The Vatican’s newly published 2025 decree register resolves the apparently conflicting reports about the Traditional Roman Mass. It contains 34 relevant decrees concerning 33 distinct diocesan or ecclesiastical jurisdictions and naming 55 parish churches. Seven decrees were issued under Francis and 27 during the pontificate of Leo XIV. More important than any headline total, however, is what the Latin wording reveals: at least 41 of the 55 church references are explicitly renewed existing permissions. What emerges is not simply a system which sometimes says yes and sometimes says no, but one which makes continuing traditional provision dependent upon repeated permission, expiry and renewal from Rome.
The first difficulty with the newly published Vatican figures is not theological but arithmetical. EWTN reported that 34 dioceses received permission during 2025 and that 29 of the 34 decrees were renewals. The Catholic Herald, examining the same material, counted 55 parish churches across 33 dioceses. Other reports repeated one set of figures or the other as though somebody had miscounted. The discrepancy disappears once the units are separated. The Dicastery for Divine Worship’s webpage describes the document as the Summarium Decretorum: Index Decretorum anni MMXXV; the document itself is headed simply Index Decretorum Anni MMXXV. Within it are 34 decree entries concerning the 1962 Missal, 33 distinct diocesan or jurisdictional headings, and 55 references to parish churches.¹ The reports were counting different things.² ³
The reason 34 decrees become 33 jurisdictions is Glasgow. On 10 March the Dicastery renewed for another two years the permission for the 1962 Missal at St Bridget’s, Toryglen. On 25 November another Glasgow decree granted a two-year permission at St Vincent de Paul, Thornliebank, and stated expressly that the new dispensation “abrogat et substituit” the earlier permission: it abrogates and replaces it. The annual register therefore contains two Glasgow decrees and two Glasgow church references, but the November decision deliberately substituted one location for the other. The most exact formulation is consequently 55 church references during 2025, representing 54 permissions from this particular cohort still operative at the end of the year.¹
That correction matters because it exposes a larger problem with the reporting. EWTN and Catholic World News stated that 29 of the 34 decrees were renewals for a further two years. The figure can be reconstructed if “renewal” is used broadly to mean some form of continuity of provision within a diocese, but it is not what the Latin wording of the 2025 index literally says. The register contains 24 decrees which unambiguously renew the existing permission in aliud biennium — “for another two years”. Those 24 straightforward renewal decrees cover 40 parish churches. Davenport then supplies a twenty-fifth decree containing both categories at once: St Patrick’s, Iowa City, is renewed in aliud biennium, while St Alphonsus in Davenport receives what the Dicastery expressly calls a novam licentiam, a new permission, for two years.¹
Davenport is particularly valuable because the Dicastery has done the classification for us. In the same decree it distinguishes a renewal from a new licence. We therefore do not need to guess what in aliud biennium means, nor should every decree which happens to continue traditional provision somewhere within an existing diocese be described as though it renewed an identical permission. At church level the point is even clearer: the 40 locations contained in the 24 pure renewal decrees, together with St Patrick’s in Davenport, mean that 41 of the 55 parish-church references are explicitly renewed existing locations.¹ The principal story in the figures is therefore not the creation of dozens of new Traditional Mass centres. It is the recurrent re-authorisation of communities already there.
The remaining decrees require distinctions rather than a miscellaneous category called “new”. Glasgow’s November decree is an explicit replacement. Sioux Falls and Toronto receive permissions ad biennium — for two years — rather than in aliud biennium, but the word “another” is absent and the register does not style them renewals. Six further decrees — Siedlce, Taipei, Fairbanks, Lincoln, Nashville and Halifax-Yarmouth — grant permission without the published summary specifying either in aliud biennium or a duration. Nashville covers two churches; the other five one each. The only 2025 entry which actually uses the words “new permission” is the St Alphonsus provision inside the Davenport decree.¹
There is nevertheless an intelligible route to the reported figure of 29, provided it is described accurately. The earlier Vatican indexes show that Siedlce already had provision in 2024 at the Church of the Transfiguration in Garwolin, whereas its 2025 permission concerns St Stanislaus in Siedlce. Sioux Falls had a two-year permission in 2023 at St Dominic’s in Canton, while the 2025 decree names Mary Help of Christians in Salem. Halifax-Yarmouth had permission in 2023 at St Patrick’s in Halifax, while the 2025 decree concerns St Agnes. Davenport plainly continues an existing arrangement while altering one of its locations, and Glasgow expressly replaces one authorised church with another. Add those five forms of diocesan continuity to the 24 pure in aliud biennium renewals and one reaches 29 decree entries exhibiting continuity with earlier provision. But that is 29 continuities in a broad administrative sense, not 29 straightforward renewals of the same church for another two years. The distinction is small enough to disappear in a news report and important enough not to disappear in serious analysis.⁴
The chronological division across the change of pontificate is much simpler. Seven decrees were issued during Francis’s pontificate: Kalisz, Siedlce and Taipei on 16 January; Fairbanks on 24 January; and Sacramento, Seattle and Glasgow on 10 March. Four of those seven — Kalisz, Sacramento, Seattle and Glasgow — are explicit two-year renewals. No further parish-church decree of this kind appears before Francis died on 21 April. The series resumes on 27 May, nineteen days after Leo XIV’s election, with Alexandria, Gaylord, Brownsville and Philadelphia. From then until Halifax-Yarmouth on 12 December, 27 decrees were issued during Leo XIV’s pontificate.¹
That establishes administrative continuity across the conclave. It does not establish that Leo personally examined or approved the substance of each individual case, still less that the 27 post-election decrees constitute a new papal policy. A Roman dicastery continued to administer legislation already in force, and bishops continued to submit requests which the Dicastery continued to decide. The evidence therefore justifies neither the claim that Leo has dismantled Traditionis custodes by stealth nor the contrary claim that these entries independently prove his settled intention to retain it indefinitely. They show that the machinery continued operating. What Leo ultimately does with that machinery remains a separate question.
Understanding what the register records requires remembering why the decrees exist at all. Traditionis custodes directed bishops not to establish celebrations according to the 1962 Missal in parish churches. The December 2021 Responsa ad dubia allowed a bishop who could not identify another suitable church, oratory or chapel to ask for a dispensation. Francis’s February 2023 rescript then reserved the granting of that dispensation to the Apostolic See.⁵ ⁶ ⁷ The entries in the Index are therefore not ordinary episcopal scheduling decisions. They record instances in which a bishop has had to obtain a Roman exception in order that an existing or proposed celebration may take place in a parish church.
That changes the significance of the 41 explicitly renewed locations. A renewal is superficially good news for the community receiving it: the Mass continues. Yet the necessity of renewal simultaneously reveals the juridical condition under which it continues. A community may have remained stable, a priest may remain available, the bishop may continue to judge the provision pastorally necessary, and no new disciplinary problem may have arisen; nevertheless, once the term expires, the continuation of the Mass depends upon another Roman act. The system does not merely regulate beginnings. It repeatedly reopens the question of continuance.
This is the point at which Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche’s recent defence of the present settlement becomes easier to test against the administrative evidence. In his July interview with The Tablet, Roche stated categorically that “Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis Custodes” and is not returning to Summorum Pontificum. He also argued that Catholics requesting the antecedent liturgy had in fact been given it and questioned why complaints of persecution continued.⁹ Whatever one thinks of the language, the 2025 register identifies the structural answer. What has been “given” to many of these communities is not a settled liturgical provision but a permission which may last two years and then require another application. The dispute is therefore not exhausted by asking whether Mass is available somewhere today. It concerns the juridical stability of its continued availability tomorrow.
That distinction helps explain why Cardinal ✠Kurt Koch has approached the problem differently. After the Écône consecrations this summer, Koch argued that Catholics should not merely condemn the Society of St Pius X without examining deficiencies within the Church, and specifically said that the relationship between the older and reformed liturgies needed to be reconsidered. Benedict XVI, he observed, had shown one path; Francis had restricted it radically. For Catholics drawn to the older liturgy without sharing the SSPX’s wider position, Koch said that new ways should be sought.¹⁰ The 2025 register gives documentary substance to the question he raises. A succession of dispensations can preserve individual communities while leaving unresolved whether those Catholics possess a normal and durable place within diocesan life.
Archbishop ✠Richard Moth’s record provides the complementary lesson from the diocesan side. As Nuntiatoria has already documented, Moth has repeatedly described his method in terms of pastoral need: identify it, make the case and seek the permission Rome requires. He has said that his requests in Arundel and Brighton were met.⁸ The earlier Vatican register corroborates the underlying mechanism: on 11 September 2023 the Dicastery granted Arundel and Brighton a two-year permission covering parish churches in Lewes, Caterham, Eastbourne, Sutton Park and Molesey.⁴ His example therefore demonstrates that Traditionis custodes does not compel a bishop to interpret every traditional community as a pastoral problem whose desired destination is disappearance. A bishop willing to make the case can obtain exceptions. It also demonstrates, however, why the exception remains dependent upon the willingness of a bishop to ask and of Rome to agree.
Toronto shows the other side of that dependence with unusual clarity. The 5 December 2025 entry names four parish churches — St Lawrence the Martyr in Scarborough, St Patrick in Schomberg, Holy Family and St Vincent de Paul in Toronto — and grants permission ad biennium, for two years.¹ Yet the communities subsequently learned that one Traditional Sunday Mass each month would be replaced by the reformed liturgy, with the replacement at Holy Family reportedly required to be celebrated versus populum. As Nuntiatoria established last week, the public Vatican summary contains no such monthly substitution. That does not prove the condition is absent from the unpublished full decree or from later correspondence; it means precisely that the available public document does not tell us who imposed it.⁸
The Toronto question also prevents Traditionis custodes from being confused with the separate controversy over ad orientem. The motu proprio does not prohibit celebration of the reformed Mass facing liturgical east, and the General Instruction does not make versus populum the exclusive lawful orientation.¹¹ A community can therefore lose the 1962 Missal while retaining Latin, chant, incense and ad orientem; conversely, it can be required to adopt versus populum by a separate local or particular decision. The object regulated by these 34 decrees is not a collection of aesthetic preferences. It is permission to use the Missal promulgated by St John XXIII in 1962 in named parish churches. Collapsing that question into Latin, ceremonial style or priestly orientation obscures what the Vatican itself is regulating.
Nor should the 55 churches be mistaken for a census of the Traditional Mass worldwide. The register captures the parish churches requiring these particular Roman dispensations and decisions during 2025. It does not enumerate every shrine, oratory, personal parish, institute chapel or other location where the older liturgy is celebrated, nor every existing parish permission whose renewal fell in another year. The Catholic Herald was correct to stress this limitation.³ Conversely, the register does not tell us how many applications Rome refused, how many bishops chose not to apply, how many requests were withdrawn, or how many communities were moved outside parish churches rather than entered in this category. The numerator is visible; the denominator is not.
This is why the bare annual total of 34 is less revealing than it first appears. Twenty-four of the decrees concern the United States, but even that striking concentration cannot tell us whether American bishops are more favourable to traditional provision, more likely to require parish churches, more willing to apply, or simply responsible for a larger number of communities falling within the Dicastery’s current administrative cycle.¹ ² The register records decisions, not motives, applications or Catholic populations. Its strongest evidence lies elsewhere: in the formulas in aliud biennium, ad biennium, novam licentiam, and abrogat et substituit. Those words show exactly how the regime works.
The corrected picture is therefore considerably more interesting than either headline with which the story began. There were 34 decrees but 33 distinct diocesan or ecclesiastical jurisdictions. They contained 55 parish-church references, of which one Glasgow location was subsequently replaced, leaving 54 permissions from this cohort operative at year’s end. Seven decrees belong to Francis’s pontificate and 27 were issued during Leo XIV’s. Twenty-four are pure, explicit renewals for another two years, covering 40 churches. Davenport adds one further explicitly renewed church and one expressly new licence. Glasgow supplies a replacement. Sioux Falls and Toronto receive two-year permissions not styled in the index as renewals, while six further decrees carry no renewal formula or published duration. The oft-repeated “29 renewals” is intelligible only if several different forms of administrative continuity are combined under that convenient label.
The larger conclusion is harder to compress into a number. The 2025 record does not show universal prohibition: Rome repeatedly said yes. Neither does it show a return to the juridical settlement of Summorum Pontificum: the same communities repeatedly need Rome to say yes again. At least 41 of the 55 church references are demonstrably existing locations being renewed rather than newly created provision. That is the statistic which best describes the practical operation of Traditionis custodes. The system is not principally one of simple suppression or simple permission. It is one of administrative dependency — permission tied to a place, often tied to a term, subject to application, capable of renewal, capable of substitution and ultimately capable of expiry.
That is also why Toronto, Roche, Koch and Moth belong in the same discussion. Moth demonstrates what a bishop can preserve when he is prepared to make the pastoral case. Toronto demonstrates how much can remain uncertain even after Rome has granted a two-year dispensation. Roche defends the continuance of the restrictive settlement because access remains possible within it. Koch questions whether Catholics attached to the older liturgy should continue to depend upon such a restrictive settlement in the first place. Leo XIV has so far presided over the continued operation of the inherited system; he has not, by these 27 administrative decrees alone, settled the larger question about its future.¹²
The newly published Index consequently gives us something more useful than ammunition for either side’s preferred headline. It gives us the anatomy of the regime. Rome did not spend 2025 simply creating 55 new Traditional Masses, nor did it refuse every request placed before it. In the great majority of identifiable cases, it was deciding whether existing traditional Catholic life could continue in particular parish churches for another period. That is the practical reality behind the abstractions of Traditionis custodes: not simply may this Mass be celebrated?, but must the same Catholic community periodically ask again for permission to continue receiving it? The figures now allow that question to be asked without exaggeration. They also make it increasingly difficult to avoid.
¹ Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Summarium Decretorum: Index Decretorum Anni MMXXV, 2025.
² Victoria Cardiel, “Vatican Latin Mass permissions steady across papal transition”, EWTN News, 14 September 2026.
³ Michael Haynes, “Vatican permitted 55 parishes to host Latin Mass in 2025”, Catholic Herald, 14 September 2026.
⁴ Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Index Decretorum Anni MMXXIII, and Index Decretorum inter menses septembrem et decembrem A.D. MMXXIV promulgatorum.
⁵ Francis, Traditionis custodes, 16 July 2021.
⁶ Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Responsa ad dubia on certain provisions of Traditionis custodes, 4 December 2021.
⁷ Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Rescriptum ex Audientia SS.mi, 20 February 2023.
⁸ Nuntiatoria, “Toronto: Rome Gave Two Years — Who Ordered the Monthly Restrictions?”, 18 September 2026; and “Pastoral need not Extinction: Archbishop Moth and the Choice Traditionis Custodes Still Leaves Bishops”, 11 September 2026.
⁹ Justin McLellan, “Vatican liturgy chief says Pope Leo will not overturn Latin Mass restrictions”, National Catholic Reporter, 30 July 2026, reporting Cardinal ✠Arthur Roche’s Tablet interview of 29 July 2026.
¹⁰ Cardinal ✠Kurt Koch, interview with Communicatio, 2 July 2026, English translation reproduced by Rorate Cæli, “We need to rethink Traditionis custodes”.
¹¹ Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, General Instruction of the Roman Missal, especially no. 299.
¹² Nuntiatoria, “Who Speaks for Leo? Sarah, Roche and a Law That Could Wither”, 28 August 2026.
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