Cardinal Robert Sarah has blasted efforts from the Vatican to ‘abolish’ the Traditional Latin Mass, describing the move as a ‘diabolical project’ that breaks with 1,600 years of tradition.
MILAN (LifeSiteNews) — Any attempt to “abolish” the traditional Mass would be a “diabolical project” that “seeks to break with the Church of Christ,” said Cardinal Robert Sarah this week.
“In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but not rupture,” noted Sarah at an event Monday.
Drawing from Pope Benedict XVI’s now famous remark, Sarah made it his own, stating that “what was holy for previous generations remains holy and great for us, and cannot suddenly be forbidden or even judged harmful. It is good for all of us to preserve the riches that have grown in the faith and prayer of the Church and to give them their rightful place.”
Sarah – who served as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CDW) from 2014-2021 – expanded his harsh criticism of any attempt to abolish the traditional Mass (Latin Mass) by warning that it would be a rejection of Church history.
He stated:
Hence the plan to definitively abolish the traditional Tridentine Mass, a rite that dates back to St. Gregory the Great, a liturgy that is 1,600 years old, a Mass celebrated by so many saints: St. Padre Pio, St. Philip Neri, St. John Mary Vianney: the Curé of Ars, St Francis. de Sales, St. Josemaria Escrivá, etc. And all the way back to Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) and even to Pope Damasus (366-384).
This project, if it is true, seems to me to be an insult to the history of the Church and to Sacred Tradition, a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ, the apostles and the saints.
The cardinal’s comments came at a book launch held in Milan by Italian Catholic media outlet La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana. Addressing the conference, Sarah did not limit himself to the theme of his book, Does God exist?, but dealt with a wide-ranging field of subjects relating to the Catholic Church and spirituality.
Drawing once more from Benedict XVI, Sarah quoted the late German pope, saying, “the First Vatican Council did not define the Pope as an absolute monarch but, on the contrary, as the guarantor of obedience to the word handed down: his authority is linked to the tradition of the faith: this is also true in the area of the liturgy.”
“Even the Pope,” said Sarah, “can only be a humble servant of its proper development and of its constant integrity and identity ... The Pope’s authority is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.”
A few days prior, at a clergy conference in Rome held last week, Sarah expressed similar themes and alluded to the growth of attendance at the traditional liturgy:
Despite intransigent clerical attitudes in opposition to the venerable Latin-Gregorian liturgy, attitudes typical of the clericalism that Pope Francis has repeatedly denounced, a new generation of young people has emerged in the heart of the Church. This generation is one of young families, who demonstrate that this liturgy has a future because it has a past, a history of holiness and beauty that cannot be erased or abolished overnight.
Sarah will turn 80 this June, and as such will age out of voting in a papal conclave.
Though not naming it directly, Sarah’s comments appeared to be aimed at the restrictions ushered in by Pope Francis via his 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes. Sarah is a public champion of the traditional Mass, offering it himself, and voiced strong criticism of the Pope’s restrictions when they emerged.
Assisted by current Dicastery for Divine Worship Prefect Cardinal Arthur Roche, such restrictions have only increased and rumors swirled last summer that a new, even more restrictive document, would emerge to further ban the traditional Mass.
READ: Pope Francis had new Latin Mass restrictions on his desk but didn’t sign document: report
Such an eventuality did not take place, following a large outpouring of public support from leading individuals in the ecclesial but also secular sphere.
However, in the past few days, Pope Francis issued fresh attacks against devotees of the Latin Mass in a memoir published January 14.
Repeating his regular denigration of supposed “rigidity” in young Catholics, Francis said that:
This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness.
READ: Pope Francis accuses young Catholic priests who like the Latin Mass of 'mental imbalance'
He further accused Catholics who attend the traditional liturgy of the Church of having a “mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.”
Responding to the Pope’s remarks, former Tyler, Texas, ordinary Bishop Joseph Strickland urged that “true shepherds must speak against this attack, and it is an attack … many from the very top of the Church are seeking to eliminate the traditional Latin Mass.”
Sarah has long advocated for the position of Benedict XVI, namely to have the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo as “mutually enriching” for one another. Decrying often the “liturgical war” of recent decades, he stated in 2019 that the Second Vatican Council “did not wish to break with the liturgical forms inherited from Tradition, but, on the contrary, to better enter and participate more fully in them.”
While speaking to the clergy conference in Rome last week, Sarah renewed that message, stating:
I want to make an appeal for that hermeneutic of reform in continuity spoken of by Pope Benedict XVI (Address, 22 December 2005).
This is a personal opinion, but it seems to me that the reformed liturgical books desperately need that continuity with the liturgical tradition that the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council sought to reform if they are to be true, beautiful, and good, and thereby do the best they can for the sanctification and edification of God’s Holy People. Others may disagree. But in my reading of the Council, this is what it intended: reform in continuity and not rupture with the past.
Notwithstanding the restrictions on the Latin Mass currently emerging from the Vatican – labelled a “persecution” by Cardinal Raymond Burke – traditional communities are thriving. Arguably even bolstered by Traditionis Custodes, Latin Mass groups have seen year-on-year records of new admissions to their seminaries.
