Diagnosis Without the Cure: Cardinal Sarah can see what modernity destroys when it rejects what it has received. The question is why he will not apply the same diagnosis to the post-conciliar liturgical revolution.
Cardinal ✠Robert Sarah’s recent address at the European Parliament is among the clearest diagnoses yet offered by a senior churchman of the crisis consuming Western civilisation: reality displaced by ideology, inherited meanings rewritten by power, natural law subordinated to positive law, and peoples pressured to surrender what they have received in exchange for what modern institutions call progress. Yet Sarah’s argument stops at an extraordinarily revealing point. For years he has identified the desacralisation, anthropocentrism and discontinuity which followed the Second Vatican Council while continuing to accept the Novus Ordo and the essential post-conciliar liturgical settlement. He prescribes silence, ad orientem, chant, kneeling, reverence and continuity — almost everything the traditional Roman liturgy already possesses — but does not offer the Traditional Mass itself as the remedy. If, as Sarah now says, “the crisis of the Church in the West and the crisis of the West itself are, at bottom, the same crisis”, then the comparison can no longer be avoided.
Cardinal ✠Robert Sarah went to the European Parliament in Brussels on 15 July 2026 and placed before Europe a question more fundamental than any individual controversy over abortion, gender, development policy or international aid. Are there realities which human beings receive and must recognise, or is reality ultimately whatever sufficient power can persuade society to call it? Sarah described the resulting disorder as a “crisis of the logos”: words such as “human rights”, “dignity”, “development”, “freedom”, “health”, “gender” and “family” remain in circulation while their meanings are progressively detached from the realities they once described.¹
This is why Sarah’s charge of “ideological colonisation” is more serious than another complaint about progressive politics. His contention is that the contemporary West increasingly exports not merely money, medicine, education and technology, but an anthropology. “Sexual and reproductive health” may encompass abortion; “gender” may cease to correspond to biological sex; “family” may cease to possess any antecedent natural structure; “rights” may be expanded until political institutions purport to manufacture claims unknown to natural law. The wealthy party consequently acquires more than economic leverage. It acquires the ability to establish the vocabulary in which the weaker party is expected to speak. Sarah described imprecise and ambiguous international language as capable of becoming an instrument of “silent power” and cultural and economic neo-colonialism.²
Sarah’s insight is fundamentally Catholic because it rests upon a proposition older than the modern ideological struggle: things are what they are before the State names them. Man is not created by legislation. Woman is not a political category. Marriage is not manufactured by parliament. Human dignity is not conferred by international convention. Positive law remains answerable to a moral order it did not create.
In this respect Sarah’s argument is not substantially opposed to Pope Leo XIV. Indeed, Sarah deliberately begins from Leo’s own teaching. Addressing the Diplomatic Corps on 9 January, Leo warned that the meaning of words had become increasingly fluid and ambiguous, that language itself could become a weapon, and that the West was developing an “Orwellian-style language” which excludes those refusing ideological conformity. The Pope defended conscientious objection to abortion and euthanasia, spoke of marriage as the exclusive and indissoluble union of a man and a woman, rejected abortion as the destruction of developing human life, and criticised public financing of the supposed “right to safe abortion”.³ In April, addressing members of the European People’s Party, Leo insisted that Christian political action must preserve the connection between natural law and positive law.⁴ Magnifica Humanitas subsequently grounded fundamental human dignity not in political recognition but in an ontological reality: man possesses dignity because of what he is, as a creature willed, created and loved by God. The same encyclical gives a strong account of subsidiarity, explicitly warning against higher authorities supplanting persons, families and lower communities or confronting them with decisions already taken from above.⁵
Sarah therefore exposes a tension within Leo’s public programme rather than a straightforward doctrinal disagreement with it. Leo rejects ideological anthropology while continuing to place considerable hope in multilateral institutions. Sarah asks, in effect, what happens when those institutions themselves become vehicles for ideological anthropology. Leo condemns the manipulation of words; Sarah identifies institutional structures through which manipulated meanings can be internationalised. Leo affirms subsidiarity; Sarah asks what subsidiarity means when economically powerful supranational bodies exert pressure upon poorer nations to adopt moral propositions those nations did not themselves derive from nature, religion or culture.
That question deserves to be pressed. But Sarah himself supplies the premise for a still more searching inquiry. Near the conclusion of his Brussels address he declared that “the crisis of the Church in the West and the crisis of the West itself are, at heart, one and the same crisis.”¹ If that judgement is correct, the examination cannot end with Brussels bureaucracies, international agencies, secular universities or progressive legislators. If the same crisis has afflicted Church and civilisation, one must ask where the Church herself absorbed something of the mentality which Sarah now condemns outside her.
Eventually that inquiry reaches the liturgy.
Cardinal Sarah is an unusually important figure precisely because he cannot fairly be dismissed as indifferent to the destruction wrought in Catholic worship after the Council. As Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship he repeatedly defended silence, Gregorian chant, reverence, kneeling, sacredness and the common orientation of priest and faithful towards the Lord. At Sacra Liturgia in London in 2016 he went considerably further than many prelates were prepared to go, suggesting that the experience of the preceding five decades might require Catholics to examine some specific ritual reforms and liturgical policies “in a different light”. He famously encouraged the recovery of ad orientem worship and insisted upon a genuinely faithful implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium.⁶
It would therefore be false to portray Sarah as an advocate of everything subsequently justified by the phrase “the spirit of Vatican II”. He manifestly is not. Much of his public liturgical work has consisted precisely in resisting its recognisable manifestations: anthropocentrism, informality, improvisation, excessive verbalism, horizontalism, the loss of silence and the reduction of sacred worship to something resembling a congregational performance.
But this makes the remaining inconsistency more, not less, striking.
Sarah’s solution has remained substantially the Benedictine solution: correct the reform rather than fundamentally reconsider the reform itself. The Missal of Paul VI is accepted; abuses must be eliminated; traditional elements should be recovered; the older liturgy possesses a continuing place; and the two usages should contribute to the renewal of Catholic worship. In his 2017 address on silence and the primacy of God, Sarah explicitly praised the usus antiquior for its “tangible sacrality” while continuing to frame the Church’s task as an authentic renewal embracing Catholic liturgical life as a whole.⁷
There is nothing logically incoherent about that position. A Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in Latin, ad orientem, with Gregorian chant, the Roman Canon, traditional vesture, substantial silence and Communion received kneeling and on the tongue can undoubtedly be reverent, solemn and unmistakeably Catholic. Traditional criticism becomes less credible, not more, whenever it refuses to acknowledge that elementary fact.
But the very success of such celebrations produces the question which the “reform of the reform” has spent years postponing: if the reformed liturgy is repaired principally by restoring what the traditional liturgy preserved, why is the traditional liturgy itself not the more obvious remedy?
This is where Sarah’s Brussels diagnosis turns with uncomfortable force upon the post-conciliar Church. Sarah tells Europe that modern man has become dangerously confident in his ability to reconstruct what he has received. Human nature becomes material. Sexual identity becomes material. Marriage becomes material. Family becomes material. Language itself becomes material. The inherited reality is dismantled, its constituent parts reassessed according to contemporary theory, and something new constructed which retains sufficient inherited vocabulary to maintain the claim of continuity.
Yet the history of the post-conciliar Roman liturgy raises an unavoidable parallel.
This does not mean that liturgy may never change. It always has. Nor does it deny the authority of the Apostolic See over liturgical discipline. The Church unquestionably possesses authority to regulate her rites. But Sacrosanctum Concilium itself placed an important restraint upon the mentality of reform: innovations were to be introduced only where the genuine good of the Church certainly required them, and new forms were to “grow organically from forms already existing.”⁸
That is not the language of revolution. It is the language of inheritance.
The reform which followed Vatican II may therefore legitimately be examined according to the Council’s own criterion. Did the extensive replacement of ancient offertory prayers constitute organic growth? Did the scale of the calendar’s reconstruction? Did the unprecedented breadth of textual alteration? Did the practical disappearance of Latin from ordinary parish worship correspond to a Council which explicitly required its preservation? Did the widespread abandonment of Gregorian chant correspond to a constitution which accorded it “pride of place”? Did the near-universality of celebration facing the people arise from an explicit conciliar mandate? It did not. Neither Sacrosanctum Concilium nor Vatican II required the familiar post-conciliar arrangement in which priest and congregation face one another across the altar.
These questions are not answered by repeating that the Church possessed authority to reform the liturgy. Authority and prudence are different propositions.
A Pope possesses authority to appoint bishops; it does not follow that every episcopal appointment is wise. A bishop possesses authority to reorganise his diocese; it does not follow that every reorganisation is pastorally successful. Ecclesiastical authority is real without every prudential exercise of that authority thereby becoming impeccable.
Paul VI possessed authority to promulgate a revised Roman Missal. That does not render every prudential judgement embodied in the reform irreformable, nor does it make investigation of its consequences disobedient.
And after more than half a century there are consequences to investigate.
In 2025 Robert Barro, Edgard Dewitte and Laurence Iannaccone published a major National Bureau of Economic Research study reconstructing long-term religious-service attendance across sixty-six countries. Their analysis concluded that Vatican II in 1962–65 “triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations.”⁹ The finding is important, but its limits must be observed. It does not isolate the Missal of Paul VI as the causal mechanism; indeed, the definitive new Missal followed the Council. Nor does it remove the sexual revolution, collapsing social authority, theological dissent, contraception, demographic change and accelerating secularisation from the historical picture.
But recognising multiple causes is not the same thing as granting liturgical reform immunity from investigation.
The Church’s liturgy forms Catholic consciousness. Lex orandi, lex credendi is not an antiquarian slogan. The Church teaches not merely through propositions but through what she does. Gesture teaches. Orientation teaches. Silence teaches. Architecture teaches. Language teaches. Ritual repetition teaches. What Catholics repeatedly see and perform becomes part of how Catholic reality is apprehended.
Sarah knows this. Otherwise his campaign for silence, orientation, reverence and the primacy of God would make no sense.
The historical transformation experienced by ordinary Catholics was immense. They did not encounter it as an academic distinction between Vatican II, the Consilium, authorised reform and an unauthorised “spirit of Vatican II”. They encountered it in the parish church. The sanctuary changed. The altar changed. The language changed. The priest’s position changed. The Offertory changed. The calendar changed. The lectionary changed. Ritual gestures changed. Music changed. Communion practices changed. Lay liturgical roles multiplied. Silence diminished. The visual distinction between sanctuary and nave frequently diminished with it.
Not all these things were commanded by the Council. That defence is true but insufficient. The relevant historical question is why the post-conciliar settlement proved so remarkably hospitable to developments which its defenders now characterise as abuses, misunderstandings or distortions.
For sixty years the answer has often been “the spirit of Vatican II”: the Council was sound, the reform was sound, but an amorphous spirit distorted them both.
There comes a point when that explanation becomes inadequate. If similar tendencies appeared across countries, seminaries, dioceses and religious orders; if they were defended by theologians, liturgists, episcopal commissions and clerical establishments; if they shaped churches, catechesis, seminaries and parish practice for decades; then the historian is entitled to ask whether the “spirit” was merely an accidental parasite upon the reform or whether something in the reforming mentality itself facilitated what followed.
Sarah comes remarkably close to asking this and then stops.
His remedies tell the story. When worship becomes horizontal, Sarah advocates ad orientem. When it becomes noisy, he demands silence. When it becomes banal, he demands sacrality. When Catholic identity becomes indistinct, he looks again to Latin and Gregorian chant. When the assembly appears to become the centre of worship, he insists upon the primacy of God.
Almost every medicine comes from the liturgical world which the reform displaced.
The question is therefore not whether Sarah’s prescriptions are good. They are. The question is why the patient must receive fragments of the medicine while the medicine itself remains restricted.
This becomes still more significant when the results of post-conciliar Catholic formation are considered. Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that 69 per cent of self-described American Catholics said that the bread and wine used in Communion are symbols of the Body and Blood of Christ, while only 31 per cent chose the proposition that they actually become Christ’s Body and Blood.¹⁰ The precise wording of surveys and the theological sophistication of respondents can legitimately be debated. Nothing in those qualifications makes the pastoral result satisfactory.
The paradox is severe. A recurrent justification for post-conciliar reform was greater intelligibility and fuller participation. Yet after decades of vernacular worship, an enormously expanded lectionary, extensive lay involvement and almost continuous verbal explanation, very large numbers of Catholics apparently failed to identify correctly the ontological reality occurring at the centre of the Mass.
That does not prove that the Novus Ordo caused Eucharistic unbelief.
It does prove that the promised intelligibility did not prevent it.
Meanwhile the Traditional Roman Mass remains numerically marginal. Pew’s 2025 national survey found that 13 per cent of American Catholics had attended a TLM at least once during the preceding five years, while only 2 per cent reported attending one at least weekly.¹¹ Whatever else may be said about traditional Catholics, they plainly cannot be blamed for the crisis engulfing mainstream Catholic sacramental practice. Their numbers are too small.
Yet the traditional liturgy has become an object of exceptional ecclesiastical anxiety.
That is curious.
Claims about the superior doctrinal or vocational fruits of TLM communities must be made carefully. Such communities are strongly self-selecting, and surveys of them cannot by themselves demonstrate that the rite causes the dispositions of those who seek it. But self-selection does not render the phenomenon irrelevant. It raises a different and important question: why do Catholics seeking doctrinal seriousness, sacramental reverence, asceticism and continuity so frequently seek the liturgy which the post-conciliar Church attempted to supersede?
If ecclesiastical authorities are confident in the pastoral superiority of the post-conciliar settlement, comparison should not be feared. Permit the traditional rite reasonable freedom. Permit priests to learn it. Permit families to attend it. Permit diocesan bishops to provide it according to genuine pastoral need. Then examine the evidence over time: retention, vocations, confession, Eucharistic belief, transmission of faith to children, doctrinal adherence and continued Mass attendance.
Such evidence would still require careful interpretation. It would not produce a laboratory experiment. But it would be more intellectually serious than suppressing a phenomenon and then treating its reduced scale as evidence of irrelevance.
Benedict XVI understood the theological absurdity of treating inherited Catholic worship as though it could simply become harmful through ecclesiastical obsolescence. In his letter accompanying Summorum Pontificum he stated the principle plainly: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too.” He added that it could not suddenly be entirely forbidden or considered harmful.¹²
That proposition does not mean that liturgy is incapable of development. It means that authentic development cannot require Catholics to believe that what sanctified generations of their forebears has become spiritually toxic merely because later ecclesiastical policy prefers something else.
Sarah ostensibly accepts that principle. Yet his preferred remedy remains renewal and enrichment rather than restoration.
Leo XIV presently appears to stand in substantially the same place. His General Audience of 27 May 2026 explicitly presented the post-conciliar reform as legitimate liturgical renewal and invoked Sacrosanctum Concilium’s conjunction of “sound tradition” and “legitimate progress”. Leo repeated that liturgical development must preserve continuity with the Church’s tradition and cited the Council’s organic principle approvingly.¹³ Then, on 29 June, writing directly to Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche, he called for fidelity to approved texts and instructions and insisted upon respect for “the rites promulgated by Pope Saint Paul VI and Pope Saint John Paul II”.¹⁴
The significance is considerable. Leo is not merely tolerating the post-conciliar settlement as an inherited fact. He is positively defending it within a theology of authentic development.
But that presents precisely the question which must be asked:
Was the reform itself as implemented truly organic?
It is insufficient to demonstrate that the Council demanded organic development. Historical reality must be measured against the principle. Sarah’s Brussels analysis should make this obvious. He is suspicious when political institutions attach traditional words to newly constructed realities. Calling something “marriage” does not make it marriage. Calling something a “right” does not make it a right. Calling something “healthcare” does not determine its moral character.
Likewise, calling a liturgical process “organic development” does not itself establish that the process was organic.
The claim must correspond to the thing.
That is precisely the logic of the Logos.
The distinction between the traditional Roman rite and the post-conciliar reform therefore cannot be dismissed as romanticism. The Roman Missal codified by St Pius V did not spring from a sixteenth-century committee as a newly manufactured rite. Benedict XVI himself recalled the Roman liturgy’s long historical development and the role of successive Popes in preserving and regulating it.¹⁵ The reform promulgated after Vatican II resulted from an organised programme of very extensive revision completed over a comparatively short period.
Both processes involved legitimate ecclesiastical authority. They were nevertheless different kinds of historical process.
That distinction matters because the strongest traditional criticism is not that the Pope possesses no authority over liturgical discipline. It is that an inherited organic liturgy and a comprehensively reconstructed liturgy cannot be made historically identical merely by asserting juridical continuity between them.
Here Sarah’s diagnosis remains incomplete. He understands the danger of constructed anthropology but will not fully confront the problem of constructed liturgy. He warns Africa against surrendering inherited identity to the fashions of wealthy Western institutions while continuing to accept as normative the principal liturgical product of the Church’s own 1960s reconstruction. He recognises the damage inflicted under the “spirit of Vatican II” yet hesitates to ask whether the practical consequences were entirely separable from the reforming mentality which gave that spirit room to operate. He identifies the symptoms of liturgical rupture and then prescribes as treatment the gradual restoration of things which the inherited Roman liturgy never surrendered.
This is not a minor inconsistency. It goes to the heart of the argument Sarah himself has placed before Europe.
If the crisis of Church and West is ultimately the same crisis, perhaps they share more than simultaneous decline. Perhaps both absorbed the same modern temptation: the assumption that inheritance becomes properly useful only after contemporary expertise has reconstructed it.
The West inherited an account of human nature and decided that freedom required emancipation from nature. The Church inherited a liturgical tradition and decided that pastoral efficacy required an unprecedented degree of reconstruction for modern man. The West now confronts the instability produced when identity is detached from what is received. The Church has confronted decades of liturgical instability, experimentation and uncertainty about the very meaning of worship.
Sarah tells the first patient to rediscover what it has received.
Why does he not tell the second the same thing?
This does not require declaring the Novus Ordo invalid. It does not require denying papal jurisdiction. It does not require pretending that every traditionalist is exemplary or that every celebration of the reformed rite is deficient. These are distractions from the serious argument.
The serious argument is that legitimate authority can make disastrous prudential judgements, and that sixty years of experience permit those judgements to be reassessed.
Nor does the remedy require coercively abolishing the Novus Ordo. Catholics formed within that rite should not be treated with the contempt which some traditionalists rightly resent when directed towards themselves. The purpose of tradition cannot be to reproduce the same centralising mentality with the liturgical preference reversed.
The immediate requirement is considerably simpler: give the traditional Roman liturgy its freedom.
Let it live not as an embarrassing concession, not as a liturgical museum piece, not as a privilege rationed from Rome, and not as an ecclesiological pathology to be contained, but as Catholic worship. Allow it reasonable space beside the post-conciliar books and then permit the Church to learn from the fruits of both.
A solemn celebration of the Missal of Paul VI ad orientem, in Latin, with chant, silence, traditional ceremonial and kneeling Communion may be admirable. But it still raises the decisive question: what precisely is gained by painstakingly reconstructing a traditional ethos inside the newer books while the complete traditional rite remains available?
If the answer is pastoral accessibility, examine the fruits.
If the answer is fuller participation, examine the fruits.
If the answer is stronger Christian life, examine the fruits.
If the answer is evangelisation, examine the fruits.
The Church should not fear evidence.
That challenge belongs particularly to Leo XIV because his own public teaching supplies the vocabulary in which it can be made. He insists that words must correspond to realities. Then let “organic development” be tested against actual historical development. He insists upon subsidiarity. Then reconsider the extraordinary centralisation by which Rome restricts a diocesan bishop’s provision of an ancient Roman liturgy to his own faithful. He insists that inherited realities should not be surrendered to ideology. Then extend that principle to the Church’s liturgical patrimony.
And it belongs particularly to Cardinal Sarah because few churchmen have done more to recover the effects of the traditional liturgical ethos without finally proposing recovery of the traditional liturgy as such.
Sarah sees that worship has become noisy and prescribes silence. He sees that it has become anthropocentric and prescribes ad orientem. He sees that transcendence has been obscured and prescribes sacred chant. He sees diminished Eucharistic reverence and calls Catholics back towards kneeling and adoration. He sees the devastation associated with the “spirit of Vatican II” and insists upon continuity.
But the Traditional Mass is not merely silence, orientation, Latin, chant, kneeling and incense collected together.
It is the liturgical organism within which those things possess their inherited relationship.
That distinction is crucial. A Gothic arch incorporated into a modern building does not make the building medieval. Traditional elements introduced into the Missal of Paul VI can make its celebration far more continuous in ethos with the inherited Roman liturgy, but they do not transform the later books into the earlier rite.
At some point the “reform of the reform” therefore reaches its logical limit.
One either believes that the traditional Roman rite possesses something intrinsically valuable which the later reform did not adequately preserve, or one does not.
If it does, its preservation cannot remain merely a concession to liturgical taste.
The Church needs what it contains.
That is the conclusion Cardinal Sarah has not yet drawn. His Brussels speech makes the omission more conspicuous because his argument outside the sanctuary is now so clear. Civilisations die when they forget that some things are received rather than invented. Peoples become manipulable when memory is severed from identity. Power becomes dangerous when it mistakes authority for the capacity to redefine what already exists. Progress becomes destructive when it treats inheritance merely as raw material.
Every one of those propositions bears upon the history of Catholic worship since the 1960s.
The point is not that Vatican II caused every catastrophe which followed it. History is not so simple. Nor is it that the old Mass can mechanically reverse secularisation. Grace is not sociology.
The point is that the liturgical revolution belongs to the evidence, and no serious diagnosis of the post-conciliar Catholic crisis can indefinitely exempt it from examination.
Sarah says the crisis of the West and the crisis of the Western Church are fundamentally the same crisis.
He may be more right than he has yet allowed himself to become.
Both crises involve a loss of confidence in inheritance. Both reveal an exaggerated confidence in reconstruction. Both replaced forms received through generations with forms consciously fashioned according to the perceived requirements of modern man. Both promised liberation and renewal. Both now confront fragmentation, weakened memory and uncertainty about identity.
Sarah’s answer to Europe is to rediscover reality.
His answer to the Church should therefore be equally clear.
Not another programme of reconstruction. Not another committee. Not another attempt endlessly to recreate fragments of tradition inside structures which displaced it.
Give Catholics back their inheritance.
Let the Novus Ordo demonstrate its fruits without suppressing the comparison. Let traditional worship demonstrate its own. Let bishops govern pastorally. Let priests learn what generations of Roman priests knew. Let younger Catholics encounter the rite which modern liturgical policy repeatedly assumes they ought not to want. Let the Church cease being afraid of her own memory.
Pope Leo XIV says authentic liturgical progress must preserve sound tradition.
Cardinal Sarah tells Europe that authentic freedom must remain accountable to objective reality.
Both propositions are true.
The unasked question is whether either man is prepared to apply them without exception to the post-conciliar liturgical settlement.
For Cardinal Sarah’s diagnosis has reached the sanctuary.
What it still lacks is the courage to cross the threshold.
¹ Robert Cardinal Sarah, Europe and Africa: In Conversation with Cardinal Robert Sarah, Lectio Magistralis, European Parliament, Brussels, 15 July 2026; text published by the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union. Cardinal Robert Sarah’s EP keynote speech on EU-Africa relations
² Ibid. Sarah’s address treats ambiguous political language as capable of becoming an instrument of “silent power” and cultural and economic neo-colonialism. COMECE publication of Sarah’s Brussels address
³ Leo XIV, Address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, 9 January 2026. Address to the Diplomatic Corps
⁴ Leo XIV, Address to Members of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament, 25 April 2026. Address to the European People’s Party
⁵ Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 15 May 2026, particularly nn. 50–54 and 68–72, on ontological dignity and subsidiarity. Magnifica Humanitas
⁶ Robert Cardinal Sarah, “Towards an Authentic Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium”, Opening Address, Sacra Liturgia UK, London, 5 July 2016. Sarah argued that the experience of the preceding five decades justified reconsideration of some specific ritual reforms and liturgical policies and advocated recovery of ad orientem worship. Towards an Authentic Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium
⁷ Robert Cardinal Sarah, “Silence and the Primacy of God in the Sacred Liturgy”, Fifth Roman Colloquium on Summorum Pontificum, Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Rome, 14 September 2017. Silence and the Primacy of God in the Sacred Liturgy
⁸ Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4 December 1963, n. 23. Sacrosanctum Concilium
⁹ Robert J. Barro, Edgard Dewitte and Laurence R. Iannaccone, “Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries”, NBER Working Paper No. 34060, July 2025. Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries
¹⁰ Gregory A. Smith, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ”, Pew Research Center, 5 August 2019. Pew Research Center: Catholic belief in the Eucharist
¹¹ Pew Research Center, Catholic Communion, Confession, Devotions and Other Practices in the US, 16 June 2025, section “Traditional Latin Mass”. Pew Research Center: Traditional Latin Mass attendance
¹² Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops accompanying the Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum, 7 July 2007. Benedict XVI’s Letter to the Bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum
¹³ Leo XIV, General Audience, “The Documents of the Second Vatican Council: Sacrosanctum Concilium. The reform of the liturgy: tradition and development”, 27 May 2026. General Audience of 27 May 2026
¹⁴ Leo XIV, Letter to Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche on the occasion of the Liturgical Conference at Mount Angel Abbey, 29 June 2026. Letter to Cardinal Arthur Roche
¹⁵ Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum, 7 July 2007, introduction on the historical development and preservation of the Roman liturgy. Summorum Pontificum
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- Today’s Mass: August 30 St Rose of Lima
Saint Rose of Lima, born in 1586 in Lima, was the first canonised saint of the New World. Renowned for her severe mortifications and deep devotion, she lived simply in her father’s garden, where she engaged in prayer and penance until her death in 1617. Sts Felix and Adauctus are also commemorated.
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