Cordileone Calls for Wider Access to Traditional Latin Mass

One of America’s top bishops, a recent appointee to the Vatican’s highest canonical court, is calling for broader access to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, commonly known as the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, who Pope Leo XIV appointed to the Apostolic Signatura late last month, made the comments in an interview last week with EWTN.

Cordileone was responding to the excommunication of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a schismatic traditionalist sect. “Let us pray that an ardent effort toward sincere and honest dialogue will soon start up, and that easier access to the traditional form of the Mass will be available to our people, so they will not feel as if they are constrained to seek spiritual nourishment outside of the family in union with Rome,” the archbishop said in a statement.

It is with gratitude that faithful Catholics may recognize that Cordileone is not among the ranks of those subversive clerics.

Last week, Cordileone warned that the growing number of Catholics devoted to the traditional liturgy — especially young Catholics — may feel pressured to seek the Traditional Latin Mass outside the Church (for example, in groups like the SSPX) if the strict restrictions imposed by the late Pope Francis and Cardinal Arthur Roche remain in place.

“They will do that,” Cordileone warned. “So I think thereʼs concern for unity on both sides. One, if the restrictions are in place, people will then go to these other groups that are not in full communion with the See of Rome,” he continued. “But if theyʼre allowed generously, we have to make sure that the people who access the Mass are in full communion in terms of their belief and their acceptance of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council,” he added. “So I think with some precautions, we can allow a greater access to the Mass and maintain unity within the Church.”

“We look at the younger generation — they all love the tradition,” Cordileone observed. “They love the more classical way that the Church worships, the traditional Mass, what we call the traditional Mass, the form of the Mass before it was changed after the Second Vatican Council.” He emphasized, “This is unstoppable. Itʼs whatʼs drawing young people in and will continue to do so.”

Since Pope Francis implemented his motu proprio Traditionis Custodes in 2021, placing increasingly severe restrictions on the celebration of the TLM, reporting has cast doubt on the late pontiff’s reasons for doing so. Initially, Francis argued that many bishops had expressed concerns over Mass-goers devoted to the TLM and their acceptance of the teachings of the Church — namely, the Second Vatican Council.

A major report published last year, however, alleged that only a handful of ideologically-driven prelates had complained of the TLM in their dioceses, many of whom had refused to implement Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which had liberalized the celebration of the TLM. The vast majority of bishops from around the world expressly warned, when surveyed by the Vatican prior to the publication of Traditionis Custodes, that imposing restrictions on the celebration of the TLM “would cause more harm than good.”

Schismatic groups like the SSPX incurred excommunication by rejecting the teachings of the Catholic Church — namely the constitutions and resolutions of the Second Vatican Council and, ultimately, the authority of the Bishop of Rome. What did young Catholics who appreciate reverence, grandeur, order, and mystery in the worship of God do to incur excommunication? Nothing, save reject the happy-clappy praise-and-worship folk bands of the 70s who insist on showing up for every “teen Mass,” the mundane churches and chapels painted and decorated like the waiting room at a doctor’s office, and the vague, generic platitudes so often spewed forth from the pulpits in such churches in lieu of catechism and virtue.

The youth devoted to the TLM and other traditional Catholic customs, practices, teachings, and prayers have done nothing to separate themselves from Holy Mother Church — in fact, the vast majority have gone out of their way to catechize themselves, since their bishops failed to, and to seek out the treasures of the Church that have lain too long forgotten and disused.

This search often comes at real personal cost — whether losing the friendship or support of older Catholics who dismiss the old Mass as a dusty relic or a right-wing dog whistle, or driving long distances every Sunday and sacrificing both time and money just to attend a more reverent liturgy.

The lovers of the TLM have done nothing to cut themselves off from the Church, but it seems as though malicious and ideological actors within the hierarchy of the Church are determined to cut TLM-goers off from the Church, at seemingly any cost. Never mind the danger posed to immortal souls, there are bishops and priests who have dedicated their lives not to Christ and the Church that He founded, but to advancing their own progressive, modernist ideologies, imperiling hundreds, even thousands of souls.

It is with gratitude that faithful Catholics may recognize that Cordileone is not among the ranks of those subversive clerics. The archbishop clearly recognizes the fact that souls hang in the balance and that a lack of charity on the part of bishops may cast hundreds or thousands of those souls out of the Church and into the dark. We may pray that more bishops would share Cordileone’s courage and his convictions and speak out boldly in defense of Catholics who ask only to worship their beloved God with reverence and piety.

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