WHO SPEAKS FOR LEO? SARAH, ROCHE AND A LAW THAT COULD WITHER
Cardinal Robert Sarah’s latest intervention does more than argue for greater freedom for the traditional Roman Mass. It exposes a more immediate question: by what authority has Cardinal Arthur Roche been speaking as though Pope Leo XIV’s future policy on Traditionis Custodes were already settled? Sarah offers Leo a route away from the Franciscan restrictions without a dramatic confrontation with his predecessor. Roche insists that no such change is coming. Yet only one man can decide which of them is right.
Diane Montagna’s publication of further remarks by ✠Cardinal Robert Sarah has introduced a useful clarity into the increasingly confused discussion surrounding Pope Leo XIV and the traditional Roman liturgy. Sarah believes that Traditionis Custodes should ideally be abolished. Asked directly whether Francis’s 2021 motu proprio ought to be abrogated, his answer was unambiguous: “Yes, let’s hope so.” But Sarah then proposed what may be the more immediately practicable alternative. Rome need not necessarily begin with a juridically dramatic reversal. A change of disposition from the Holy See — greater openness, an end to obstruction, genuine generosity towards priests and faithful attached to the Vetus Ordo — could cause the restrictive regime simply to **“disappear gradually, day after day, year after year.”**¹
There is something characteristically Roman about the proposal. Laws can be repealed by legislation; policies can also perish when those charged with implementing them cease treating their most restrictive interpretation as an ecclesiastical imperative. Sarah’s preference remains clear: abrogation would be better. But his alternative offers Leo XIV a means of beginning immediately to heal what the Pope himself has called a “painful wound” without requiring him first to stage a public repudiation of Francis. The Holy See could simply stop making the traditional liturgy a problem.
That possibility acquires particular significance because it stands in such obvious tension with the public confidence of ✠Cardinal Arthur Roche. Asked by The Tablet about Leo’s intentions, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship declared: **“Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis Custodes, and he’s not going back to Summorum Pontificum.”**² Diane Montagna subsequently drew attention to the extraordinary certainty of the assertion. It was not phrased as Roche’s opinion, his recommendation, or even his expectation. It was presented as a statement about what the Pope will do.
That is now the real issue.
Sarah’s remarks were recorded on 29 June, before Roche’s Tablet interview of 29 July, so it would be inaccurate to present them as a deliberate public rebuttal. They were not. But Montagna’s publication of the additional Sarah material on 6 August has placed two sharply different conceptions of the possible future alongside one another. Roche tells Catholics that Leo will preserve Traditionis Custodes. Sarah thinks it ought to be abrogated and, failing that, believes Leo could allow it progressively to lose its restrictive force. The disagreement is therefore not manufactured; it is simply more revealing than a personal exchange would have been.¹ ²
For the crucial question is not whether Sarah or Roche possesses the greater ecclesiastical prestige, liturgical learning or persuasive argument. The question is who is entitled to speak for Pope Leo XIV.
Roche is a prefect of a Roman dicastery. He advises the Pope and administers an area of ecclesiastical government in the Pope’s name. But a prefect’s authority remains delegated authority. Unless Leo has expressly authorised Roche to announce a settled papal decision, Roche’s statement cannot itself make papal policy. If the Pope has decided irrevocably that Traditionis Custodes will remain unchanged, the obvious question is why that decision has not been promulgated by the Pope or officially announced by the Holy See. If no such definitive decision has been made, then Roche’s categorical declaration is necessarily something less: an expectation, an interpretation or an attempt to describe the outcome he believes will prevail.
The distinction matters particularly because Roche has already presented a strong defence of Traditionis Custodes to the College of Cardinals. His January paper was distributed during Leo XIV’s first Extraordinary Consistory and argued for the continuation of the restrictive settlement. But the document was Roche’s report. It was one of four papers prepared for possible discussion; the Cardinals selected evangelisation and synodality, and the liturgical paper was consequently not formally debated.³ Its circulation therefore cannot reasonably be transformed into evidence that Leo had adopted its conclusions as his own.
Yet precisely that inference has subsequently been encouraged. The Spanish newspaper La Razón claimed that Roche’s consistory paper reflected Leo’s thinking and foreshadowed his future decisions. Montagna correctly identified the procedural problem: permitting a dicastery’s paper to be circulated to Cardinals for consideration is not equivalent to papal adoption of its thesis. A consistory exists in part precisely because the Pope seeks counsel. Consultation becomes meaningless if every document submitted for consultation is retrospectively treated as the Pope’s predetermined conclusion.⁴
Against that background, Sarah’s intervention is useful not because it proves what Leo intends, but because it demonstrates that another course remains entirely conceivable. Indeed, Sarah grounds his proposal not in wishful thinking but in language already issued in Leo’s name. In March the Pope urged the French bishops to seek “concrete solutions” generously including Catholics sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo. Vatican News described Leo as “particularly attentive” to the problem and recorded his desire that the Church approach it with greater understanding and sensitivity.⁵
Sarah’s argument is straightforward: what is pastorally just in France cannot logically become pastorally objectionable upon crossing the border. The principle of generous inclusion ought to apply throughout the Church. His proposed method for allowing Traditionis Custodes to wither is therefore essentially an attempt to take Leo’s own language seriously and universalise it. If Rome really wants bishops to find generous solutions rather than manufacture liturgical conflicts, it must cease administering Traditionis Custodes as though generosity itself were a failure to implement the law.
There is, of course, an important limit to Sarah’s position, but it need not detain us at the length required elsewhere. Sarah remains fundamentally within the post-conciliar liturgical settlement. He does not argue that the Missal of Paul VI must itself be displaced by the traditional Roman rite, nor does he advance the more comprehensive traditional critique of the liturgical reform. His remedy remains substantially one of coexistence, continuity, reverence and freedom. That makes his intervention more, not less, awkward for the restrictionist case. Roche cannot dismiss Sarah’s position as that of someone rejecting the Council, repudiating the reformed liturgy or denying papal authority. Sarah accepts the post-conciliar settlement and still concludes that suppressing the older rite is unnecessary and harmful.
That is enough for the present argument. There is no need to rehearse again every historical or theological controversy surrounding the reform. The immediate question is much narrower: must Leo XIV inherit Francis’s liturgical war simply because Roche wishes the settlement of 2021 to remain?
Sarah has shown that the answer is no.
A Pope who wished to lower the temperature could do so immediately. He could tell bishops to stop closing traditional Masses for which there is demonstrable pastoral need. He could cease requiring the Dicastery for Divine Worship to function as a bottleneck through which local pastoral solutions must pass. He could restore confidence in diocesan ordinaries. He could instruct Rome to interpret existing provisions generously rather than maximally restrictively. None of those actions would require Leo tomorrow morning to promulgate a new Summorum Pontificum. Yet together they would transform the lived reality of traditional Catholics.
And if such a policy proved fruitful — if congregations remained peaceful, vocations continued to emerge, young families continued to worship, and the apocalyptic consequences predicted from greater freedom failed to appear — the rationale for retaining Traditionis Custodes would become progressively harder to sustain. Sarah’s “withering” would not merely be administrative. The legislation would increasingly reveal itself as a solution to a problem that Rome had chosen to perpetuate.
There remains, however, a reason why simple desuetude cannot be the final settlement. A law permitted to sleep remains a law capable of being awakened. Traditional Catholics should not have to live indefinitely according to the disposition of whichever prefect happens to occupy the Palazzo delle Congregazioni. The long-term question therefore concerns juridical security. If the traditional Roman rite genuinely belongs to the Church — if, as Benedict XVI famously insisted, what earlier generations held sacred cannot suddenly be regarded as forbidden or harmful — then its continued celebration ought eventually to rest upon something more stable than temporary Roman toleration.
But Sarah has identified a way to begin.
And that leaves Roche’s extraordinary certainty looking increasingly premature. Perhaps Roche knows that Leo XIV has privately made the decision he publicly attributed to him. If so, ultimately the Pope himself can say so. Perhaps Roche is merely confident that the policy he has defended will survive. If so, confidence should not be confused with papal judgement.
The distinction is fundamental because the Church is not governed by anticipatory declarations from dicastery prefects. Leo XIV is Pope. Arthur Roche is not.
Sarah has not told us what Leo will do. To his credit, he has instead told us what Leo could do: abrogate Traditionis Custodes, or begin withdrawing the oxygen which keeps its restrictive programme alive. That proposal is measured, politically realistic and entirely compatible with the Pope’s own appeal for generosity.
The next move therefore belongs neither to Sarah nor to Roche.
It belongs to Leo XIV.
And until Leo himself decides, nobody else has the right to turn his future judgement into a fait accompli.
¹ Diane Montagna, “Cardinal Sarah Makes the Case for Letting ‘Traditionis Custodes’ Wither and Die,” Diane Montagna, 6 August 2026; interview recorded 29 June 2026.
² Diane Montagna, “More Extraordinary Gaslighting: Cardinal Roche on the Traditional Latin Mass Yet Again,” Diane Montagna, 31 July 2026, reporting Roche’s interview with The Tablet of 29 July 2026.
³ Diane Montagna, “English Exclusive: Cardinal Roche Defends Traditionis Custodes at Extraordinary Consistory,” Diane Montagna, 13 January 2026.
⁴ Diane Montagna, “Spanish Report Fuels Anxiety Over Pope Leo’s Intention Regarding the Traditional Latin Mass,” Diane Montagna, 3 August 2026.
⁵ “Pope writes to French Bishops on education, abuse, and liturgy,” Vatican News, 25 March 2026.
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