Posted on 01/19/2026 5:36:24 PM PST by ebb tide
Those who visit the Dicastery for Divine Worship say that Cardinal Roche has been looking downcast lately; they find him sad and worried. And no wonder. His career as a bishop, now drawing to a close in the shadows of old age, has been a series of failures. His pontificate in Leeds was disastrous in many respects, including financially. That is why—and this is no secret—the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales asked Pope Benedict in 2012 to find him another position where he could do no harm to souls or banks. And good old Ratzinger had no better idea than to place him as Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, making him the natural successor to Cardinal Robert Sarah. (Moral: to be a good ruler, it is not enough to be wise and pious).
Roche's failures in his position as prefect were resounding. And the first was precisely Traditionis custodes. He was responsible for convincing Pope Francis to publish that ill-fated document on a subject that did not interest the Argentine pontiff and that embarked him on one of the most significant avoidable and self-inflicted crises of his pontificate.
Not only did it achieve nothing, but it plunged the Church into a permanent state of division, conflict, and sadness. The liturgical peace that had been achieved with Summorum Pontificum was inexplicably shattered by an unnecessary and mendacious document, as Nicola Bux and Saverio Gaeta have demonstrated with documents in hand in their book La liturgia non è uno spettacolo: Il questionario ai vescovi sul rito antico: arma di distruzione di Messa? (The liturgy is not a spectacle: The questionnaire to bishops on the ancient rite: a weapon of Mass destruction?), the statistical reasons with which they sought to justify TC were grossly manipulated.
Worse still, by the end of 2022 it was known with certainty that Roche, Archbishop Viola, secretary of the dicastery, and some advisor from San Anselmo (Andrea Grillo?) were preparing a new document that, in the form of an apostolic constitution, would brutally restrict the traditional liturgy, targeting above all the so-called “Ecclesia Dei institutes.” Pope Francis, in the audience he granted to Roche on February 20, 2023, as we reported here, not only did not sign any apostolic constitution but also rebuked the cardinal, to whom he barely gave a rescript that did little or nothing to change the prevailing situation.
And now, when the leadership in Rome has changed, and the liturgical issue is being played out again with a Pope who wants to find a definitive solution, who is not against traditional liturgy and who wishes to return to that pax liturgica that will heal an important wound in the Church, Roche comes out with a document that has more holes than a Gruyère cheese. We are not going to repeat here the gross errors that appear in the document signed by the cardinal, and for which he wanders like a lost soul through the silent corridors of his dicastery. They have been thoroughly dissected by theologians and experts on the subject, whose opinions are easily found on well-known websites. Curiously, to my knowledge, it was not defended by any progressives. Not even Andrea Grillo came out to shout about it this time.
On the other hand, the tactical error was huge. Roche gave the cardinals that weak text before they decided on the topics to be discussed in the Consistory. In other words, he showed his cards before the game that will finally take place next June. The cardinals will be fully informed of the unbearable lightness of Roche's arguments, and in the coming months they will receive, with respect and reverence, the opinions of their faithful on the subject and the refutations of the arguments put forward by the prefect.
Finally, I would like to add one striking aspect. These figures, who are so open to new ideas and diverse theologies, become more orthodox than the most recalcitrant traditionalists when it comes to traditional liturgy, invoking like geese the hackneyed theological principle lex orandi, lex credendi. They invoke and interpret it as they please, in many cases misleading those who are unaware of the historical perspective needed to interpret it, that is, the majority of bishops and cardinals.
No one doubts the importance of unity in faith. It is a fundamental principle of the Catholic Church that distinguishes it from other Christian denominations. And no one doubts that this unity is expressed in worship. But the misleading argument is to assume that unity of faith is necessarily tied to unity of worship. To assume this is absurd. There are 24 rites in the Church, completely different from each other, and no one would think that a Chaldean from Iraq, a Coptic from Egypt, or a Byzantine from Romania have a different faith from a Roman from Madrid or Bogotá. All of them share the one faith in Jesus Christ, and yet their worship or lex orandi is diverse.
But even if we focus on the West, Roche's argument falls flat. If any Catholic of faith attends a Mass celebrated with Paul VI's reformed missal in Buenos Aires, he will find it quite different from the one he attends when on vacation in Mar del Plata, or Mendoza, or Paris, or New York. Moreover, if they go to another church in the same city, the Mass will most likely change considerably, because we know that the novus ordo encourages improvisation and creativity on the part of the celebrating priests. What unity in the lex orandi is Cardinal Roche talking about, then?
What's more, it would be difficult to find two historical moments in the Church in which unity in the faith was more strongly sought after than in the 13th and 16th centuries. Well, any Catholic living in a European city at that time, say Lyon or Milan, if he attended Mass at his parish, it would be celebrated in the Lyonese or Ambrosian rite; if he attended the Franciscan convent, which was 20 meters away, it would be celebrated in the Roman rite; and if they walked two blocks to the Dominican convent, they would find a Mass in the Dominican rite, and a few steps further on, the Carmelites (shod) would celebrate it in the Carmelite rite. And if he decided to make a spiritual retreat and went to a Carthusian monastery, there the monks would celebrate according to the Carthusian rite. In other words, within a radius of just a few kilometers, he would have five different forms of lex orandi without undermining the lex credendi. And this situation I describe continued well into the 20th century.
As I said in a previous post, we cannot imagine that the cardinal prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship is unaware of these historical circumstances. My question is whether we can imagine that he would want to deceive the faithful and his brother cardinals. And if so, I would advise His Eminence to take more care with his tricks and lies.
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(Informative article by the Wander!)
Is The Wanderer still in print? Perhaps online-only? Many, many moons ago I was a devout subscriber, though not a believer, let alone Catholic. It was a very good paper and ran Joe Sobran’s outstanding weekly column (even after The National Review had cast him into journalistic purgatory).
This is a different Wanderer, one from Argentina.
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