Pittsburgh lets its diocesan traditional Mass expire

The Bishop of Pittsburgh, Most Rev. Mark Eckman, has announced that he will not seek renewal of the permission to use the 1962 Roman Missal at Mary, Queen of Saints Parish in Aliquippa, a small town of roughly 9,000 people. He will let that permission lapse when its term expires, rather than requesting its renewal from the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

"I have decided not to request the renewal of the permission [...] to use the Roman Missal of 1962 at Mary, Queen of Saints Parish. Instead, I will allow the current permission to cease at the end of the allotted time," he said. The old rite continues to be celebrated at a Pittsburgh parish entrusted to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, and the bishop invites the faithful attached to the 1962 Missal to go there: "if, after that time, the faithful still desire to worship the Lord according to the Roman Missal of 1962, I invite and encourage them to attend there."

The scope of the measure is reported differently. On one reading, this would be the last diocesan traditional Mass in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, to be celebrated on Friday 4 September 2026; on another, the Mass being suppressed is precisely the one at Aliquippa, with the parish entrusted to the Institute of Christ the King continuing to offer the 1962 rite. The decision comes five months after Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, encouraged the bishops of France to show generosity toward the faithful attached to the traditional Mass.

What the Church has always held

The traditional Roman rite is not a revocable concession. By the bull Quo Primum Tempore (1570), St. Pius V established the Roman Missal and granted every priest, in perpetuity, the faculty to use it, forbidding that he ever be compelled to abandon it or troubled in any way for using it. The Council of Trent, at its twenty-second session (1562), defined that the Mass is a true and proper sacrifice, offered for the living and the dead, and anathematized anyone who denies it. This rite is the common treasure of the Latin Church, not the object of an authorization whose months are counted.

The measure

To reduce an immemorial rite to the regime of a temporary permission, left to expire like an administrative deadline, is to treat as a precarious favor what tradition holds to be an acquired and perpetual good. The act does not abolish the rite: it withdraws access to it in one parish and sends the faithful elsewhere. But the logic remains. What St. Pius V willed to be perpetual and inviolable is made subject to a term. There lies the gap, and it is not a small one.

What the faithful take from it

That the Mass of all time is not earned and does not expire. Where it remains accessible, one holds to it; where it is withdrawn, one keeps the faith the Church has always taught, without schism and without flight. The rite is not a pastoral convenience to be opened and closed: it is the very sacrifice of Calvary, offered as the Church received it.

Sources. St. Pius V, bull Quo Primum Tempore (1570), on the perpetual use of the Roman Missal. Council of Trent, twenty-second session (1562), doctrine and canons on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of the Eucharist and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.