The prostration of the ordinandi during the Litany of the Saints at Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, the FSSP’s parish in Rome, June 22, 2013. / CNA
Denver Newsroom, Oct 8, 2021 / 16:50 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis’ restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass appear to be unpopular among regularly practicing Catholics, but most American Catholics have not even heard of the changes, a survey reports.
“Catholics who attend Mass weekly are both more likely to be aware of the new restrictions and more inclined to oppose them than Catholics who attend less frequently,” the Pew Research Center, which conducted the survey, said Oct. 7
About 58% of Catholics who attended Mass weekly had heard about the restrictions. Regular Mass attendees were the most sceptical of the Pope’s move. Of these, 29% disapproved of the new restrictions, 11% approved, while 17% had no opinion. However, 42% had not heard of the changes.
On July 16, in Traditionis custodes, Pope Francis issued rules giving a bishop “exclusive competence” to authorize the Traditional Latin Mass in his diocese. Bishops with groups celebrating this form of the liturgy in their dioceses are to ensure that the groups do not deny the validity of the Second Vatican Council. The council, held in the 1960s, preceded major changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy. These changes were codified in 1970 with St. Paul VI’s Roman Missal, the missal used in most Catholic parishes in vernacular languages.
The restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass are a break from the practice established in a 2007 apostolic letter from Benedict XVI, Summorum Pontificum, which had acknowledged the rights of all priests to offer the Mass according to the Roman Missal of 1962, promulgated by St. John XXIII.
Overall, some two-thirds of Catholics told Pew that they had heard “nothing at all” about the changes from Pope Francis, 28% had heard “only a little,” while 7% had heard “a lot.” Overall, 9% approved, 12% disapproved, and 14% declined to answer.
Catholics who attend Mass monthly or yearly slightly favored the new restrictions rather than opposed them. Respondents’ opinions appeared not to differ significantly by age. Besides religious practice, Catholics’ favorability towards Traditional Latin Mass restrictions broke along partisan lines.
Among Catholics who are Republicans or lean Republican, only 4% approved the pope’s move, while 20% disapproved. Another 15% had no opinion, while 61% had not heard of the change. By contrast, 13% of Catholics who are Democrats or lean Democrat supported the move, 6% opposed it, 13% had no opinion and some 68% had not heard of it.
Pope Francis said he had issued the restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass “in defense of the unity of the Body of Christ,” saying, “I am constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my predecessors.” He said permission to celebrate this form of the liturgy had led to “distorted use” that was contrary to the intentions that had allowed it.
In response to the papal action, some bishops have said that priests may continue to offer the Traditional Latin Mass in their dioceses, while others have banned it. Still others have said they need more time to consider their response.
Laity and clergy who support the traditional Latin Mass had their own reactions.
Joseph Shaw, the chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, told CNA that many priests and lay Catholics have worked to combine an interest in the Traditional Latin Mass with “sincere loyalty and affection for the hierarchy and the Holy Father.” He said they have been “let down by this document.”
Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, told the National Catholic Register that the text was “marked by a harshness” towards those who attend extraordinary form Masses.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was also critical, contrasting the action with Francis’ stress on accompanying people: “Accompaniment for some, slow strangulation of their rites for others.”
It is unclear how many Traditional Latin Mass parishes will be affected by the pope’s new limits and how the limits will affect diocesan clergy and laity who seek to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass going forward. Catholic parishes that celebrate this Mass are a small minority. As of Oct. 8, the Latin Mass Directory website lists 662 venues in the U.S. By comparison, there are over 16,700 parishes in the U.S., according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
Pew’s survey also asked respondents whether they had a favorable or unfavorable view of Pope Francis.
American Catholics’ favorability of the pope hovered at about 83%, with Catholics who attend Mass monthly or yearly slightly more favorable towards Pope Francis. Democratic or Democrat-leaning Catholics gave the pope 91% approval, compared to 71% of Republicans or Republican sympathizers. Overall, only 14% of Catholics had an unfavorable view of the pope.
However, 49% of Republican or Republican-leaning Catholics described the pope as too liberal. Only 30% of all Catholics, and 16% of Democratic or Democrat-leaning Catholics said the same.
Strong majorities of Catholic respondents tended to agree that Pope Francis should be described as compassionate, humble, and open-minded, and tended to reject describing him as out of touch or naïve. However, only 52% said he is in good physical health, and Republican or Republican-leaning respondents tended to be less positive in their descriptions of the pope.
American Catholics tend to be more favorable towards Pope Francis than Americans overall. Only 60% of all U.S. respondents had a favorable view of the pontiff, with 28% voicing an unfavorable view.
The Pew Research Center’s survey of 6,485 U.S. adults, 1,374 of whom are Catholic, was conducted Sept. 20-26 as part of Pew’s American Trends Panel. Pew said the survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by sex, race, ethnicity, party affiliation, education, religious affiliation and other categories.
The survey claims a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points for all Americans, plus or minus 4.3 percentage points for all Catholics, and plus or minus 8.4 percentage points for Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly.
[…]
To avoid criticism among Catholics, he will, on rare occasion, allow his moodiness shift towards his distaste for abortion and make the stupid, insensitive to troubled women, hitman statement. But he’ll never forcefully call upon the whole world for its total elimination. That might cause him to lose face with global elitists and their lapdogs in the media.
“Morally inadmissible,” but also still admissibly moral(!). Just thinkin’, now, about the prisoner whom St. Therese prayed for conversion, and how he did convert and kissed the crucifix moments before losing his head to the guillotine. So, maybe conversion is sometimes about timing and certainty: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” (Samuel Johnson).
“And in the light of the Gospel, the death penalty is unacceptable. The commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ refers to both the innocent and the guilty.”
Really?
Where was the Holy Spirit for the last twenty centuries in regard to this if only now this papacy has the ‘truth’. Christ promised that the Third Person would guide His Church in all truth. It took all these centuries for this to evolve for the ‘inadmissible’ claim under the gravity of death?
Christ upheld the Mosaic Law which included capital punishment. If the original Commandment had said, ‘Thou shall not kill’, even accidents, war, and self defense would be in violation as such a literal declaration did not provide exceptions.
The God of the Old Testament would indict even Himself with all the killing in that period often directed at the behest of the Almighty.
Murder and killing.
Feser and Bessette handily defeated that professor and his ilk, cheerleaders for all things Francis, who refused to acknowledge the difference.
This works for me but I have to believe that there may be rare exceptions where capital punishment may be the only way to protect society.
If we distrust the secular state in smaller matters we should distrust it also in greater things like the power of life and death. Outside of self defense, our lives should be in the hands of God, not the government.
SO according to Pope Francis, the Bible, Tradition, all the Church Fathers, all the Doctors of the Church, and all 265 previous Popes got it wrong on the death penalty, but somehow he got it right. That is pure narcissism not based on authentic Catholic moral theology.
When St. Pope John Paul II rendered the need for the death penalty “very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Evangelium Vitae, 1995, n.57; or now morally “inadmissible” but still admissibly moral), this guidance served largely as a segue to the immediately following section (surely intended to all of the members of the European Union which prohibits the death penalty but then permits abortion):
“If such great care must be taken to respect every life, even that of criminals and unjust aggressors, the commandment “You shall not kill” has absolute value [!] when it refers to the INNOCENT PERSON [italics]. And all the more so in the case of weak and defenseless human beings, who find their ultimate defence against the arrogance and caprice of others only in the absolute binding force of God’s commandment” (n. 58).
And, yet, in the United States we now have duplicitous clericalists (e.g. Cardinal McElroy) pontificating, instead, that sacrilege against the Eucharistic Presence, by notorious Aztecs, should not be a “litmus test” preventing their indiscriminate participation in the Church’s sacramental life.
The Big Picture, in our fallen world, is that elimination of the death penalty would foster a much broader culture of life for everyone, such as the unborn as noted by Pope St. John Paul II (my above comment). But, when he added the words “very rare,” perhaps he also had an intuition about other kinds of situations–such as a later case in a maximum-security prison in Washington State…
A prison guard was murdered by a prisoner already serving a life sentence. What disincentive, or further penalty for outcomes like this? Only sequential or concurrent life terms?
If the death penalty is totally disallowed as a disincentive for homicides and mass shootings in the general population, then perhaps the penalty at least can remain on the books for the protection of prison guards or other prisoners? (Perhaps a footnote in the next edition of the amended Catechism!)
The Catholic Church & The Death Penalty
8 Factual Errors: 2018 CCC 2267 amendment
https://prodpinnc.blogspot.com/2022/02/7-factual-errors-2018-ccc-2267-amendment.html