Pope Leo XIV’s general audience on Wednesday clarified something that many conservative and traditionalist Catholics have been unwilling to face: the pope believes both that the liturgical reform is a good thing and that the reforms carried out following the Second Vatican Council are “firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.”
This really should not be surprising to Catholics. Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Francis all affirmed the reform and presented it as an authentic implementation of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. Statements from these popes make clear that they believe the reform was carried out in obedience to the Council and intended to renew Catholic life.
Among the postconciliar popes, Benedict XVI stands apart in having offered concrete criticisms not only of abuses, translations, or failures of implementation, but also of the process by which the reform was carried out and of aspects of the resulting liturgy. To be clear, Benedict accepted the reform’s legitimacy and holiness. Nevertheless, particularly in his writings before his papacy, Joseph Ratzinger returned to these criticisms often and in blunt terms. On this question, Benedict did not see eye-to-eye with the other popes of the postconciliar era.
I realize that this runs against the conventional wisdom of many conservative Catholics, particularly in the English-speaking world. For years, Ratzinger’s analysis of the reform has often been treated as though it were the settled judgment of the Church: that the reform might have been legitimate, but it was not carried out ideally, departed in significant ways from the intentions of the Council Fathers who debated and approved Sacrosanctum Concilium, and produced liturgical books that required substantial correction. Ratzinger’s reservations were not limited to abuses or poor implementation. As he wrote in his preface to Alcuin Reid’s book The Organic Development of the Liturgy, “It was one of the weaknesses of the first phase of reform after the Council that to a great extent the specialists were listened to almost exclusively. A greater independence on the part of the pastors would have been desirable.” He later described the liturgy as having been “extensively rationalized during the early phase of reform” and wrote that those formed by the earlier Liturgical Movement could only stand “deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.”
Ratzinger also adopted many of the ideas of the German liturgical scholar Klaus Gamber, as I have written in the past. Gamber believed that the reformed liturgy was not the fruit of “organic development” and even suggested that it was unworthy to be called the “Roman Rite.” As pope, Benedict rejected that latter claim, declaring that the two Missals represented “two usages of the one Roman rite.” But he clearly shared Gamber’s underlying criticism of the way the reform had been carried out. In a preface to the 1992 French edition of Gamber’s book The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, Ratzinger wrote perhaps his harshest words about the liturgical reform:
What happened after the Council was something else entirely: in the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it — as in a manufacturing process — with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.
In other words, Ratzinger accepted the authority and validity of the reform while expressing profound disappointment with its process and results.
Leo’s catechesis this week suggests that he takes the majority view. He explained that the Council considered it necessary to revise the liturgical books “with the utmost respect for the heritage of tradition, and precisely in order to make it more accessible.” After tracing the reform’s roots through Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, and John XXIII, Leo concluded, “The liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.”
Leo — in line with the other modern popes — did acknowledge and criticize liturgical abuses. But he did not attribute them to fundamental defects in the reform. He said that liturgical abuse occurs when “some of the principles underlying the reform itself have been taken to extremes or misunderstood.” Rather than calling for an overhaul or reversal of the liturgical reform, Leo called for a “correct understanding” of the liturgy and active participation.
This places Leo in substantial continuity with Pope Francis. In 2017, Francis said that liturgical renewal:
is not a matter of rethinking the reform by reviewing the choices in its regard, but of knowing better the underlying reasons, through historical documentation, as well as of internalizing its inspirational principles and of observing the discipline that governs it. After this magisterium, after this long journey, we can affirm with certainty and with magisterial authority that the liturgical reform is irreversible.
Francis wanted the liturgical reform implemented properly, not reconsidered from the ground up.
Unlike Pope Francis, when speaking on the liturgy Pope Leo rarely mentions the views of those who reject the reform. For Leo, the revised liturgical texts promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II simply are the Church’s normative liturgy. This forward-looking approach has confused many of Pope Francis’s critics. His statements on the “need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in” the liturgical rites of the Eastern Churches and how the French bishops should show “generosity” towards those attached to the older form of the liturgy were interpreted by motivated traditionalist-leaning commentators as signs of hope that he intends to reverse or roll back Pope Francis’s restrictions on the Tridentine liturgy. Yet despite the wishful thinking of Francis’s critics, Leo has never publicly suggested that he disagrees with Francis’s decision or is considering a change in policy.
The differences between Benedict’s approach and the position of the other contemporary popes became visible during Cardinal Robert Sarah’s tenure as prefect of the then-Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW). Sarah understood his mission as continuing Benedict’s liturgical program, and early in his tenure he portrayed Pope Francis’s views as aligned with his. In his July 2016 address to the Sacra Liturgia conference, he said that the Church could not dismiss “the possibility or the desirability of an official reform of the liturgical reform.” He called for a return to priests adopting an eastward-facing (ad orientem) posture — with their backs to the people — during the Mass. He also encouraged a restoration of the faithful kneeling to receive Communion. Quoting from one of his own books, he said, “Man is not fully man unless he falls on his knees before God to adore Him.”
In the years following the Council, the normative posture of the priest is facing the people (versus populum), and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal encourages it, saying, “The altar should be built separate from the wall, in such a way that it is possible to walk around it easily and that Mass can be celebrated at it facing the people, which is desirable wherever possible” (GIRM 299).
And although the Vatican’s 2004 instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum forbids priests from denying Communion to those who want to receive kneeling, standing is the common practice throughout the Catholic world. It is the established norm in countries including the United States, Canada, and England and Wales, while the bishops of Australia and New Zealand identify it as the customary posture. The Italian Roman Missal directs that Communion should ordinarily be received standing — and this is the Missal commonly used at Vatican liturgies. One exception is Kazakhstan, where Bishop Athanasius Schneider says the bishops’ conference decreed that Communion is ordinarily to be received kneeling and on the tongue. Beyond Kazakhstan, however, I have not been able to identify another country where kneeling is clearly established as the national norm for the reformed Roman Rite.
In his speech, Cardinal Sarah was essentially proposing that Benedict’s particular liturgical vision was to guide the Church’s future. Francis put a stop to that effort. A few days after the speech, Francis met with Sarah and the Holy See Press Office issued an official clarification, stating that no new liturgical directives were forthcoming and that “it is better to avoid using the expression ‘reform of the reform’ with reference to the liturgy, given that it may at times give rise to error.” Four days after Cardinal Sarah’s address, Francis discussed the liturgical reform with Father Antonio Spadaro in a conversation published as the preface to the original 2016 Italian edition of Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola. Francis told Spadaro, “We need to meet with magnanimity those who are attached to a certain way of praying. But the ordinary is not that. Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium must be carried forward like everything else. To speak of a ‘reform of the reform’ is a mistake.”
John Paul II’s position on the liturgical reform was also unambiguous. In his 1988 apostolic letter Vicesimus Quintus Annus, he called Sacrosanctum Concilium a source of “hope for the life and the renewal of the Church.” He said the reform had been undertaken “in accordance with the conciliar principles of fidelity to tradition and openness to legitimate development” and therefore was “strictly traditional and in accordance with ‘the ancient usage of the holy Fathers.’”
Fifteen years later, in Spiritus et Sponsa, John Paul called for a deeper knowledge of the “riches and potential” of the renewed liturgical texts. Certainly, he thought liturgical formation was lacking, and he was deeply troubled by liturgical abuse. But he explicitly distinguished those abuses from the reform itself, saying that such abuse “has nothing to do with the authentic spirit of the Council” and calling on pastors to correct it “prudently and firmly.” He did not echo Ratzinger’s broader criticisms of the reforming process or of the resulting liturgical books.
Pope John Paul I’s 33-day papacy was too brief for him to develop a papal teaching on the subject, but Albino Luciani’s earlier record is clear. During the Council, he described many of the proposed reforms enthusiastically — more Scripture, use of the vernacular, simplification of rites, and active participation by the faithful. “A rite,” he wrote, should not require explanation but should “speak and explain by itself.” In 1965, he endorsed Paul VI’s insistence that the reform be accepted and implemented “without reservations.”
In September 1969, Luciani wrote, “Fidelity to the Council requires that the principles it enunciated be applied to the new rites. And that they all be applied. Therefore: novelty, yes; but no rupture with the ‘sound tradition.’” In 1973, he criticized Catholics “situated on the right” who called for the Church to preserve medieval rites, including the use of Latin, simply because earlier popes had established them.
Like every pope since the Council, John Paul I opposed unauthorized experimentation and insisted upon reverence for tradition. But he did not regard liturgical abuse and experimentation as evidence that the reform itself was defective. Occasional “accidents” in the work of renewal, he said, did not justify “active or passive resistance.”
Paul VI, of course, promulgated the reformed Missal. For him, its implementation was not a regrettable experiment but a solemn responsibility entrusted to him by the Council. A common traditionalist narrative persists that Paul VI did not fully understand or support the reforms promulgated in his name, but was strong-armed into approving the liturgical changes by Archbishop Annibale Bugnini. The theory draws heavily on Louis Bouyer’s claim that Bugnini told the members of the Consilium that “the Pope wants it so,” while telling Paul VI that the commission had unanimously supported the proposed changes. It is reinforced by stories such as the famous — though unconfirmed — anecdote that Paul VI arrived in his chapel for Mass one morning in 1970 and began to weep upon discovering that he had abolished the Octave of Pentecost.
Paul VI’s own public statements, however, leave no doubt that he supported the reform. In his general audience of November 19, 1969, he described the reform as the fulfillment of the Council’s express will and an act of obedience intended to preserve the Church’s authentic liturgical tradition. One week later, he told Catholics that behind the changes stood “the will of Christ” and “the breath of the Holy Spirit” calling the Church to renewal (November 26, 1969). Years later, in his 1976 letter to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Paul stated plainly: “The present reform derived its raison d’être and its guidelines from the Council and from the historical sources of the liturgy.” He added that he had sanctioned the reform by his own authority and required its adoption throughout the Roman Rite. Whatever influence Bugnini or other liturgical experts may have had on him, Paul VI publicly championed the reform and claimed it as his own — defending it as an authentic fruit of the Council and as a work undertaken under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
The reaction from some traditionalist commentators to Leo’s catechesis was remarkably consistent. Stephen Kokx accused the pope of “invoking 1970s talking points about attendees being mere ‘spectators.’” Anthony Stine employed the same characterization in a video response, and former child actor Bug Hall classified it as “a well known boomer talking point.” Other commentators repeated nearly identical language — using a talking point about talking points.
But the pope’s words were not simply talking points left over from the 1970s. He was restating magisterial teachings. The idea that the faithful should not remain “strangers or silent spectators” comes directly from Sacrosanctum Concilium. So does “active participation,” a phrase that originated with Pius X. The terms and expressions that Catholics take as dated progressive rhetoric are actually conciliar and papal teachings whose history has been drowned out in certain circles for decades by reactionary and derogatory rhetoric from traditionalists and champions of the “reform of the reform.” This ideology has become so entrenched that some Catholics now mistake polemical language for settled Catholic teaching while dismissing the actual teaching articulated by Pope Leo as a collection of dated talking points.
To be clear, none of this means Benedict was an opponent of Vatican II or of the reformed Mass. In his letter accompanying Summorum Pontificum, he insisted on the “value and holiness” of the reformed Roman Rite. He identified Paul VI’s Missal as the ordinary expression of the Roman Rite and hoped that allowing the two forms to coexist would have a positive impact on the Roman Rite overall. Many good Catholics share this opinion, and although I disagree, they are entitled to it.
The point I am making is more straightforward. Benedict’s liturgical vision, which included the need to correct some of the reforms undertaken after the Council, is a minority position among recent popes. Francis decisively declined to continue the program commonly described as the “reform of the reform,” and Leo has given no indication that he wishes to revive it. Like Francis, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II, Pope Leo speaks of the reform as necessary, traditional, and directed toward the fuller participation of the faithful.
Leo does not believe that the reformed liturgy is a defective product awaiting reconstruction. Certainly, like the other popes, he is open to modifications and refinements and corrections if they are deemed necessary. Clearly, he frowns on liturgical abuse. And like Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Francis, Leo receives the reformed rites as a positive good and an authentic fruit of the Council. And in this sense he is strongly in continuity with four of the five popes who preceded him. Only Benedict — who nevertheless affirmed its legitimacy and holiness — offered concrete criticisms of the reforming process and aspects of the resulting liturgy, which sets him apart from the broader papal consensus. Catholics who have long treated Ratzinger’s critique as the Church’s default position have the story backwards: on the liturgical reform, Benedict was the exception, and Leo — like Francis before him — stands with the rule.
Image: Pope Benedict XVI distributes communion in Westminster Cathedral. YouTube Screenshot.
Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. In addition to his work for the site, his writing has appeared in America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, US Catholic, The Irish Catholic, Catholic Outlook, The Synodal Times, and other Catholic publications. He has been quoted in The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New York Post, and other mainstream outlets on Catholic affairs. He previously co-hosted the Field Hospital podcast with Jeannie Gaffigan and The Debrief podcast. Before founding Where Peter Is, he worked in communications at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Climate Covenant. He is married with four children.
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