THE COLUMN: Il Ritorno della Messa Tridentina in Patria?

The recent accession to the throne of St. Peter by the new pope, Leo XIV, is surely the most significant event in Church history since the doctrinal demolition derby of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 unleashed by Pope John XXIII and concluded by Pope Paul VI (both, unaccountably, sainted since their deaths). Nothing did more to destroy the integrity and popularity of the Roman Catholic faith than this disastrous conclave, and nothing could be more timely or encouraging than a restoration of the liturgy by the Chicago White Sox fan, Pope Bob; it just might take an American to clean out the Augean Stables of the Eternal City.

Under the regrettable papacy of Jorge Bergoglio, an Argentine-born Italian heavily influenced by Latin-American social leftism, the Church cracked down on the use of the old Tridentine Mass, established in 1570 and in use worldwide until the "reforms" of Roncalli and Montini. Meant to "modernize" an institution that has been the moral, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual bedrock of European Christianity and hence culture for more than two millennia, Vatican II dispirited the faithful and discouraged the curious, and was rightly seen by many if not most as the act of betrayal it in fact was. No amount of "good intentions" could possibly have outweighed its calculated destruction.

With the rollback of punitive political "progressivism" now underway, not only in the United States under the second Trump administration but in such European countries as Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands, it's high time Holy Mother Church got with the program of rebirth and renewal. As I wrote in the Epilogue to my 2018 book, The Fiery Angel: "The way forward might just be backward."

The history of our art reveals, and constantly revisits, the norms of Western culture. But no matter how “transgressive” we might wish to be, the fundamental things apply: the relationship of mankind to God; the physical and spiritual bond between men and women, and its absolute primacy in the world of human creation; and the need for heroes.

Iconoclasm comes and goes, often literally, but it must be seen as an aberration, the yeast in the ferment of history, if we are to have faith in our culture, our civilization, and our future; it cannot be the norm. Likewise with revolutionaries, manqué and otherwise. We must learn to distinguish between those who are the fulfillment of Western foundational principles, such as the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, whose revolution was against their own, and our, imperfection; and those whose transient “truths” have ended up, like Marx himself, on the ash heap of history, no matter how many icons they smash along the way to the boneyard.

History, therefore, is neither an arc nor a plot. Neither “his story” nor “her story.” It is our story.

One of the principal differences between leftists and conservatives is that the first group believes the world is imperfect but perfectible via the right philosophy and a heapin' helping of brute force, while the latter understands that some truths are immutable and we reject them at our own peril. And once rejected should more often than not be restored as quickly as possible.

Indeed, the theme of restoration is fundamental to the Western tradition. It appears in both the Homeric epics: in the Iliad, the wronged Menelaus demands the return of his wife, Helen, from Paris and the Trojans who absconded with her. It is even more thematic in the Odyssey, which details Ulysses' decade-long journey back to Ithaca from the shores of Anatolia and his successful attempt to wrest both his queen and his kingdom from the hands of rapacious suitors. (The Zeitgest, moving as it does, has given us two films on the subject now: The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes last year and the upcoming The Odyssey directed by Christopher Nolan out next year.

There's nothing new under the sun, however: one of the earliest composers, Claudio Monteverdi, treated the same material in his opera Il ritorno d"Ulisse in patria of 1640, which remains in the repertory today:

So the news that Pope Leo XIV might be rolling back some of his predecessor's strictures against the Latin Mass is welcome indeed:

The Vatican has granted a parish in Texas an exemption from restrictions to the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) imposed by Pope Francis’ decree Traditionis Custodes. The exemption, requested by Bishop Michael Sis on Feb. 6, was granted to St. Margaret of Scotland Parish in the Diocese of San Angelo, Texas. No other such exemption by Pope Leo XIV has been reported since the start of his pontificate.

“The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments informed me in a decree of May 28, 2025, that my request has been granted for a further two years for a dispensation from article 3§2 of the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, so that Mass according to the ‘Missale Romanum’ of 1962 may be celebrated in the parish church of St. Margaret of Scotland in San Angelo,” Sis, who previously served as a member of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, said in a statement he shared with CNA.

Further, it appears that the late Francis ignored the wishes of a majority of his bishops in imposing tough restrictions on the Latin Mass:

In one of his most controversial acts, Francis in 2021 reversed Pope Benedict XVI’s signature liturgical legacy and restricted access for ordinary Catholics to the old Latin Mass. The ancient liturgy was celebrated around the world before the modernizing reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council, which allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular, with the priest facing the pews.

Francis said he was cracking down on the spread of the old liturgy because Benedict’s decision in 2007 to relax restrictions on its celebration had become a source of division in the church. Francis said he was responding to “the wishes expressed” by bishops around the world who had responded to a Vatican survey, as well as the Vatican doctrine office’s own opinion.

The documents posted online, however, paint a different picture. They suggest the majority of bishops who responded to the Vatican survey had a generally favorable view of Benedict’s reform. They warned that suppressing or weakening it would “do more harm than good” and lead traditionalist Catholics to leave the church and join schismatic groups.

Which is, of course, exactly what has happened.

There is increasing anecdotal evidence both in the U.S. and Europe that attendance at Mass is waxing, as the Promised Land of Secular Socialism has failed to arrive and a deep spiritual void -- embodied by the inhuman, soulless entity of the EUSSR, run by a cabal of middle-aged women -- has taken hold of the populace. As the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton famously observed, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Chesterton also wrote the parable of the Fence, the moral of which is don't tear anything down before you fully understand why it was there in the first place.

The fracturing of Roman Catholicism begotten by the Second Vatican Council was a foolish and unnecessary attempt to placate the false gods of modernity and a reversal of the official motto of the United States, e pluribus unum. Instead, we've had "out of the one, many," a concept fatal to any orthodox religion, and look how well that's turned out.