Rome-based Catholic journalist Diane Montagna this week published the full text of a report about the liturgy written by the Vatican prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments that was distributed to cardinals gathered from around the world at the Vatican last week.

According to Montagna, the report presents an argument in favor of the late Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio Traditionis custodes, which significantly restricted the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass. 

Cardinal Arthur Roche, an Englishman who has been prefect since 2021, penned the two-page report distributed at the Extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals. The cardinals received one report per theme of the Consistory to consider, reflect on, and discuss. Along with the theme of liturgy addressed by Cardinal Roche were the themes of evangelization, the Synod and synodality, and the Roman Curia. 

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As CatholicVote previously reported, Pope Leo said the cardinals’ meeting would only be able to specifically address two of the themes due to time constraints. The cardinals took a vote on which themes to focus on, and a majority picked evangelization and synodality. 

Montagna reported Jan. 13 that because of this, “while Cardinal Roche’s report was distributed to the Cardinals, it was never formally discussed.” She published PDFs of the report in English and Italian in the Substack article. 

Near the end of Cardinal Roche’s report, he argues that it was a “concession” of popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis to allow the use of liturgical books that Vatican II encouraged reform of; this allowance, he argues, “in no way envisaged their promotion.”  

“Pope Francis — while granting, in accordance with Traditionis custodes, the use of the 1962 Missale Romanum — pointed the way to unity in the use of the liturgical books promulgated by the holy Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, in accordance with the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, the sole expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite,” Cardinal Roche wrote.

The 11-paragraph report begins by stating: “In the life of the Church, the Liturgy has always undergone reforms.” He cites numerous developments including the Franco-Germanic reforms, the Tridentine reform, and “the partial post-Tridentine reforms to the general reform of the Second Vatican Council.”

“The history of the Liturgy, we might say, is the history of its continuous ‘reforming’ in a process of organic development,” Cardinal Roche writes. 

He argues that in the liturgy, “the rite is in itself characterised by cultural elements that change in time and places.”

“Besides, since ‘Tradition is not the transmission of things or words, a collection of dead things’ but ‘the living river that links us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are ever present’,” he continues, quoting Pope Benedict XVI, “we can certainly affirm that the reform of the Liturgy wanted by the Second Vatican Council is not only in full syntony with the true meaning of Tradition, but constitutes a singular way of putting itself at the service of the Tradition, because the latter is like a great river that leads us to the gates of eternity.”

To both maintain solid tradition and pave the way for “legitimate progress,” as encouraged by Vatican II, “cannot be understood as two separable actions: without a ‘legitimate progress’ the tradition would be reduced to a ‘collection of dead things’ not always all healthy; without the ‘sound tradition’ progress risks becoming a pathological search for novelty, that cannot generate life, like a river whose path is blocked separating it from its sources,” Cardinal Roche writes. 

The cardinal recalls Pope Francis’ February 2024 address to participants of the Plenary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in which the pontiff noted it had been 60 years since the promulgation of the Vatican II declaration Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. 

The declaration’s objectives “describe a precise desire to reform the Church in her fundamental dimensions: to make the Christian life of the faithful grow more and more every day; to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change; to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ; to reinvigorate that which serves to call all to the bosom of the Church,” Pope Francis said in quoting the document, according to Cardinal Roche. 

Cardinal Roche argues that the application of the reform encouraged by Sacrosanctum Concilium “suffered and continues to suffer from a lack of formation” putting the liturgy as the source and summit of Christian life for pastors. 

“The primary good of the unity of the Church is not achieved by freezing division but by finding ourselves in the sharing of what cannot but be shared,” Cardinal Roche wrote, arguing that Pope Francis said this in his 2022 apostolic letter on the liturgy, Desiderio desieravi. 

Cardinal Roche quotes the section of this letter in which Pope Francis says that the Church is called to continually rediscover the value of the foundations explained in Sacrosanctum Concilium, adding that “For this reason we cannot go back to that ritual form which the Council fathers, cum Petro et sub Petro, felt the need to reform, approving, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and following their conscience as pastors, the principles from which was born the reform. The holy pontiffs St. Paul VI and St. John Paul II, approving the reformed liturgical books ex decreto Sacrosancti, have guaranteed the fidelity of the reform of the Council.” 

This is why he wrote Traditionis custodes, Pope Francis continued, “so that the Church may lift up, in the variety of so many languages, one and the same prayer capable of expressing her unity.”

The final paragraph of Cardinal Roche’s report is a full quote from paragraph 31 of Desiderio desieravi in which Pope Francis wrote: “I do not see how it is possible to say that one recognizes the validity of the Council — though it amazes me that a Catholic might presume not to do so — and at the same time not accept the liturgical reform born out of Sacrosanctum Concilium, a document that expresses the reality of the Liturgy intimately joined to the vision of Church so admirably described in Lumen gentium.”

Montagna published a groundbreaking report in July 2025 on a Vatican document assessing bishops’ responses to a 2020 questionnaire, the results of which were cited as the basis for Traditionis custodes, as CatholicVote reported.

Montagna reported at the time that the document revealed “major cracks” in the basis for Traditionis custodes. Most of the bishops said at the time that making changes to the current Latin Mass situation “would cause more harm than good.” 

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