U.S Cardinal Raymond Burke will celebrate a traditional Latin Mass for pilgrims in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, Oct. 25, with Pope Leo XIV’s permission. The pilgrim group, which makes annual trips to the Vatican, did not receive permission to celebrate the pre-Vatican II rite in St. Peter’s during its 2023 or 2024 pilgrimages.

The Mass will be celebrated at the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter, just behind the main altar of the basilica. Since 2021, celebrations of the pre-Vatican II Mass in the basilica have been limited to the Clementine Chapel beneath the floor of St. Peter’s Basilica, where St. Peter is believed to have been crucified. The change in location is likely due to the capacity needed for the Mass: Organizers expect 1,000 registered pilgrims plus additional attendees, and the Clementine Chapel only seats eight.

Devotees of the pre-Vatican II Mass have wondered whether this gesture by Pope Leo indicates that he will lift some of Pope Francis’ 2021 restrictions on the old Latin Mass.

What is the Latin Mass?

The pre-Vatican II Mass is also known as the Tridentine Rite because it was promulgated after the Council of Trent (Latin: Tridentum) in 1570, in an effort to standardize the Catholic liturgy around the world. Before then, the Mass varied greatly across the world, being celebrated in various languages, with the parts of the Mass arranged in different orders and priests adding flourishes like extra prayers and long lists of saints. Popes beginning in the fourth century had made efforts toward standardization—introducing the Gloria in the sixth century and the Eucharistic Prayer in the seventh—but the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press made standardization more urgent and feasible than ever before.

The Mass promulgated after Trent was used, mostly unchanged, by the majority of Roman Catholics for about 400 years. But over time, as less and less of public life happened in Latin, the Mass became more and more difficult for the faithful to understand. Beginning in the 1800s, bishops began developing resources to teach their congregants how to follow the Mass, like missals that printed both the Latin text and a vernacular translation of the Mass. At the same time, some historians began to argue that the liturgy should look more like the early church’s worship. And, in the decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council, ecclesiology was shifting as well, toward seeing lay people as protagonists in the church’s mission who should be actively participating in the liturgy.

The reform of the liturgy that followed Vatican II responded to many of these shifts with the changes most Catholics now see at every Mass: The liturgy could be translated into local languages, the priest would face the people and speak the prayers out loud rather than sotto voce and lay people would participate with movements, music and spoken prayers.

Pushback and accommodation

Although the changes formalized by Pope Paul VI in 1969 were widely accepted, there was some immediate pushback, which took two forms: Some critics, like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his Society of St. Pius X, rejected Vatican II’s ideas entirely; others simply wanted the old Mass back. Not wanting the latter group to be lured into schism, Pope John Paul II chose to allow some groups to celebrate the pre-Vatican II Mass so long as they accepted the teachings of Vatican II.

John Paul also created a pontifical commission in the Vatican to continue dialogue with the followers of SSPX, “Ecclesia Dei.” After the death of John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI met with some of SSPX’s leaders to discuss reintegration, and they said they would not reintegrate into the church until Benedict agreed that SSPX priests would not have to receive permission from a local bishop to celebrate the pre-Vatican II Mass. In 2007, Benedict issued a motu proprio, “Summorum Pontificum,” which said exactly that—but it didn’t convince the SSPX to rejoin Rome.

With permission no longer needed to celebrate the old rite, more priests began giving it a try, and some young Catholics who had never experienced the old Mass found themselves attracted to how different it was, often describing it as more “reverent” or beautiful than the post-Vatican II Mass.

“Summorum Pontificum” also introduced a new way of understanding the old and new rites as two “forms” of the same liturgy—the “ordinary form,” following Vatican II’s guidelines, and the “extraordinary form” (that is, not the one ordinarily used) from before Vatican II. Benedict wrote, “These two expressions of the Church’s lex orandi [rule of prayer] will in no way lead to a division in the Church’s lex credendi (rule of faith); for they are two usages of the one Roman rite.”

Pope Francis’ restrictions 

In 2020, the Vatican’s then-Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith sent out a nine-question survey to bishops asking about the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass in their dioceses. In July 2021, just months after restricting the celebration of the pre-Vatican II Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to the Clementine Chapel, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio, “Traditionis Custodes,” that significantly curtailed the celebration of the extraordinary form around the world.

In a note accompanying the decision, Francis wrote that the survey responses revealed “a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.” He said that Benedict’s vision of a united diversity of practices had been ignored, and that his and John Paul II’s generosity had been “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the church…and expose her to the peril of division.”

“Traditionis Custodes” returned to the pre-2007 practice of priests needing approval from their local bishop to celebrate the old Mass, requiring bishops to review each priest and community in their diocese celebrating the old Mass to make sure they accepted the teachings of Vatican II. Francis banned bishops from approving any new communities dedicated to the Latin Mass and required any priest ordained after “Traditionis Custodes” to get approval not only from their bishop but from Rome.

“Traditionis Custodes” also said that Latin Masses should not happen in parish churches. Some bishops in the United States have taken that to mean that the Latin Mass has to be celebrated elsewhere besides the church building. Others have decided that churches operated by religious orders don’t count as parishes, so the celebration of the Latin Mass can continue there. Others have banned Latin Masses entirely.

Perhaps most significantly, “Traditionis Custodes” departed from “Summorum Pontificum” by calling the ordinary form “the unique expression of the Roman Rite.” Theologian Terrence Sweeney wrote in America this week that settling that debate—over how the church’s law of faith is revealed in its law of worship—is a key decision facing Pope Leo XIV.

Cardinal Burke’s critique

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a staunch proponent of the pre-Vatican II Mass and a frequent critic of Pope Francis, called “Traditionis Custodes” “severe and revolutionary” upon its release and called for the full results of the bishops’ survey to be released. In August of this year, he appeared on EWTN, saying of the post-Vatican II Mass: “I am in no way questioning its validity; there is a continuity, but it is strained. You cannot take something that is so rich in beauty and remove the beautiful elements without there being negative effects.”

In July, American Catholic journalist Diane Montagna published a document that she said was an official summary of the Vatican’s survey of bishops on the Latin Mass. The document, claimed to be from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith but lacking its official letterhead, said that “the majority of bishops who responded to the questionnaire stated that making legislative changes to Summorum Pontificum would cause more harm than good,” seemingly contradicting Pope Francis’ stated reasoning for restricting the old Mass.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni did not confirm the legitimacy of the documents and said that they “presumably” were part of Francis’ decision, albeit “a very partial and incomplete reconstruction of the decision-making process.” The publication of the document was seen as putting pressure on Pope Leo to address the ongoing Latin Mass debate.

Pope Leo’s dilemma

Since Pope Leo XIV’s election on May 8, 2025, advocates of the Latin Mass have sent letters and requests to Pope Leo, which he revealed in an extensive interview with his biographer, Elise Allen. “Between the Tridentine Mass and the Vatican II Mass, the Mass of Paul VI, I’m not sure where that’s going to go. It’s obviously very complicated,” he said.

The pope echoed his predecessor’s concerns about the liturgy becoming “part of a process of polarization,” saying: “People have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate.”

In the interview, the pope expressed a desire to meet and talk with proponents of the Tridentine rite, saying, “There’s an opportunity coming up soon”—possibly in reference to the pope’s meeting with Cardinal Burke on Aug. 22.

Pope Leo also seemed to hint at a sort of “middle way” that those hoping to make peace between the two rites have advocated: the ordinary form as the exclusive form of the Mass but with a crackdown on so-called “liturgical abuses” and an increase in reverence, the presence of Latin and other traditional practices that are allowed and even encouraged in the Vatican II Mass.

“I think sometimes the, say, ‘abuse’ of the liturgy from what we call the Vatican II Mass, was not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass,” he said. Leo speculated whether “if we celebrate[d] the Vatican II liturgy in a proper way,” massgoers would experience much less difference between the rites. 

As it stands, however, the issue has become “so polarized that people aren’t willing to listen to one another,” he said. 

“That’s a problem in itself. It means we’re into ideology now, we’re no longer into the experience of church communion. That’s one of the issues on the agenda.”

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