Wheels Are Moving

When Traditiones Custodes was first released it was pointed out by Canon lawyers that under Canon Law bishops had the right to decline to apply TC if they deemed it wasn’t in the best interests of the liturgical life of their diocese.

It wasn’t until Cardinal Roche issued a ‘clarification’ on the application of TC that bishops were told that Rome had decided that the Canon Law protecting the bishops’ discretion and prerogative in the matter was suspended and Rome reserved the final say to itself. The bishops were, in effect, instructed to shut up and do as they were told and Canon Law be damned.

At the time of that ‘clarification’ I remember wondering why Francis and his cronies felt the need to force the bishops to eliminate the TLMs in their dioceses. Why would Rome feel it had to force compliance from bishops when the bishops were supposedly already overwhelmingly in favor of suppressing TLMs? The only explanation that made sense was that Francis and his underlings were lying about their bishops’ survey, and merely using it as a justification for persecuting those Catholics Francis despised.

I truly hope that Pope Leo takes this perfect opportunity to erase <Traditiones Custodes now that it’s been demonstrated to have been an injustice based on lies.

Amen, Clinton and Philip.
Clinton, your review of the situation perfectly matches my own. TC was always based on a lie. Time to fix it.

I certainly have no idea how things will turn out, but I doubt Leo will directly revoke TC, at least not by means of a MP. I’m sure the last thing he wants is for this issue (and thus many others) to become a matter of dueling motu proprios, at which point they become just a churchy form of executive orders with the same limitations and pitfalls, albeit with an even greater diminishment of the office.

I guess this leaked document could be seen as some kind of air cover for something else. Perhaps the most diplomatic way to revoke TC would be to frame the revocation or modification as working to achieve the unity that TC was purportedly promulgated to achieve. It seems to me much easier to say that something was tried and just didn’t work as intended than to try and outright say it was wrong or misguided or any such thing. I don’t envy trying to navigate this mess which just got way messier.

Reading the various actions of Pope Francis became a near occasion of sin for me. May he rest in peace but I’m happy I do not have that daily near occasion of sin anymore.

CAG, I share your reservations about Pope Leo. We’ve witnessed sixty years of bad liturgy, lax discipline, and incoherent, sometimes openly heretical, theology; it’s hard to fully trust anyone whose education and priestly formation took place in such circumstances, and who managed to be ordained and rise to any position of authority, let alone the papacy, under Paul the Mass-wrecker, John Paul the Qur’an-kisser and Francis the …, well, the whatever-he-was.
Our diocese received a new bishop this spring, 59 years old, so I am now older than both the Pope and the local ordinary. My genealogical research has shown that, going back at least five generations on every branch of my tree, only one person lived past the age of eighty. Since I’m now 71, it seems I’m stuck with these two ghostly fathers for the rest of my life, and the odds of my finding that a comfort rather than a penance are long indeed.