Pope Francis began regularly using a wheelchair in public in 2022, around the time he stopped celebrating Mass in public. On 14 February he was admitted to the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome. His end grows nearer. Faithful Catholics seem increasingly anxious, less about the pope’s health than the question of who will be elected his successor on the Throne of St Peter.
Many Vatican-watchers are concerned that the next pope might well be the oily Pietro Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican’s current Secretary of State, or else the slickly philistine former Archbishop of Manila, Luis Cardinal Tagle. Both men are viewed as more competent than Pope Francis in terms of implementing the reforms that they and many of their peers in the Vatican seek to impose on the Church, regardless of whether the Catholic masses (or what is left of them after sixty years of such reforms) in fact want them.
Non-Catholics are often shocked at how unpopular Pope Francis is amongst the ever-dwindling number of faithful Mass-going Catholics who try to fulfil their basic spiritual obligations. Few who claim to love Pope Francis seem to obey basic Church teachings or go to Mass every Sunday. If you talk in confidence to Catholic priests, you will find that most of them are exhausted, frustrated and demoralised after a dozen years of erratic, sometimes abusive management by this pope and his key advisers. Then there are the scandals.
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It is difficult to keep up with the list of corrupt, disgraced, sometimes criminal clergy and prelates with whom Pope Francis has surrounded himself. The distinguished scholar Professor John Rist, former Regius Professor of Classics at Aberdeen, helped compile a list of these in a statement published in May 2024 calling for the pope’s resignation. Philip Jenkins published a less detailed, more digestible short summary on the Patheos blog on 7 March.
Perhaps the best-known of these scandals involves Theodore McCarrick, who was once one of the most powerful figures in the American Catholic Church. He rose to become Archbishop of Washington, but was revealed in 2018 to have engaged in a practice best described as “seminary date-rape”. McCarrick’s preferred victims were young men training to become priests. He was removed from the College of Cardinals and subsequently defrocked.
According to McCarrick’s former secretary, Mgr Anthony Figueiredo, Pope Benedict imposed strict sanctions on McCarrick as long ago as 2008, but was too weak to enforce them. After Pope Benedict’s unexpected resignation in 2013, Pope Francis rehabilitated McCarrick despite being well aware of both the sex-crime allegations and the sanctions. This was first revealed in an explosive report released on 22 August 2018 by Mgr Carlo Maria Viganò, Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana, who served as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016.
Pope Benedict tried to bring back traditionalists who had drifted away
Archbishop Viganò was excommunicated in 2024. But his 2018 testimony has never been convincingly refuted; indeed, more than one reliable high-level source in the Church will vouch in private for the complete accuracy of Viganò’s account (alas, there is too much threat of retaliation to do so in public as yet). Most Catholics remain uninformed about the McCarrick scandal, even though it has been covered extensively by the New York Times and Washington Post. Yet to understand this particular crisis is to understand everything that has gone wrong in the Church over the past six decades.
Only so-called “traditionalist” Catholics seem consistently to have taken the time to inform themselves about the various scandals surrounding Pope Francis. Traditionalists are best defined as those who see what non-Catholics see — that the Church’s “reforms” of the 1960s and 1970s were, for the most part, acts of institutional suicide that drove the majority of Catholics out of their churches and permanently destroyed their faith. The most pivotal of these reforms involved the Church’s central public liturgy, the ritual of the Mass.
Until 1970, there was an ancient rite that was celebrated everywhere in Latin. From 1970 onwards, Catholics who remained in the Church experienced something else entirely, which to an outsider often looks like a manifestation of some different new religion. The traditionalists tried to resist all of this and preserve the pre-1970 Latin ritual, as well as the other devotions that all but disappeared as a result of the reforms.
Yves Chiron has written a definitive history of the traditional movement, Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism (Angelico Press 2024). This, alongside Joseph Shaw’s The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals (Arouca Press 2023), shows in some detail just how cruel the Church’s self-appointed reformers have been over the decades in their efforts to shut up their traditionalist opponents and suppress the Latin Mass.
Pope Benedict was never a traditionalist, but as early as 1969 he publicly recanted some of his earlier enthusiasm for certain reforms, and began to acknowledge how much damage these innovations were doing. After his election in 2005, Pope Benedict set about trying to reconcile various factions in the Church and bring back traditionalists who had drifted away from Rome. The main result was an apostolic letter entitled Summorum Pontificum (“Of the Supreme Pontiffs”) which was promulgated in July 2007. It made clear that the Church’s ancient Latin Mass had never been abrogated and could be celebrated by priests relatively freely where the faithful wanted it. The reaction from reform-minded Catholics was scream-rage.
One of the most vociferous opponents in England of traditionalist Catholicism and the Latin Mass was the late Fr Philip Endean SJ, the controversial Jesuit priest who was responsible for instituting the Soho Gay Mass in London. He objected so strongly to a revised 2010 English-language translation of the 1970 Mass that he compared the process of its authoritarian imposition on the Church to the child-abuse scandal. It never occurred to Fr Endean that traditionalists might regard the imposition of the 1970 Mass in precisely the same way.
The only consistent outrage about the McCarrick scandal since 2018 has come from traditionalist Catholics. Pope Francis was angry and humiliated by this perceived challenge to his authority, and he decided to take revenge. In 2020, the conservative Guinean prelate Robert Cardinal Sarah was asked to step down as Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, which oversees the liturgy. He was replaced by the former Bishop of Leeds, Mgr Arthur Roche, who until then was best known for officiating at the funeral Mass of Jimmy Savile, the noted television personality and serial child rapist. Mgr Roche was made an archbishop in 2012 and a cardinal in 2022. He has not been uniformly popular as Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship.
Liturgy is the embodiment of theology
In July 2021, whilst Pope Benedict was still alive, Pope Francis promulgated an apostolic letter entitled Traditionis Custodes (“Guardians of Tradition”), which has become widely known — even amongst clerics who do not favour the old Latin Mass — as “Traditionis Molestores” (no translation of the term ought to be needed). Pope Francis and his obedient instrument Cardinal Roche essentially declared war on the traditionalists by imposing severe restrictions on the ancient liturgy. The document was as close as they could legally get to abrogating Summorum Pontificum entirely and permanently suppressing the Latin Mass once and for all.
According to his secretary Archbishop Gänswein, Pope Benedict was not informed in advance of Traditionis Molestores. In fact, it broke his heart. But in the end Pope Francis and Cardinal Roche cannot have been pleased with the fruits of their action either: after declaring war, they lost — badly. There has been a worldwide backlash against Traditionis Molestores, and the old Mass now seems more popular than ever, not least amongst young people and converts — the two groups most frequently targeted by the Church’s evangelisation initiatives, which have otherwise been laughably unsuccessful for half a century.
Even Cardinal Roche seems to have slowly realised what a colossal blunder he has made. He is too widely hated to have a chance at becoming pope now; he seems to be posing as a “moderate” in the hopes of attaining a more suitable office under Pope Francis’ successor. This is the most reasonable explanation for certain of his claims in a very odd recent interview with The Catholic Herald.
Perhaps this is less an interview than a press release; whatever it is, it is not recognisable as journalism. Most of the content is uninteresting, except in terms of what it reveals of Cardinal Roche’s weak grasp of Church history, his faulty elementary theology, and his evident total lack of understanding as to why Catholics who are visibly devout overwhelmingly prefer the Mass that he has tried and failed to suppress over the ritual that was partly written up one night atop a sticky tablecloth in a cheap restaurant in Trastevere (see Fr Louis Bouyer’s eye-opening memoirs, which were posthumously published, then translated into English by John Pepino in 2015).
Traditionalists want the Latin Mass not because of some eccentric preference for Latin, or reactionary nostalgia, or a sentimental attachment to aesthetic qualities that are missing in the 1970 rite. Liturgy is the embodiment of theology, and the 1970 rite visibly does not embody the same theological principles as the old Mass. This is the real reason the reformers become so hysterical about traditionalists. Their respective positions cannot honestly be reconciled.
Cardinal Roche tries to dodge the issue of his responsibility (and enthusiasm) for Traditionis Molestores in his interview by conflating the Church’s ancient Mass with a mere Latin version of the 1970 Mass: “I often hear people say, ‘Cardinal Roche is against the Latin Mass,’” he tells the Herald: “if they only knew that most days I celebrate Mass in Latin because it is the common language for all of us here.” He seems to be tacitly repudiating the only thing he is known for (other than the Jimmy Savile funeral). God help us if any of his peers in the College of Cardinals are fooled by this.
The great French preacher Saint John Eudes (1601–1680) once said that the greatest sign of God’s anger is when He lets the faithful fall into the hands of clerics who try to drag Christian souls into Hell instead of leading them toward Heaven. If this is true, then Catholics and non-Catholics alike should be profoundly worried, because God is clearly enraged with humanity, judging by the current quality of clerics in the Vatican. The chastisement of the world is not over yet. What will we all suffer next?
