Why I am not (quite, yet) a Traditionalist: Part II

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 12, 2025

For months, before we moved to our current home, our family would regularly drive past a half-dozen Catholic churches to attend Sunday Mass celebrated in the Anglican Use. We loved it. Sometimes we would visit the Melkite cathedral, for the beautiful Divine Liturgy of the St. John Chrysostom, and loved that, too. Occasionally I have made retreats at a Maronite monastery, hearing the ancient chants and prayers in Aramaic, and loving them.

Now we usually (not always) attend a reverent Novus Ordo Mass at our local parish, and love it—not because it is the Novus Ordo, but because it is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the single event that brings us salvation and makes sense of otherwise senseless lives.

Most Catholics, unfortunately, never experience the rich variety of liturgical offerings within the Catholic Church. For them, the Sunday liturgy is not the Novus Ordo; it is simply the Mass—the only Mass they have known (if they are older, the only Mass they have known for several decades). To be sure they notice changes in the liturgy from time to time, or from parish to parish, or even from one Mass to the next in the same church. But change, too, has become something they expect. They are not moved, one way or the other, by arguments about the Traditional Latin Mass: a liturgical form they have probably never seen.

Over the years my work as a Catholic journalist has brought me into contact with many wonderful, faithful, prayerful Catholics. Some of them, I suspect, are living saints. I may be wrong in some cases; nasty vices can lurk behind a pious exterior. But then, how many other humble, unrecognized saints are scattered in the pews around us? And these admirable Catholics draw their spiritual nourishment exclusively from the Novus Ordo liturgy.

Yes, I wish that the Church would offer a more reverent and beautiful liturgy for these good people—and for me. And yes, I believe that a more fitting celebration of the Mass would attract more people, and help more lukewarm Catholics to deepen their faith. For that very reason every healthy parish needs a cadre of people who will steadily push for greater reverence, and support initiatives in that direction.

Traditionalist Catholics today may feel oppressed, and with good reason, but in one way they are spoiled. The congregation at a TLM is made up of people who want to be there, to worship just as Catholics have worshipped for centuries. Very few Catholics attend the TLM out of a sense of obligation or routine; they seek out the ancient liturgy. So the congregation is more reverent, more focused on the liturgy, than in a typical parish.

I am old enough to remember when this was not the case: when anyone who wanted to fulfill his Sunday obligation came to the TLM—not out of love but because there was no choice. I know, from sad experiences, that the TLM can be celebrated sloppily, distractedly, in front of an equally distracted congregation. Granted, the TLM does not allow for the grosser abuses that occur with appalling frequency in Novus Ordo parishes. But the TLM, too, can be done badly. The form of the liturgy is no guarantee of reverence.

So a reasonable goal, for Catholics craving better liturgy, is not to do away with the Novus Ordo and replace it everywhere with the TLM, but to promote greater reverence in every Catholic church. Even if it were possible to imagine a worldwide mandate from Rome to return to the TLM, such an imposed solution would be disruptive and unjust to the sensibilities of the Catholic laity, as were the disastrous liturgical revolutions of the post-conciliar generation.

Pope Benedict XVI had a much better pastoral solution, which he set forth in Summorum Pontificum: to allow wider access to the TLM, and then let human nature take its course. That solution might still be workable, assuming that Traditionis Custodes is consigned to its rightful place on a dusty shelf somewhere in the Vatican archives. If interest in the TLM spreads, that interest is bound to be felt in any lively parish.

We already know what is happening to sleepy parishes, where the sense of reverence is fading. The congregation shrinks; the young people leave; the community cannot support a priest or pay the church heating bills; the parish closes. But in livelier parishes, where the priests encourage a spirit of pious reverence and the people want to come to Mass, changes occur organically. In time—particularly if they experience the TLM and make comparisons—parishioners will ask:

• Why can’t we use the Roman Canon regularly, with its fuller expression of the sacrificial offering, as our Catholic ancestors did?
• Why doesn’t the priest’s posture show that he is leading us in prayer, not acting as the focus of our attention?
• Why not offer more opportunity for silent prayer, for private thanksgiving, for meditation?
• Shouldn’t we use a special language for the most sacred parts of the Mass—a language that, because it is not in common us, separates the Holy of Holies from ordinary things? Shouldn’t we dip into the rich treasury liturgical music that has been written in that language?
• Could our parish schedule regular Benediction, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, Eucharistic processions, Vespers services, and other special services that enrich liturgical sensibilities?
• Can we, by our example, encourage our fellow parishioners to show respect for the Eucharist by dressing appropriately, keeping quiet, spending a few minutes in thanksgiving after Mass?

And then, eventually:

• Could our bishops revive the many old Propers and Orations that been edited out of the Novus Ordo, to help us appreciate the nature of the Sacrifice, recall the virtues of the saints on their feast days, and recognize the deep Biblical roots of the liturgy that harken back to the Temple Sacrifice of the People of Israel?

Notice, by the way, that none of these questions even hint at resistance to the liturgical reforms mandated by Vatican II. On the contrary, they point toward the points on which the liturgical revolutionaries of the post-conciliar era sharply diverged from the guidance of the Council.

Meanwhile young priests and seminarians, unencumbered by the bitter memories of the “liturgy wars” of past generations, are already learning to celebrate the TLM, even in the face of official disapproval. To them—and potentially to the people they will serve—the TLM is not the “old” Mass, it is new and exciting, its influence infectious.

”Mutual enrichment,” Pope Benedict called it: the means by which the Mass that most Catholics know today could become the more beautiful liturgy that their grandparents knew. That is the opposite of the attitude that Cardinal Gerhard Müller decried, in a recent interview with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo, when he said: “Some bishops say that if people don’t accept the new form, they should stay home or go to the Lefebvrists. That is not a Catholic understanding.”

By the same token—and as a caution to my Traditionalist friends—I would warn against the fantasy that in some happier day the Novus Ordo will be summarily abolished. The sentence that we all enjoy quoting from Pope Benedict can cut both ways: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us, too.” Our grandchildren will view us as the “earlier generations,” and in our midst there are countless thousands of good and faithful Catholics who rightly value the Mass—the Novus Ordo Mass, the only Mass they know—as sacred. To say that they are wrong is, to put it mildly, not a Catholic understanding.