Posted on 01/21/2026 12:55:39 PM PST by ebb tide
Bishop Athanasius Schneider dismantled Cardinal Arthur Roche’s justification for suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) in an exclusive interview with Diane Montagna published Tuesday.
Bishop Schneider decried as “manipulative” a document on the liturgy distributed by Roche at the extraordinary consistory convened by Pope Leo XIV earlier this month, in which Roche claimed that “we cannot go back” to the Traditional Latin Mass.
In the missive, Roche continued the talking points of Pope Francis as culminating in the dictates of Traditionis Custodes, which throttled TLMs around the world and told priests they must reapply for permission to offer the TLM from their diocesan bishop, “who should in turn consult the Apostolic See before granting this authorization.”
Like Francis, Roche framed the continuation of the TLM as divisive, referring to it in his consistory document as “freezing division.” This contradicts Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum, which affirmed that the 1962 missal was “never abrogated” and that its continued use is not divisive.
The antagonism of Roche and Francis toward the TLM, as manifested in Traditionis Custodes, also contradicts Quo Primum, which permanently authorized the traditional Mass, declaring that it may be used “freely and lawfully” in “perpetuity.”
Bishop Schneider believes Roche’s document, which has not yet been discussed among the consistory’s cardinals, “appears driven by an agenda aimed at denigrating” the traditional Latin Mass and “ultimately eliminating it.”
The orthodox prelate told Montagna he sees the document marked not by an impartial desire for truth but by “manipulative reasoning” and even the distortion of historical evidence.
For example, Roche selectively references Quo Primum in an attempt to support the suppression of the traditional Latin Mass, quoting its statement that “there ought to be only one rite for celebrating the Mass.” However, as Bishop Schneider pointed out, Quo Primum actually “explicitly permits all variants of the Roman Rite that had been in continuous use for at least two hundred years to continue lawfully,” including the Ambrosian and Dominican rites. “Unity does not mean uniformity, as the history of the Church attests,” noted Bishop Schneider.
Referencing Quo Primum here is disingenuous on the part of Roche, because the 1570 bull clearly contradicts his main point, by firmly authorizing the TLM “in perpetuity.” It states that “this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain … that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remains always valid and retains its full force."
Bishop Schneider also contests the claim of Roche that the Novus Ordo was “wanted” by the Second Vatican Council and its “in full syntony with the true meaning of Tradition.”
Rather, the Novus Ordo embodies a rupture with the tradition of the Church as then-Father Joseph Ratzinger wrote in a 1976 letter to Professor Wolfgang Waldstein:
“The problem of the new Missal lies in the fact that it breaks away from this continuous history—one that progressed uninterrupted both before and after Pius V—and creates an entirely new book, whose appearance is accompanied by a type of prohibition of what previously existed that is wholly foreign to the history of Church law and liturgy. From my knowledge of the conciliar debates and from a renewed reading of the speeches delivered at that time by the Council Fathers, I can state with certainty that this was not intended.”
Even the “majority of the Synod Fathers of 1967—almost all of whom were also Fathers of the Second Vatican Council—rejected” the Novus Ordo Missae, as opposed to the initial new Mass of 1965, according to Bishop Schneider.
Bishop Schneider further condemned Roche’s suggestion in his consistory document that liturgical pluralism amounts to “freezing division.”
“Such a claim is manipulative and dishonest, since it contradicts not only the Church’s two-thousand-year practice, which has always regarded the diversity of recognized rites—or of legitimate variants within a rite—not as a source of division, but as an enrichment of ecclesial life,” said Bishop Schneider. Intolerance for coexistence of different liturgical practices is the mark of a “narrow-minded cleric” and has done damage to Christians in the past, he argued.
An example of this was the prohibition of the older form of the rite of the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, leading to a schism of the “Old Rites,” which continues to this day, even after the Russian Orthodox Church restored the older rite. “In this case, intolerance on the part of the hierarchy toward the legitimate use of the older rite quite literally froze division—the Old Ritualists were exiled by the Tsar to frozen Siberia,” pointed out Schneider.
The bishop ended with a sharp critique of Roche’s document, calling it “reminiscent of a desperate struggle of a gerontocracy confronted with serious and increasingly vocal criticism — arising primarily from a younger generation, whose voice this gerontocracy attempts to stifle through manipulative arguments and, ultimately, by weaponizing power and authority."
“Yet the timeless freshness and beauty of the liturgy, together with the faith of the saints and of our own ancestors, will nevertheless prevail.”
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Ping
HE should have ascended ... as GREGORY XVII ... or NICHOLAS VI ...
...or a truer continuation of LEO XIV.
May our current LEO XIV step it up and knock some heads. Borrow the fists of St. PIUS X if necessary.
His trajectory, though, is not looking good.
Roche is really bad news. Allegedly he was so incompetent and disliked in Leeds, England, that the rest of the English hierarchy begged B16 to take him off their hands with a Vatican job. And the rest is history. He can’t be put into retirement soon enough.
Schneider is a Saint.
you're kidding, right.... the handpicked member of the Velvet Mafia. The RCC is rotten from the top down. The pederasts and communists have completed their mission and infiltrated and have tried to destroy the church.
God will always win, they will always lose...but they'll guide their flock towards the devil and they deserve nothing but contempt. Ask them their view on homosexual child abuse and the priests involved.... that's the tell. There are seminaries that discourage heterosexual devout young men and favor pipe lickers with a weak spine and a fondness of Lenin/Mao/Stalin.
There are so many young people joining our parish and DYING for a conservative message and understand the fact that the Latin Mass made Catholicism a world wide religion because wherever you were on this planet, the words were in Latin and universal.....
The "Church" and "God's word" are good but men are evil, weak and greedy with lust for money, sex and power... like most men..
Pope Leo XIV seems to think Almighty God is ambivalent about whether the Church saving souls is more important than chasing U.S. tax dollars.
Wow! Just, Wow.
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