For Pope Francis, the Mass is the message

First Things, 20 July 2021

The importance Traditionis Custodes gives to the Internet world makes it a novelty.

Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis's recent motu proprio, is not principally about the right to offer the Holy Mass in the older form of the Roman Rite. It’s not really about rites at all. It’s about Catholic life in the age of the Internet. The Mass is the message. 

Vatican II and the subsequent reforms of the Roman Rite are about the same age as Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage “the medium is the message.” The theorist of mass media was a Catholic convert, and not at all a lukewarm one. He went to daily Mass. In part, his conclusions about the effects of mass media arose from his study of the transmission of Scripture and the nature of worship. McLuhan thought that the printing press was as much a factor in the Reformation as theology and politics, and that the invention of the microphone was key in the shift from Latin to the vernacular languages in the celebration of Holy Mass.

McLuhan is useful for thinking about the “firm decision” of Pope Francis in Traditionis Custodes to immediately revoke all the provisions made by St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI for the celebration of what the latter called the “Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite” (EF), also known as the Tridentine Mass or the Traditional Latin Mass. 

Pope Francis's decision to drop this heavy ecclesiastical hammer (not customarily his preferred pastoral approach), follows from his judgment that those Catholics frequenting the EF foster 1) division in the Church and 2) reject the teaching of Vatican II. About the first, he is right. About the second, it rather depends upon where the soundings are taken.

Catholics attending the EF can be divisive. But so are many others. I went to a Catholic elementary school in which there were a good number of Ukrainian Catholics. They went to the local Ukrainian Greco-Catholic parish with its Byzantine liturgy. We never saw them at our parish church across the street for Mass. So we were divided. Not hostile, but divided. 

Division happens in parishes all the time; those who prefer the music-free early Sunday Mass never meet those who come on Sunday evening for the praise-and-worship choir. And that’s not new; in the old pre-conciliar days, parishioners chose between low Mass and high Mass.

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