[Catholic Caucus] “We Demand the Latin Mass”: CIC 2026 Statement to the Vatican

We address our Holy Father as loyal sons of Holy Mother Church, “with burning concern” for the souls of our children.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ commanded Peter to pray that his faith would not fail him during a time of testing. We also pray for Peter today that his faith will not fail him during this time of great testing.

We pray for you, Holy Father, and we recall that down through the ages of faith not a few saints, in the spirit of St. Paul, have in times of great testing prayed for Peter and even resisted Peter to his face out of love for Peter and in filial charity to the Church Suffering here on earth.

In the Fourteenth Century, St. Catherine of Siena reminded Pope Gregory of his duty, begging him to “be manly” in the sight of God, to use the “power and strength that is yours” …. otherwise, it would be “more to God’s honor and the good of your soul to resign.”

Before that in the Fourth Century, St. Athanasius was excommunicated for prayerfully insisting that Peter pray that his faith would not fail him during the time of great testing. Just as today the Church went to sleep Catholic and woke up Modernist, so too in Athanasius’s time, the Church went to sleep Catholic and woke up Arian. And so, Athanasius, like St Paul before him, resisted Peter to his face – not in defiance, behind his back, but honorably and to his face, out of love.

We do not presume to place ourselves at the same level as the saints of the past who saw it as their duty before God to admonish the pope. Nevertheless, we admonish Peter today, not as saints, but as sinners, not as arrogant critics, but as abandoned sheep who find ourselves scandalized by shepherds who preach a different Gospel than the one we learned in Catholic schools established by Catholic bishops, approved by Catholic popes, and manned by Catholic priests and nuns.

We learned their lessons well. We memorized their catechisms. We learned to love and serve the Latin Mass they taught us, and we made promises at our Confirmation to keep the Catholic Faith and to be prepared to die rather than deny it.

Holy Father, the Church of our childhood, is no longer recognizable. She is racked by scandal. Her sanctuaries have been bulldozed. Her altars broken. Her communion rails removed. Her teachings and dogmas dismissed, her buildings locked or sold off to pay the legal bills for accused priests.

But we are still here. Despite the scandals, we have not left the Church of our childhood. Every day we seek her out, sifting through the ruins of the once mighty Catholic fortress that protected all men on earth from the world, the flesh, and the devil. We seek out the little chapels that still stand, where the priests we remember still teach the Faith that made us who and what we are.

Holy Father, you are a missionary priest. Surely, you can imagine how it must be for scattered sheep to feel abandoned by their shepherds, so betrayed. We watch in disbelief as our thriving Latin Mass parishes – our spiritual oases in the desert of relativism – are shut down by order of the Vatican for reasons known only to God.

What is our crime? Why are we being persecuted for believing and worshipping what the Catholic schools of our childhood taught us to believe and worship?

This is a scandal even in the eyes of the world, who also look on in total disbelieve as a Catholic Church on life support cancels the few thriving Catholic communities left in the world.

If there is to be any chance of fixing what has gone so terribly wrong, we must know what sins we have committed that contribute to the division Pope Francis addressed in Traditionus Custodes. How can the pope say the Latin Mass of the ages is disunifying, especially when his own predecessor restored that same Mass as an inalienable birthright of all Catholics, of all times?

You have seen fit to continue the synodal approach of your predecessor which includes an express ecclesial desire to listen to the sheep. If that is so, then listen to us.

We are on the front line, Holy Father. We see firsthand and every day that the human element of Christ’s Church is suffering a crisis unparallelled in her history. The Vatican itself recently released the vital signs of a dying Church in France. The eldest daughter is on life support. Like the rest of the Church in Europe, she is in critical condition.

Why are thriving Latin Mass centers in France being shut down by papal decree, then, when the Vatican’s own website reports that from 1980 to 2024, the number of priests in France plummeted from 39,000 to 12,000 – a seventy percent drop?

Why are thriving Latin Mass centers in France being shut down by papal decree, then, when Catholic parishes in France have decreased by seventy-two percent?

Why are thriving Latin Mass centers in France being shut down by papal decree when three out of four parishes in France are no more?

Why are thriving Latin Mass centers in France being shut down by papal decree when
the number of religious sisters has plunged from 87,000 to 17,000.

Why are thriving Latin Mass centers in France being shut down by papal decree when the number of Baptisms in France went from 513,000 to 186,000.

Why are thriving Latin Mass centers in France being shut down by papal decree when the Catholic Church in France is ceasing to exist?

How can we NOT conclude that the Vatican does not give iota UNUM for us and for our children when she intentionally expels us from our own churches and refuses to defend our children from prowling secularist wolves?

As the Church in France remains in a self-induced coma, the government of France transforms the eldest daughter into a barren and dangerous wasteland. First, they legalized same-sex marriage.

Then on March 4, 2024, the French Parliament voted 780 to72 to amend Article 34 of the French Constitution, making Catholic France the first country in the world to enshrine abortion as a guaranteed constitutional freedom.

In August of 2026, the new aid in dying law came into effect in France, after having received full approval from the Constitutional Council of France.

With the notable exception of a strong Latin Mass Catholic movement in France, the human element of the Church is in terminal decline. Alas, the Vatican is euthanizing that Catholic revival.

The Society of Saint Pius X in France is also teeming with young families and plenty of vocations, and yet Your Holiness saw fit to declare them excommunicated.

In the summer of 2026, during a press conference at Castle Gandolfo, Your Holiness told the media that the Society of Saint Pius X refuses to accept “some fundamental elements of the Church, starting with several points of the Second Vatican Council.”

But which “several points of Vatican II,” Holy Father? Do we not have a right to know which doctrinally binding elements of Vatican II we too must accept in peril of our souls? Otherwise, how do we guard against falling into the same error, so serious as to incur the penalty of excommunication?

What in Vatican II is doctrinally binding and thus must be accepted by all Catholics in peril of their souls? Tell us, Holy Father – what is this new dogma in Vatican II and in which Creed is it listed? Tell us, since we fully accept every previously defined dogma that is reiterated in the documents of Vatican II.

For that matter, Holy Father, which Vatican II are you referring to? Because according to your predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, there were two.

On February 14, 2013, when His Holiness addressed the Roman curia for the last time, he explained that the true Council has not even materialized yet:

“We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone. Therefore, this was the dominant one, the more effective one, and it created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, and the liturgy was banalized –and the real Council failed to materialize; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.”

Which Council then, Holiness, is the Society of St. Pius X “refusing to accept?” The real one, which never actually materialized, or the council of the media – the only one the world ever got — which emptied seminaries and banalized the liturgy?

During an interreligious youth gathering in Singapore on September 13, 2024, Pope Francis, said that “all religions are a path to reach God.” There are “different languages in order to arrive at God. . . some are Sikh, some Muslim, Hindu, Christian. And they are ALL paths to God.”

Is this the official teaching of the Vatican? How CAN it be when it contradicts the constant teaching of your predecessors, most recently that of Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos?

“The Catholic Church is alone in keeping the true worship. This is the fount of truth, this is the house of faith, this is the temple of God: if any man enter not here, or if any man go forth from it, he is a stranger to the hope of life and salvation.”

So, which of these two contradictory papal teachings must we accept in peril of our souls?

Has the Vatican changed Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts? In 1994, Pope John Paul II said that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and contrary to natural moral law.” Is this still the teaching of the Catholic Church, and if so, why has it been over twenty years since the Vatican has shared this teaching with the same-sex couples Pope Francis asked Catholic priests to bless in Fiducia Supplicans?

Is it still necessary for same-sex couples to repent of acts that are “intrinsically disordered and contrary to natural moral law” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church? If so, why doesn’t the Vatican say so and for all the world to hear? Does the admonition of Jesus Christ in John 8:11 still apply: “Go, repent, and sin no more?”

What are we as parents to teach our children about the Sixth and Ninth Commandments? That even God has changed his mind?

If Synodality continues down this path, Holiness, how will history not describe it as the hospice nurse who was summoned to provide palliative care for a dying Catholic Church?

Holy Father, how can it be that WE are the problem, merely for being dismayed by such radical departures from the infallibly defined teachings of the Church of our childhood?

Before God, we have the right to know the truth. And until Your Holiness acknowledges that right, we have no choice but hold fast to tradition, and to do as Blessed Fulton Sheen said in the early days of the Modernist crisis – be the minds, the eyes, and the ears that will help save the Church.

See that our priests act like priests, our bishops act like bishops, and our religious act like religious and since you, Holy Father are the Bishop of Rome, that our popes act like popes.

Holy Father, surely, you know that like Rachel weeping for her children, our wives and mothers today are weeping for our children, lost in the desert of Modernism and a Godless new world order.

The Latin Mass is the only Mass our children have ever known. It has kept our families united in the Catholic Faith. It has enabled us to fulfill our first duty as fathers to our children — to save their souls.

With so many Church scandals splashed across the front pages of the world’s newspapers today, I am not sure how much more our children can endure. They have overheard the things of which St. Paul tells us we should not even speak – the sexual abuse of children, the homosexual abuse of seminarians, blasphemy against God, and now Traditionis Custodes – that the most beautiful thing this side of heaven is, according to their Holy Father in Rome, divisive and in need of cancelation.

Holy Father, we are not your enemies but rather your most loyal sons, watching and praying that Peter’s faith will not fail him. If it does, we will be left with no choice but to resist you as Paul resisted Peter, Athanasius resisted Liberius, Catherine resisted Gregory. If your faith does not fail, you will have no greater defenders than us — the traditionalists.

Either way, until we have answers from our shepherd during this crisis, we will not allow the Vatican or anyone else to divide and conquer us, either through excommunication or cancellation.

The traditional Catholics of the world stand as one, INSIDE THE CHURCH, united by the faith of our fathers, the holy Latin Mass which we WILL find no matter how far, no matter how long it takes, and in fidelity to Christ the King Who will be with us always even unto the consummation of the world.

Your Holiness, we respectfully demand that you respect our rightful liturgical aspirations as guaranteed by Saint Pius V in Quo Primum, and as restored by Pope John Paul II in Ecclesia Dei, and Pope Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum.

Please, Holy Father, listen to us — If the Latin Mass is not restored, then in the spirt of St Paul who resisted Peter to his face, we traditional Catholics, whose first responsibility is the salvation of the souls of our children — will have no choice but to do the same.

Give us back the Mass of our fathers. We pray to God that Peter’s faith does not fail him, and that as Saint Catherine demanded – he will do the right thing. May God bless Your Holiness, and Mary protect our beloved Church under siege.

In Christ the King,
Michael J. Matt and Eric Frankovitch
Catholic Identity Conference

On February 14, 2013, when His Holiness (Pope Benedict XVI) addressed the Roman curia for the last time, he explained that the true Council has not even materialized yet:

3 posted on 10/12/2026 6:33:22 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (The right of the Democrats to embezzle elections shall not be infringed. )

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