Will Pope Francis Suppress The Latin Mass?

There's been lots of speculation recently, for instance here, that Pope Francis is on the verge of revoking Summorum Pontificum. I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm a Catholic convert to the post-Conciliar Church, and I've never been to a Latin mass (if you leave out the one my mother took my sister and me to in the 1950s).

Beyond that, our pastor turned my view of Pope Francis on its head a couple of years ago, when he gave a homily on the passage in John 21 where the risen Christ recommissions Peter on the shore of a lake. He said the Peter we see in that account reminds him a great deal of the Holy Father we have now: often impulsive, even clumsy, but utterly genuine. Francis is the pope we have, just like all the others. My takeaway at this point is that as a convert, I need to avoid trying to be more Catholic than the pope.

We have a highly successful novus ordo parish. We came into the Church via another parish that was less successful, though I've heard they're improving. After two years there, we went looking to see what else was available, and we found this one within a couple of miles. It's anything but the novus ordo stereotype. In some ways, without being self-conscious or self-congratulatory, it out-Episcopalians any of the Episcopal parishes we used to attend. The cantor at our mass is a professional soprano whose day job is singing opera and Broadway.

Our pastor and a succession of associates and priests in residence are extremely capable and inspiring men who would succeed at other careers -- the pastor worked at an accounting firm before following his vocation. I would summarize their message as go to mass; go to confession; get/stay married unless you have a vocation, which is something you must take seriously; study scripture; read the Catechism; go to adoration; give to the parish and the archdiocese; keep your sense of humor.

Given that, I simply don't see what the Latin mass brings to the party. Since I've never been to a contemporary Latin mass or gotten to know a TLM parish, I don't know what I could be missing, but it would have to be so muich better than our parish that it would also be woth an extra 30-minute drive. By the same token, I've never had first-hand experience of the downside to a rad-trad parish. Bp Barron is clear that this exists. He's taken aback by the vehemence, discourtesy, and anger of on line comments against him. He often engages atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics, but the people who consistently denounce him are the rad-trads.

His position is that if you like the Latin mass because you like the Latin mass, more power to you. But I wonder how many of those there actually are, vis-a-vis people who are maybe overcompensating for something else, with anger as part of the package.

I did get some exposure to people who are at least first cousins of TLM rad-trads when I investigated Anglicanorum coetibus on the old blog. The original target audience was disgruntled Episcopalians from the "continuing" movement of the 1970s and 80s, but few took this up, and by default, the target audience has changed to disgruntled rad-trad cradle Catholics, who like a concocted super-long liturgy that includes all the extra Anglican prayers with all the extra verbiage of Eucharistic Prayer I in the Catholic English mass, with a thorough sprinkling of thee-thou archaisms.

And although I stopped updating the old blog late last year, I still get angry and abusive e-mails about it. This suggest a mindset not too far from the angries who beset Bp Barron in comment sections. Just last week I heard from a guy who insisted that Catholic ladies wear chapel veils all the time, and I was completely off base to suggest that ordinariate parishes use them as an ostentatious marker that they're with a rad-trad program.

All I can say is that Pope Francis speaks against "ritualism", and if he means making a fetish of a particular liturgy as a form of overcompensation, I've got to say he has a point. He also says he doesn't want "rigid" priests. I'm not sure what he means by that. I'm not sure if St Peter always carefully explained himself, either. However, I don't think either Abp Gómez or Francis himself would call any of the priests who've passed through our rectory "rigid". They simply encourage us to study and practice the faith and be good Catholics.

At this point, nobody can be sure if the pope actually intends to suppress the Latin mass, or what measures, if any, he may take short of that. It really won't affect me or our highly successful parish. But after all, he's the pope, just like all the others.