Vatican newspaper that Pope Francis had renewed harsh restrictions on the Latin Mass. The new moto proprio of Pope Francis, Traditionis Custodes (“Guardians of Tradition”), aimed explicitly at undoing Summorum Pontificum, and making the ancient liturgy disappear forever. In a letter to bishops, Pope Francis claimed that he had based Traditionis Custodes on what the bishops themselves had requested. For some reason, he refused to release any supporting documentation.
Pope Francis died on 21st April 2025. On 1st July, the Vatican journalist Diane Montagna published details of the 2021 Overall Assessment on her Substack page. It turns out that Pope Francis was not telling the truth about why he restricted the Latin Mass. On 3rd July, at a Vatican press conference, Hannah Brockhaus of Catholic News Agency asked the Secretary for the Congregation of Divine Worship, Mgr Vittorio Francesco Viola, Archbishop-Bishop Emeritus of Tortona, to comment on Montagna’s revelations. He froze.
Pope Leo XIV has his work cut out for him in cleaning up the results of a dozen years of Pope Francis
The Director of the Vatican Press Office, Matteo Bruni, scolded Brockhaus for her impertinence. Then he stiffly read out a prepared statement that neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the document that had been leaked to Montagna. A week later, Montagna confirmed that the leak was indeed authentic.
Pope Leo XIV has his work cut out for him in cleaning up the results of a dozen years of Pope Francis. But in dealing with Traditionis Custodes, he cannot simply spit in his predecessor’s face, just as Pope Francis did to Pope Benedict, who insisted on maintaining the internal continuity of Church history: “We cannot say: Before, everything was wrong, but now everything is right; for in a community in which prayer and the Eucharist are the most important things, what was earlier supremely sacred cannot be entirely wrong. This issue [is] internal reconciliation with our own past, the intrinsic continuity of faith and prayer in the Church.”
