The Five-Point Question Facing Leo XIV
Cardinal Roche says the Traditional Mass will remain restricted. The evidence on Eucharistic belief makes that policy increasingly difficult to defend.
The future of the Traditional Latin Mass is again being decided in Rome. Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche has declared that Pope Leo XIV will neither alter Traditionis custodes nor return to the freedom established by Benedict XVI under Summorum Pontificum. Yet at precisely the moment when the continued availability and preservation of the traditional Roman liturgy are again in question, evidence from American Catholics presents Rome with an uncomfortable pastoral fact: even within an exceptionally observant Catholic population, exclusive TLM attendees professed complete belief in Christ’s Real Presence at a rate five percentage points higher than exclusive Novus Ordo attendees. Pope Leo himself now insists that liturgical rites, words and gestures both express the Church’s faith and form the faithful. If so, the evidence raises a question which cannot honestly be excluded from the decision about the old Mass: what kind of Eucharistic faith is each liturgical culture actually producing and preserving?
The question is no longer academic. On 29 July 2026, Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and the principal Roman official charged with implementing the restrictions imposed under Pope Francis, made an extraordinarily categorical statement about the intentions of the present Pope. Asked whether restricting the Traditional Latin Mass would remain as important under Leo XIV as it had been under Francis, Roche replied: “Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis Custodes, and he’s not going back to Summorum Pontificum.” He justified the policy principally in terms of unity, arguing that the Eucharist is the sacrament in which Catholics ought to be united and that something is seriously wrong if the celebration of Mass becomes divisive.¹
That declaration matters enormously. If Cardinal Roche is accurately stating the settled intention of Leo XIV, the debate over the future availability of the traditional Roman liturgy may already be moving towards a continuation rather than a reversal of Francis’s policy. But precision is essential. It was Cardinal Roche who said this, not Pope Leo himself in a legislative act concerning the Traditional Mass. Roche may, of course, have spoken from direct knowledge of the Pope’s thinking, and it would be foolish simply to assume that the Prefect of Divine Worship was inventing papal policy. Nevertheless, the distinction matters. Leo’s own letter to Cardinal Roche, dated 29 June 2026 and released by the Holy See on 14 August, strongly emphasised fidelity to the rites promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II and continued Francis’s emphasis upon liturgical formation, but it did not mention Traditionis custodes, Summorum Pontificum or the Traditional Latin Mass.² Roche has therefore given the clearest public assertion yet concerning Leo’s supposed intentions; Leo has not himself expressed that conclusion in those terms.
Nor is the discussion occurring in a vacuum. Since Leo XIV’s election, senior churchmen have publicly urged a more generous approach to the traditional liturgy. Cardinal ✠Kurt Koch argued that Benedict XVI had offered a useful path because something practised for centuries could not simply be prohibited, and described it as “desirable” that the door closed under Francis should be opened more widely again. The disputed future of the TLM became still more urgent after the SSPX episcopal consecrations of 1 July 2026, when figures including Archbishop ✠Salvatore Cordileone argued that easier access to the traditional liturgy could help prevent Catholics attached to it from feeling driven towards bodies outside ordinary structures in communion with Rome.³ Whatever judgment one makes about the SSPX’s actions, the pastoral question is obvious: does restricting the ancient liturgy foster unity, or can restriction itself deepen alienation?
Into that unresolved debate comes evidence which ought to be impossible for Rome simply to ignore. The 2024 Real Presence Coalition Survey of U.S. Catholic Laity, developed with assistance from the professional research firm Public Opinion Strategies, attracted nearly 16,000 responses, including 12,680 completed surveys, from Catholics across all 178 Latin-rite dioceses in the United States. Respondents were questioned about belief in the Real Presence, sacramental practice, liturgical experience and the factors they believed had contributed to the erosion of Eucharistic faith. Crucially, the researchers separately analysed Catholics who attended the Traditional Latin Mass exclusively and those who attended the Novus Ordo exclusively. Twenty-one per cent of respondents belonged to the former group and 36 per cent to the latter. Public Opinion Strategies reported a clear difference: exclusive TLM attendees registered a five-percentage-point advantage in complete belief in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist over exclusive Novus Ordo attendees.⁴
That figure needs careful handling precisely because its proper context makes it more interesting, not less. The RPC project was not a representative probability survey of every American Catholic. It was a self-selecting online survey conducted through SurveyMonkey, promoted by members of the Real Presence Coalition and additionally geo-targeted towards participants at the National Eucharistic Congress. Its respondents were consequently vastly more observant than American Catholics as a whole. Yet this means that the comparison is not the familiar—and methodologically easy to dismiss—contrast between intensely committed traditional Catholics and nominal Catholics who scarcely practise their religion. Ninety-six per cent of the entire RPC sample attended Mass at least weekly and 97 per cent already professed complete belief in the Real Presence. The five-point difference therefore appeared inside an overwhelmingly practising, highly engaged and already strongly Eucharistic Catholic population.⁴
The same comparison disclosed further differences which make the finding harder still to dismiss as an isolated curiosity. Public Opinion Strategies reported that exclusive TLM respondents were eight percentage points more likely to attend Mass at least weekly, confessed much more frequently—with differences of 13 percentage points for weekly confession and 21 points for monthly confession—and were substantially younger, with 18 percentage points more respondents under the age of 55 than among exclusive Novus Ordo respondents.⁴ None of this establishes a simple causal chain in which attendance at the old Mass mechanically produces orthodoxy, confession or youth. It does, however, describe a Catholic population displaying precisely those things which bishops throughout the Western Church repeatedly say they wish to recover: Eucharistic faith, frequent sacramental practice, committed Mass attendance and younger Catholics.
There is additional evidence pointing in the same direction. In a 2023 Northwestern University research project, Gabriella Nyambura surveyed Catholics associated principally with Traditional Latin Mass communities. Ninety-three per cent explicitly affirmed that Jesus is present in the Eucharist “in a true, real and substantial way”. A further five per cent supplied open answers affirming the same doctrine, some expressly invoking transubstantiation. Nyambura therefore assessed 98 per cent of respondents as affirming Catholic Eucharistic teaching, while only two per cent regarded the Eucharist as merely symbolic or metaphorical and 0.5 per cent said that they did not know.⁵ This smaller and geographically concentrated study is not a representative survey of every TLM Catholic. It should not be presented as one. But its near-universal level of Eucharistic orthodoxy is strikingly consonant with the direction of the later, much larger RPC findings.
The wider American picture makes the contrast far more serious. In 2019, the Pew Research Center asked U.S. Catholics whether the bread and wine used in Communion actually become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ or are symbols of His Body and Blood. Only 31 per cent affirmed that they actually become Christ’s Body and Blood; 69 per cent selected the symbolic understanding. Most troublingly, even among Catholics attending Mass at least weekly, only 63 per cent gave the Catholic answer. In other words, 37 per cent of weekly Mass-goers still denied that the Eucharistic elements actually become the Body and Blood of Christ. Pew also found Catholics who knew what the Church teaches but did not believe it, demonstrating that the crisis cannot be reduced entirely to poor information.⁶
The Pew, Nyambura and Real Presence Coalition surveys are not interchangeable datasets. They asked somewhat different questions, surveyed different populations and used different methodologies. Honest argument requires that distinction to remain explicit. Pew employed a probability-based national panel intended to represent American Catholics broadly. The RPC captured an unusually committed self-selecting Catholic population. Nyambura examined a smaller traditionalist population. Pew’s wording directly tested whether the elements actually become Christ’s Body and Blood, whereas the RPC asked respondents whether they completely believed in Christ’s Real Presence. No responsible analysis should pretend that these are three stages of a controlled experiment.
Yet methodological precision must not become an excuse for refusing to notice a pattern. Pew demonstrates a catastrophic weakness in Eucharistic belief among American Catholics generally. Nyambura finds near-universal Eucharistic orthodoxy in traditional communities. The RPC then finds that even inside an overwhelmingly practising population, exclusive TLM attendees still register stronger complete belief in the Real Presence than exclusive Novus Ordo attendees. One may debate why. It is considerably harder to argue that the phenomenon itself deserves no attention.
And here the evidence intersects directly with Pope Leo XIV’s own developing liturgical teaching. On 20 May 2026, beginning his catecheses on Sacrosanctum Concilium, Leo explicitly invoked lex orandi, lex credendi. He taught that the Church’s rituality expresses her faith and at the same time shapes ecclesial identity, specifically naming the proclaimed Word, sacramental celebration, gestures, silences and sacred space among those things which give form to the worshipping people.⁷ His letter to Cardinal Roche subsequently insisted that Catholics must be **“formed both for the liturgy and by the liturgy.”**² And in his concluding catechesis on Sacrosanctum Concilium, delivered on 26 August 2026, Leo returned explicitly to the didactic character of worship. He described liturgy as a vehicle of divine teaching, stressed that its gestures and words are critical to the experience of the sacred mysteries, and repeated the conciliar claim that texts and rites should express more clearly the holy realities which they signify.⁸
That is precisely why the Eucharistic survey evidence is relevant to the future of the Traditional Latin Mass under Leo XIV. If liturgy teaches; if rites form; if gestures communicate; if sacred space shapes belief; if Catholics are formed by the manner in which they worship—then the doctrinal fruits associated with different liturgical cultures become relevant evidence. One cannot affirm lex orandi, lex credendi in papal catechesis and then treat observable differences in lex credendi as wholly irrelevant to decisions about lex orandi.
The doctrine under consideration could scarcely be more important. Catholicism does not teach merely that the Eucharist reminds the community of Jesus, symbolises His sacrifice or generates an awareness of His spiritual presence. The Council of Trent solemnly taught, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats, that at the consecration there occurs a conversion of the whole substance of bread into the substance of Christ’s Body and the whole substance of wine into the substance of His Blood. The Church calls this conversion transubstantiation. Christ is thereafter present whole and entire—Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity—under the Eucharistic species.⁹ Paul VI, confronted with growing Eucharistic confusion during the very period of conciliar reform, insisted in Mysterium Fidei that the Eucharistic presence is “real” in the fullest sense because it is substantial, and warned against explanations which leave intact the substance of bread and wine while reducing the change merely to symbolism, meaning or purpose.¹⁰
Catholics do not learn this truth only from catechetical propositions. They learn it by worshipping. The traditional Roman Mass enacts Eucharistic belief with relentless consistency. The priest genuflects immediately after each consecration. Once his fingers have touched the Sacred Host, the canonical digits remain joined until their purification, lest even a consecrated particle be carelessly lost. The sacred vessels are purified with scrupulous attention. The Canon is surrounded by sacred silence. The Host and Chalice are elevated for the adoration of the faithful. Bells announce the sacred action. Holy Communion is ordinarily received kneeling and directly upon the tongue. The altar is unmistakably an altar of sacrifice. Priest and people are not principally arranged to gaze at one another but are directed towards the sacred action being accomplished before God. Before any catechist explains the word transubstantiation, the rite has already taught the worshipper by a hundred interconnected signs: this is no longer ordinary bread; God is here.
If Leo XIV is correct that liturgical words, gestures, silences and spaces form the Catholic people, then these things cannot be dismissed as antiquarian externals. They are exactly the means by which liturgical theology becomes incarnate. A child who watches everyone kneel, sees the priest genuflect repeatedly, hears the sanctuary fall silent, observes extraordinary care lest even a particle of the Host be lost and receives the Blessed Sacrament upon the tongue while kneeling at the rail is being catechised before he possesses the vocabulary to explain what he has learned. His body has already been taught that Something—or rather Someone—infinitely sacred is present.
The Real Presence Coalition respondents themselves identified precisely this relationship. Asked which developments they believed had contributed most severely to weakened Eucharistic faith, 57.74 per cent gave the highest impact rating to reception of Holy Communion in the hand while standing; 54.56 per cent did so for lack of humility and reverence before the Eucharist; 51.30 per cent for a casual clerical attitude towards the Blessed Sacrament; and 49.48 per cent for failure adequately to catechise Catholics concerning transubstantiation. Very high concern was also expressed about inadequate teaching regarding worthy reception, displacement of the tabernacle, diminished emphasis upon the sacrificial nature of the Mass, loss of supernatural transcendence, extensive use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, abandonment of ad orientem worship, removal of altar rails, diminished silence and the replacement of sacred musical traditions.⁴
Those opinions do not scientifically establish causation. They are the judgments of respondents and must not be represented as controlled findings. But they reveal a coherent Catholic instinct: ritual practice teaches theology. The implications are obvious. If the consecrated Host is routinely passed from hand to hand, distributed by numerous lay ministers and received in a manner increasingly similar to ordinary food, those practices communicate something. If the tabernacle recedes from the visual centre, that communicates something. If silence disappears, that communicates something. Conversely, kneeling, genuflection, careful sacerdotal handling, orientation towards the altar, sacred barriers, silence and conspicuous adoration communicate something else. One may argue over the magnitude of the effect; one cannot sensibly argue that embodied religious practice has no formative effect at all.
When RPC respondents were asked for the single most important recommendation they would make to the bishops to restore Eucharistic faith, the largest group—29 per cent—called for encouragement of reception of Holy Communion kneeling and on the tongue. The next largest—24 per cent—asked for stronger catechesis concerning transubstantiation and worthy reception. Another 10 per cent called for increased Eucharistic reverence through genuflection, kneeling and thanksgiving after Mass, while nine per cent sought an end to routine use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.⁴ Their answer to a crisis of Eucharistic belief was therefore not primarily another programme, consultation or publicity campaign. It was that Catholic worship and catechesis should once again behave as though Catholic Eucharistic doctrine were true.
None of this requires asserting that the Novus Ordo is invalid, that Jesus Christ is somehow absent when it is validly celebrated, or that Catholics who attend it necessarily reject transubstantiation. Those propositions would be false and would obscure the actual issue. Sacramental validity and liturgical formation are distinct questions. A sacrament may undoubtedly be valid while its surrounding ceremonial culture expresses particular aspects of Catholic doctrine with greater or lesser clarity. Individual Novus Ordo Catholics may possess heroic Eucharistic faith; individual TLM Catholics may fail to understand the very liturgy they attend. The relevant pastoral question concerns what kinds of belief and practice particular liturgical environments tend to preserve and transmit across populations and generations.
Nor has it been demonstrated that the TLM causes greater Eucharistic orthodoxy. Self-selection matters. Catholics who already possess strong traditional beliefs may naturally seek the older Mass. Traditional communities may catechise better. They may foster confession more effectively, sustain denser devotional cultures and transmit religion within families more deliberately. Their demographics differ. All of these are possible confounding variables. But this objection does not remove the pastoral significance of the result. It changes the research question from “Does the TLM cause orthodoxy?” to something much more interesting: why do orthodox Catholics seek it, why do their children remain around it, why does its surrounding culture reinforce those convictions, and why does Eucharistic belief appear so successfully preserved within it?
Whether the traditional Roman liturgy creates, attracts, confirms, reinforces, preserves or transmits Eucharistic faith—or, much more probably, participates in several of those processes simultaneously—the result is pastorally relevant. If Rome believes the old liturgy attracts Catholics who take transubstantiation seriously, that is not an argument against it. If traditional communities retain people who believe Catholic doctrine, that is not an argument against them. If their catechesis is better, imitate it. If their ceremonial reinforces doctrine, learn from it. If the old rite itself proves capable of transmitting Catholic belief with exceptional effectiveness, preserve it.
This is where Cardinal Roche’s July declaration becomes so important. His argument is essentially that unity requires continued restriction. But unity in Catholicism cannot mean simply liturgical uniformity imposed irrespective of doctrinal fruit. The Eucharist is indeed the sacrament of unity; Cardinal Roche is right about that. But Eucharistic unity presupposes Eucharistic faith. What sort of unity is achieved if Catholics stand around the same altar while substantial numbers no longer believe what the Church says is upon it? If liturgical uniformity is purchased alongside doctrinal fragmentation, the ecclesiastical calculus requires rather more scrutiny than the assertion that different rites are themselves divisive.
Indeed, this is precisely the paradox which Rome must confront. Traditionis custodes was presented as serving ecclesial communion. Yet the communities subjected to its exceptional restrictions exhibit extremely high levels of belief in the sacrament which Cardinal Roche himself identifies as the sacrament of unity. Meanwhile, the wider Catholic population formed overwhelmingly within the post-conciliar liturgical settlement has displayed levels of Eucharistic unbelief so severe that the United States bishops launched an entire National Eucharistic Revival in response to the crisis. To describe the traditional liturgy principally as a threat to Eucharistic unity while declining to reckon with this doctrinal disparity risks mistaking administrative uniformity for Catholic communion.
The tension is heightened by Leo XIV’s own teaching. On 26 August, the Pope reiterated that the purpose of liturgical reform included enabling the texts and rites to express more clearly the sacred realities they signify so that the Christian people might understand and participate in them more fully.⁸ That proposition supplies a criterion by which reform can be examined. Did the reformed liturgical culture in fact make the reality of transubstantiation clearer to ordinary Catholics? Pew’s data do not permit an easy affirmative answer. If 69 per cent of American Catholics understand the Eucharistic elements as symbols rather than believing that they actually become Christ’s Body and Blood, and if 37 per cent even of weekly Mass-goers fail Pew’s basic test of belief, then something in the Church’s transmission of Eucharistic faith has plainly failed.⁶
The answer cannot simply be that the post-conciliar reform itself is blameless because catechesis subsequently failed. Liturgy is itself formative. Leo XIV is explicitly saying so. If liturgy forms Catholics; if gestures and words matter; if ritual gives shape to faith; if sacred music, sacred time, sacred space and ceremonial action all teach—then liturgical reform cannot claim the credit for successful formation while being placed beyond examination whenever formation fails.
This does not establish that every post-conciliar change caused the Eucharistic crisis. It does establish that the question is legitimate. And it makes the aggressive restriction of the older form especially difficult to justify before that question has been adequately investigated. One would expect ecclesiastical authorities confronted by communities with near-universal belief in the Real Presence, frequent confession, high Mass attendance and disproportionately younger adherents to study them with intense pastoral interest. Instead, extraordinary administrative effort has repeatedly been expended on limiting where their Mass may be celebrated, who may celebrate it, whether parish churches may accommodate it and whether newly ordained priests may use the older books.
That inversion is becoming increasingly indefensible. If traditional communities had displayed the opposite profile—if they denied the Real Presence at higher rates, seldom confessed, attended Mass irregularly and consisted overwhelmingly of an ageing remnant—it requires little imagination to know how quickly those statistics would be enlisted as evidence that the old rite had reached the end of its pastoral usefulness. The fact that available evidence points in the opposite direction cannot suddenly render empirical outcomes irrelevant.
And this is why the question belongs squarely before Leo XIV now, not merely before historians discussing Francis’s pontificate. Cardinal Roche has publicly asserted that Leo intends to leave Traditionis custodes untouched and will not return to Benedict XVI’s settlement.¹ Leo’s own letter to Roche undoubtedly shows continuity with the post-conciliar liturgical reform and explicitly calls for respect towards the rites promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II.² His 2026 catecheses likewise defend the aims of Sacrosanctum Concilium and the legitimacy of reform.⁷ ⁸ There should therefore be no attempt to manufacture a fictitious “traditionalist Leo” from gestures, rumours or wishful thinking.
But neither has Leo’s own liturgical theology rendered the empirical question irrelevant. Quite the reverse. The Pope has himself supplied the principle by which the issue should be examined: Catholics are formed by the liturgy; ritual actions express faith; gestures and words teach; the rites should disclose sacred realities clearly. If that is true, then a measurable difference in belief in the Real Presence between Catholics formed exclusively by the traditional rite and those formed exclusively by the reformed rite is evidence directly relevant to his judgment.
Nor should the calls for generosity from Cardinal ✠Koch, Archbishop ✠Cordileone and others simply be dismissed as concessions to a troublesome minority. Benedict XVI’s fundamental insight remains pertinent: what generations of Catholics regarded as sacred cannot coherently become intrinsically dangerous merely because an ecclesiastical policy has changed. The present evidence adds a pastoral dimension Benedict did not possess in 2007. We can now ask not only whether the old liturgy deserves preservation because it belongs to the Church’s inheritance, but whether its preservation may be urgently valuable because the Catholics who live within its sacramental culture appear unusually successful at believing what the Church teaches about the Eucharist.
The Church should therefore do what any institution serious about its own stated objectives would do: investigate before suppressing. Study the TLM communities. Compare like with like. Commission properly representative research controlling for age, education, frequency of practice, family formation and previous belief. Examine catechesis, confession, vocations, retention, fertility and Eucharistic doctrine. Investigate what happens when Communion is received kneeling rather than standing, on the tongue rather than in the hand; when Mass is celebrated ad orientem; when the tabernacle occupies the central sanctuary; when silence and Gregorian chant replace continual verbal and musical activity; when the sacrificial nature of the Mass is expressed explicitly and repeatedly.
If stronger catechesis explains the difference, reproduce it everywhere. If frequent confession explains it, restore confession to the centre of parish life. If greater ritual reverence explains it, recover that reverence. If kneeling, silence, sacred orientation and careful treatment of the Host cause Catholics more readily to perceive what transubstantiation means, the Church should not be afraid to say so. And if, after serious examination, the traditional Roman liturgy itself proves to be an unusually effective carrier of Catholic Eucharistic faith, then fidelity to the Church’s mission requires not its managed extinction but its preservation.
That is the real issue now confronting Leo XIV. It is not essentially Latin, lace, incense, nostalgia or the preferred aesthetics of one Catholic constituency against another. It is whether Catholics believe that after the words of consecration the whole substance of bread becomes the Body of Jesus Christ and the whole substance of wine becomes His Blood, while only the appearances remain. It is whether the Catholic approaching the altar believes himself to stand before a symbol—or before Jesus Christ Himself, truly, really and substantially present.
Cardinal Roche says Leo XIV will not change Traditionis custodes. Perhaps he is correct. If so, that makes the question more urgent rather than less.
For before the present Pope allows the restrictions inherited from Francis to determine the long-term availability and preservation of the traditional Roman liturgy, he should confront the evidence produced by the Catholics who actually live according to it.
Why, even inside an exceptionally observant Catholic population, do exclusive Traditional Latin Mass attendees register stronger complete belief in the Real Presence than exclusive Novus Ordo attendees?
Why do they confess more frequently?
Why are they younger?
Why does a separate traditionalist study find 98 per cent adherence to Catholic Eucharistic doctrine?
And why, while the wider Church struggles desperately to restore belief in transubstantiation, would Rome continue restricting the liturgical culture in which that belief appears exceptionally secure?
The Real Presence Coalition survey cannot answer those questions. It does something more immediately important.
It establishes that they must be asked.
Leo XIV has said that the liturgy teaches, expresses and forms faith. The five-point difference therefore matters by the Pope’s own stated liturgical principles.
Before Rome closes the door which Benedict XVI reopened, it should first discover why so much Catholic Eucharistic faith appears to be flourishing on the other side of it.
¹ Maggie Fergusson, “Work still to do: The Tablet interview with Cardinal Arthur Roche,” The Tablet, 29 July 2026, in which Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche discusses the Traditional Latin Mass, Traditionis custodes and Summorum Pontificum. The Tablet: “Work still to do: The Tablet interview with Cardinal Arthur Roche”
² Leo XIV, “Letter of the Holy Father to H.E. Card. Arthur Roche on the occasion of the Liturgical Conference at Mount Angel Abbey,” 29 June 2026. (press.vatican.va)
³ Cardinal ✠Kurt Koch, interview with kath.net, 5 August 2025, reported by Catholic News Agency Deutsch; on Archbishop ✠Salvatore Cordileone and the post-Écône discussion, see the contemporary Religion News Service report. (de.catholicnewsagency.com)
⁴ Real Presence Coalition/Public Opinion Strategies, Survey of U.S. Catholic Laity on the Real Presence (2024). (realpresencecoalition.com)
⁵ Gabriella Nyambura, The Traditional Latin Mass: Tradition, Family Values and Politics in American Catholicism, Northwestern University Summer Undergraduate Research Grant project (2023–24), “Results and Discussion.” (gaby650037.substack.com)
⁶ Gregory A. Smith, Pew Research Center, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ,” 5 August 2019. (pewresearch.org)
⁷ Leo XIV, General Audience, 20 May 2026, “The liturgy in the mystery of the Church.” (press.vatican.va)
⁸ Leo XIV, General Audience, 26 August 2026, “The motivations of the liturgical reform.” (press.vatican.va)
⁹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1375–1378. (vatican.va)
¹⁰ Paul VI, Encyclical Mysterium Fidei, 3 September 1965. (vatican.va)
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