Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods? – “Previously undisclosed documents raise serious questions about the stated rationale for Pope Francis’ 2021 decree restricting the Traditional Latin Mass.” EXCLUSIVE: Official Vatican Report Exposes Major Cracks in Foundation of Traditionis Custodes (Diane Montagna – Substack)
Longest-Serving Priest – “Throughout his remarkable lifetime, the Rev. James Kelly has baptized thousands of people, married thousands more, ministered to the sick in hospitals, and traveled the world extensively. He became friends with an opera superstar and, yes, even with a saint.” Catholic priest still bakes pies, enjoys opera and performs daily Mass at age 100: ‘The Lord was wonderful to me’ (New York Post)
Lima’s Problematic Cardinal – “Critics of Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasogglio allege financial and administrative mismanagement in Peru’s capital see.” Lima archbishop accused of mishandling nun abuse case (The Pillar)
Against the Trans Lobby – “Refusing to affirm a child’s new gender is now treated like a crime.” “They are institutionalizing child abuse”—Spanish Criminal Lawyer Paula Fraga (The European Conservative)
The Compatibility of Science and Religion – “The Vatican Observatory attests that ‘science is not against God’ — and the nexus of science and spirituality invites humankind to contemplate the Lord’s wondrous works, said a Jesuit astrophysicist.” Science and the stars a call to the spiritual, says Vatican astrophysicist
Parliament First, Catholic Second – “MP Chris Coghlan is upset because his pastor called him out publicly & denied him Communion.” Another ‘Catholic’ Defends Voting for Killing (New Oxford Review)
Search for Peace – “A 39-year-old Hindu man, who was convicted of being part of a gang that murdered Australian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his two young sons 26 years ago, has announced his baptism as a Baptist Christian.” Indian jailed for Australian missionary’s murder becomes a Christian (UCA News)
Human Trafficking Horror Stories – “Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered stunning testimony during a June 24 House Energy Committee hearing, accusing the Biden administration of recklessly handing over migrant children to sponsors without proper vetting.” RFK Jr. alleges Biden admin delivered migrant children to strip clubs, shipping containers (CatholicVote)
Beginning to Breathe Again – “‘This isn’t a revival, this is a renaissance!’ he shouted, as the Eucharistic Procession entered the courtyard of the Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. ‘Because a revival’s when something’s dead, and this Church certainly ain’t dead!'” From Revival to Renaissance: What One Man Shouted—and Why It Might Be True (Words and Pictures by Jeff Bruno – Substack)
Day of Deliverance – “What if our most American holiday isn’t just about hot dogs and sparklers, but about devotion, gratitude, and freedom’s price?” Prayers before fireworks: Rediscovering Independence Day with John Adams (Refine)
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Re: Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods?
It is not at all surprising that Bergoglio’s persecution of the Catholic Mass as it has been celebrated for centuries was fraudulently based.
Bergoglio claimed that his crackdown was in response to the results of a study that indicated problems in the communities where the Latin Mass is found. But the study was never produced.
Now, research into the study shows that it actually casts the Latin Mass and its adherents in a positive light.
Once again it is evident that Bergoglio was not inspired by the Holy Spirit but rather by the other one.
Pope Leo XIII, pray for us.
I did have an intense dislike for Francis whom I regarded as the worst pope in history. The pleasure-seeking popes at least did not seek to undermine doctrine. But his main fault was surrounding himself with Yes-men. It could be that his foolhardy view of the Church’s mission was corrupted by those lying to him in addition to his own vanity.
Regardless, he now belongs on every Catholic’s daily All Souls intention prayers for those in purgatory, not just those prayers we do in November.
Re: Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods?
No comments from you several popesplainers who were always explaining away Bergoglio’s duplicity and vindictiveness?
Hmmmm?
Regarding MP Chris Coghlan one has to ask the question what does it take for a Catholic to be excommunicated. To start the Bishops should mandate he is not to receive communion. Second there should be a process to excommunicate him. The guy voted to kill people, he shows no remorse. Why do the bishops have no backbone to do the right thing. Thankfully there is a priest who has a backbone, which means he is definitely not bishop material.
About four centuries before the beginning of the Vatican Observatory, the contemplative theologian JULIAN OF NORWICH experienced sixteen visions, all in one day. She spent the next 25 years trying to explain what had happened. In part of her “Revelations of Divine Love,” she records beholding a simple hazelnut. She was given to know that the hazelnut represented all of creation in the hand of God, its “maker, keeper, and lover.” God is active in every point in space and time.
G.K. CHESTERTON wrote: “I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind [….] The cosmos went on forever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will” (Orthodoxy).
About which, the ex-communist convert (as a Quaker) WHITTAKER CHAMBERS walked his son through their apple orchard to witness the night sky and to consider our modern and fleeting moment:
“I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them, and that the problem of good and evil is not more simple than the immensity of worlds.
“I want him to understand that evil is not something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away, for it is not merely an uninvited guest, but lies coiled in foro interno [that is] at home with good within ourselves. Evil can only be fought. . . .I want him to know that it is his soul, and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns” (Epilogue in “Witness,” 1952).
Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods? – “Previously undisclosed documents raise serious questions about the stated rationale for Pope Francis’ 2021 decree restricting the Traditional Latin Mass.” EXCLUSIVE: Official Vatican Report Exposes Major Cracks in Foundation of Traditionis Custodes (Diane Montagna – Substack)
Granting the Franciscan Vatican every benefit of every doubt, they simply read and misinterpreted the bishops’ assessment of Summorum Pontificum!
Devotees of the TLM recognized the lie a long time ago: The TLM is a threat to the demise of Catholic Christianity.
Diane Montagna’s ability to locate the evidence of substance is a tribute to her fortitude and tenacity. It is a mark of God’s GRACE, his gifts to His Church. It indicts the heinous hierarchs who continue to offer their deceitful minds and hearts to demons in the church. Woe to those little evil ‘men’.
@ Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods?
My contribution to the assessment of doctrinal integrity investigator extraordinaire Diane Montagna will be one and small of an expected avalanche of commentaries that should take us into August.
She told us so earlier. Declining from investigating her investigation my comment will address skulduggery, witchcraft, and plain old duplicity. Most of us cognoscenti [the Francis case didn’t require genius to see through it except for diehard defenders of a peerless papacy] realized within weeks of elevation that Cardinal Bergoglio now Francis I was magical at revealing to us that moral truths have two essential natures, good or evil. Simply put, good can be evil and evil good.
That aside, the real issue at this stage is what will Pope Leo XIV do or decline from doing following Cardinal Burke’s request that Summorum Pontificum be restored – especially in the light of a world class journalist’s findings. If Leo does act in favor as justice requires, will he modify his commitment to follow the path of Pope Francis? Our Church must have a positive response, not a finely worded restraint.
Yes, about the risk of “follow[ing] the path of Pope Francis,” but drawing to an inside straight maybe another scenario is in the offing…
Pope Leo’s announced priority to find formal unity with the Orthodox Churches (with the papacy fully intact)…does this goal reframe things to where reinstating Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum (2007) is slipped in as a simple footnote? (We’ve all seen the power of footnotes as in Amoris Laetitia!)
No news is good news! We note with some delight that the 15 post-synodal expert Study Groups on “hot button issues” were scheduled to report in June. Today, all is still quiet on the Western front, except for maybe one of the less problematic Study Groups (#1) and the goal of full reunification—this after a mere millennium (A.D. 1054). https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/07/09/these-are-the-members-of-the-synod-on-synodality-study-groups/
The great post-synodal overhang is not the Latin Mass, but rather what to do with rogue Germania which recently issued formal and scripted guidelines on how to sprinkle “informal and spontaneous” blessings under the backwardist Fiducia Supplicans. The conversion of the tribes is taking more time than was thought by St. Boniface (A.D. 675-754), the “Apostle to the Germans.”
It all turns on who the Augustinian Pope Leo XIV appoints to important positions.
There are some good signs as you indicate. What the more heterodox appointments Msgr Renzo Pegoraro, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Cdl Victor Fernandez left in place at the DDF – may do and Leo’s reaction would tell us more. My hope is that he will start to slowly redirect the Church in line with Francis’ predecessors.
To Beaulieu’s “Leo’s announced priority to find formal unity with Orthodox”; surely we have to be putting at least some of our house in order first. Considering so much confusion and disarray and whatnot.
It could be however that the intention is to apply synodalism as THE “formal” actuator into the “unity”.
But anyway, what really is envisaged besides synodalism? What SHOULD be envisaged?
‘ 10) Be Realistic.
You won’t be able to address everything, and you won’t address everything to everyone’s satisfaction. Some topics are crying out for attention, while others may not be ripe enough to address fruitfully for another decade, century, or longer. As the late Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus used to say, when it is not necessary to speak, it is necessary not to speak. Orthodoxy, of course, is an old hand at this kind of apophaticism: saying little, usually by negation, to avoid larger errors that come from talking too much. ‘
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2014/03/18/some-thoughts-and-unsought-advice-on-holding-church-councils/
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2025/07/former-liberation-theology-leader-criticizes-excess-of-social-issues-by-latin-american-bishops
If Leo XIV is prepared to make a serious effort at union with Eastern Orthodoxy the announcement to do so inevitably suggests a reform within the Catholic Church of Custodes, other documents to which the East particularly Russian Orthodoxy are firmly opposed. Otherwise there are apparent intractable differences on permission for divorce and continuance with repentance in the East. Certainly the Filioque Clause.
Although Leo may have a loose knit Tutti Fratelli unity in mind that relegates Catholicism to a conglomeration of equals. If Leo XIV remains true to his adherence to Francis’ reform then the trend of emasculation will continue.
We can speculate ad infinitum as suggested by Elias and it’s been tried before. It seems unity requires some exceptional event to convince one and all that Roman Catholicism centered on the Chair of Peter is the unique body instituted by Christ if it is to remain Roman Catholicism.
Somehow wrongly submitted this comment in Extra extra.
@ Against the Trans Lobby
Spain’s criminal lawyer Paula Fraga is a heroine both for her cause and what she’s up against – the dominance of the godless Spanish Left that slowly returned to power following the death of Generalissimo Franco.
The preposterous percentages of children becoming Trans since the Leftist fascists regained their death grip on Spanish society are – preposterous. They markedly show that becoming gay can be taught, and is most often a learned behavior.
Why is the Spanish Left as well as the American hell bent on transforming whole nations into Sodom and Gomorrah? That’s because they hate God. We don’t require that hate by professing belief in God, rather solely in the hatred of what is pure and good.
Re #1 TC and Falsehoods
Catholic Unscripted outdoes itself on this bombshell.
A canon law perspective on “Traditionis Custodes”, sent to me by someone studying canon law:
The Enormous Loophole in Traditionis Custodes
By Cathy Caridi
July 29, 2021
@Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods?
After reading the assessment, the immediate thing to be done is for the Vatican to release the full report. It’s too late to try to conceal the results of the Summorum Pontificum survey. The assessment is already drawing plenty of attention. It doesn’t seem like the report would contain sensitive information but if there are concerns along those lines, judicious redactions could be made. Speaking as a member of the Body of Christ, or the People of God (whichever term one prfers), we need to know the truth about what the responses to the survey actually indicated, and seeing the overall pattern is important.
I read the reports and the quotes. What the trads leave out is that many of the bishops who didn’t want Summorum Pontificum to be changed expressed worry that trads would revolt and leave the church for the SSPX if the TLM were restricted. Well, that’s exactly what happened. Bishops didn’t necessarily think the TLM was an intrinsically good thing to have in their dioceses; they realized it mollified the trads.
Pope Francis did not lie. He understood what the bishops were saying: trad TLM communites were borderline schismatic already under Summorum Pontificum, and taking away the TLM would lead them into the arms of the SSPX. Francis did the wise managerial thing: take away the pacifier.
There is no good reason for the TLM to continue to be authorized for use. Let the trads go to the SSPX. Their actions will reveal what has been in their hearts all this time: they have been SSPX in heart while being allowed to maintain superficial juridical union with the Roman Catholic Church. No more of that falsehood.
If someone were only to read the first page of the quotations, “Negative assessments about the attitude of certain faithful,” then assume that one section expressed the majority opinion of the survey respondents, I could see how they might come to the conclusion you’ve expressed here. But reading through all nine pages of the collected quotations in conjunction with the Assessment, it becomes clear that these negative opinions represent a minority of the respondents. The Assessment says as much:
“Unfortunately, in certain dioceses, the Forma extraordinaria has not been considered a richness
for the life of the Church, but rather as an inappropriate, disturbing, and useless element for
ordinary pastoral life, and even as “dangerous” and therefore something not to be granted, or to
be suppressed, or at least strictly controlled so that it does not spread, in the hope of its eventual
disappearance or abrogation.
The majority of bishops who responded to the questionnaire, and who have generously and
intelligently implemented the MP Summorum Pontificum, ultimately express satisfaction with
it…”
This is all the more reason for the entire report to be released, so that we can see the fullest picture of the responses in context.
Congratulations, Mary E. You immediately spotted a dominant flaw of honavatar’s argument. (It took me far longer than it took you! He should arrive wearing a warning sign.)
What hatred seeks to bully believers into schism? You could at least seek these Catholics to stay, ghettoized in the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) or some shrine. Perhaps liturgists are terrorists.
Like abortion, TC seeks to kill an embryonic work of God. Let the record show that the bully Franciscus abused his papal authority when he hid and misrepresented the opinions of his fellow bishops:
https://dianemontagna.substack.com/p/exclusive-official-vatican-report
Robert,
I just want you to know that you are loved. You seem very wounded.
I have read many of your posts, and your vindictive generalizations about TLM people and parishes are at best ignorant. Have you spent time with them? Have you entered into the sheepfold?
Have you gone to an SSPX chapel?
I repeat a question I’ve asked many others:
Why are you so concerned about and fearful of less than 2% of Catholics who hold fast to the old Mass and Sacraments, those fountains of grace that can never be made void as stated by Pius V and reiterated by multiple modern Popes.
Thank you again for your accusations of schism.
Ave Maria!
Robert!
Thank you for responding to my challenge (7/2 3:03 pm)!
Yours was an admirable effort indeed!
There are a couple of problems with it, though.
First, I would be one of those “trads” whose inner thoughts you are capable of penetrating. Yet, somehow, as any regular CWR visitor can attest, I’m a huge fan of Vatican II.
How can we explain this?
Also, as Diane’s article clearly illustrates, even though you say that Bergoglio “did not lie,” he, um, like, actually *did* lie. The study on which his Catholic Mass persecution was based was not what he claimed. The problems he said it highlighted did not exist. He himself had invented them.
In other words, he lied. The study was not what he claimed.
As I said, Robert, your effort was a noble one. I appreciate it very much.
And I will almost miss you popesplainers pretzeling yourselves to make sense of Bergoglio’s evil machinations.
It was a study in extreme logical, moral and linguistic yoga like I have never before witnessed.
re: Trasitionis Custodes…falsehoods…
This should be a top story on every Catholic news website, proof positive the pope sat there and bald faced lied to the world…where is the Catholic press outrage?
I cannot help but suspect these documents only now leaking are the result of someone, maybe several someones, high atop the…the…THING…at the Vatican giving Leo the diplomatic excuse to walk back TC and reverse course on tne assault on Latin mass communities, of which I am not a member, but found such assaults wicked in the extreme. And such assaults continue in my own southern plains diocese, a a busy community shut down and forced to consolidate with another over 45mins away.
Was Traditionis Custodes Based on Falsehoods?
The so-called “new evidence” being cited against Traditionis Custodes collapses under even minimal scrutiny. To begin with, the leaked document’s authenticity is entirely unverified. It has not been published by any official Vatican body, nor corroborated by credible sources. The sole reporting originates from Diane Montagna’s Substack—hardly a neutral outlet, given her well-established traditionalist leanings and the lack of any independent verification. Cherry-picking quotes from an alleged CDF summary without full disclosure of provenance or context is not journalism—it’s narrative manipulation, and it reeks of ideological bias.
Even assuming the quote were genuine, it misses the larger point. Vatican officials, including Cardinal Roche, have repeatedly emphasized that the issue at hand is not about how many bishops favored or opposed the Vetus Ordo. The concern is pastoral and ecclesiological: that in many contexts, the old rite has become a symbol of division, a rallying point for resistance to the Second Vatican Council, and a wedge against ecclesial unity. That’s what informed Pope Francis’s decision—not raw numbers, but a global pastoral discernment.
Let’s be honest about what’s happening here: this “report” is being exploited by radical traditionalists to discredit Traditionis Custodes, delegitimize the post-conciliar liturgical reforms, and roll back the ecclesiology Vatican II so clearly articulated. Slogans like “the future is in the past” don’t reflect love for tradition; they betray a rejection of the Church’s living Magisterium. Unless and until these documents are officially published and evaluated in full, this entire narrative remains little more than an ideologically charged attempt to stir dissent under the pretense of revelation.
The Franciscan Vatican lied (as was their wont).