Rome will keep the restrictions on the traditional Mass

Rome has let it be understood that the restrictions on the traditional Roman Mass will not be lifted: the recent legislation that governs the ancient rite will be maintained, and the wider freedom once granted will not be restored.

The Church has never held her liturgy to be the property of a single generation. The Roman rite that Saint Pius V codified in the bull « Quo Primum » (1570) was given in perpetuity, and the priest who kept to it was never to be troubled for doing so. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the holy Sacrifice of the Mass is one and the same as that of the Cross, offered according to the rite received and guarded through the ages. Dom Guéranger saw in the liturgy the very tradition of the Church, at its highest degree of solemnity.

To restrict the rite that formed the saints is to treat as suspect what the Church venerated for centuries. A law can bind discipline; it cannot undo what is immemorial. The Mass of all time awaits no permission it did not already possess. And what has nourished the faith and sanctified generations cannot become, overnight, a threat to the very unity it has served.

Sources. Bull « Quo Primum » of Saint Pius V (1570); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrifice of the Mass; Dom Guéranger, « Liturgical Institutions ».