By Justin McLellan, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY — Without verifying their authenticity, the director of the Holy See Press Office said that a series of documents purporting to reveal bishops’ input into Pope Francis’ decision to restrict celebrations of the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass are “incomplete.”
The documents, published July 1 on the Substack page of Diane Montagna, a journalist accredited to the Vatican, claim to present the results of a worldwide consultation of bishops that led to the pope’s 2021 decision to issue “Traditionis Custodes” (“Guardians of the Tradition”). That decree significantly limited celebrations of the traditional Latin Mass, which uses the 1962 Roman Missal that was in place before the Second Vatican Council.
One of the documents states that bishops who responded to a Vatican questionnaire about the implementation of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 decree allowing limited use of the older rite “ultimately express satisfaction with it.” Another document claims to share excerpts from individual diocesan responses, with the names of the dioceses included.
During a July 3 news conference on a new formulary for the Mass, Matteo Bruni, director of the Holy See Press Office, intercepted a question directed to Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, regarding the reportedly leaked documents.
He did not confirm the documents’ authenticity but said they “presumably concern part of one of the documents on which the decision was based” to restrict use of the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass.
“As such, they feed a very partial and incomplete reconstruction of the decision-making process,” he said. “To the cited consultation were later added other documentation, other confidential reports that were also the fruits of other consultations that were received by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
In a letter to bishops accompanying the publication of “Traditionis Custodes,” Pope Francis wrote that the bishops’ responses to the questionnaire “reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”
While Pope Benedict XVI had granted any Latin-rite Catholic priest permission to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass, Pope Francis’ decree granted that authority exclusively to diocesan bishops. It also instructed bishops not to authorize the formation of new groups wishing to celebrate the Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal.
“Ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the church and her institutions in the name of what is called the ‘true church,'” the late pope wrote in explaining his rationale for the decision.
