How the Latin Mass Split the Catholic Church

[douglas9]

Jessica Harvey used to worship in a church with stained glass and a soaring ceiling. The Catholic parish gave Harvey and her family a sense of community as they settled into their new hometown in Virginia. But a year later, they started worshipping at a Catholic school four miles away, in a cramped space that used to double as a ballet studio and storage room. Instead of stained glass, colored images cover the windows. Exposed ductwork hangs overhead.

Why the downgrade? Harvey’s parish was forced to relocate its traditional Latin Mass, an ancient version of the Catholic liturgy that has set off one of the fiercest controversies in modern Catholicism. In 2021, Pope Francis restricted access to the old rite and required that priests get special permission to celebrate it. The parishes that are still allowed to offer the traditional Mass can’t advertise it in their bulletin. And many Latin Mass devotees, like Harvey, no longer worship in their churches, which are largely reserved for the newer, now-standard rite. Traditionalists have been relegated in some cases to auditoriums and school gyms.

In an autobiography published earlier this year, the pope made his distaste clear, writing that he deplored the “ostentation” of priests who celebrate the old Mass in fancy vestments and lace, which can “sometimes conceal mental imbalance.” Such language stands in clear contrast to his emphasis on mercy and pastoral flexibility toward groups on the margins, such as divorced or LGBTQ Catholics.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/latin-mass-pope-francis-church/682354/

[EYESORE 9001]

1. Nothing says 'devotion' like religious ceremonies

where you (likely) can’t understand the words. It’s no accident that the magician’s catchphrase ‘hocus pocus’ is corrupted, faux Latin from the Roman Catholic mass.

[Wonder Why]

3. According to Wikipedia, that is one of the possible explanations.

[EYESORE 9001]

7. It happens to be my personal favorite

Occam’s razor & all.

[snowybirdie]

2. They stopped Latin Mass

In the 60's. Very few of vanishing Catholics were alive then. Fewer priests. A dead language. And the ones that demand Latin Mass are the ones so conservative that most regular people are driven away from them and the Church. No feeling sorry for them.

[Wonder Why]

5. Yup! Some people can never change. Even though I took 3 years of Latin in High School

60+ years ago, I never was able to interpret it from someone talking in even the simplest Latin because nobody used it in conversation.

[snowybirdie]

6. Me too

Finally when we retired in Mexico, my 1950's lessons from the good Sr. Marie. finally came in handy when we moved and had to learn Spanish.

[Redleg]

4. I assumed this was a radical wing of the church doing this

I grew up Catholic and attended mass from the mid 1960s until the mid 1980s and never once heard a Latin mass. Some of the short prayers were in Latin or Greek but the rest of the mass was in contemporary English, including the Catholic Bible, which was printed in contemporary English. I saw the use of the contemporary Bible as an important advance of the church.

[T_i_B]

8. It's the very traditionalist wing of Catholicism

Who attach special importance to the Latin Mass and decry the second Vatican council for it's move away from that.

Often it seems to be new converts who are most zealous for the Latin Mass.

[Redleg]

9. Ah, the new converts like J.D. Fucking Vance

I was lucky to have some good priests who believed the second Vatican Council represented progress and who actually believed, like Pope Francis did, that we must care for the least of those among us.

[Igel]

10. I've been in and around churches that shifted.

They went from one set of beliefs to another. Whether mine, my girlfriend's family in HS, my SIL's.

It always went the same way.

Somebody in charge decided to change something that was traditional. A lot of people didn't care, some were against it, some for it. Those "for" tradition lost and the rules changed.

Not only were the rules changed, but suddenly it was *wrong* to do what they'd been doing for years, what the church hierarchy had said was The One True Way. Suddenly last year's One True Way was actually (and always had been) a Highway to Hell. And the dictum was "conform or be cast out."

When the traditionalists, not-even-late-adopters of the change complained--when mere tolerance would have been sufficient--were described as having started the altercation and were soundly condemned for it. Maybe some subgroup was taken to be representative of the entire group, maybe their views for letting both practices coexist were simply too much "temptation to sin", maybe something else. A schism is born.

It always struck me as a wonderful bit of Stalinesque agitprop to say that the change was uncontroversial when obviously it had been, and that those controverting it were suddenly those launching the attack. Sadly, it never failed and those who held to last year's One True Way were always the losers and were kicked out of the organization that often they were the most zealous in building and most devoted to its precepts.