One Rite in Two Forms

After the Council of Trent, Pius V issued the Missale Romanum of 1570 with the bull Quo Primum, imposing a single fixed text on the Latin Church while exempting rites that could show more than two hundred years of continuous use. That Tridentine missal, lightly revised by later popes, governed Roman worship for four centuries and is the form now often called the Traditional Latin Mass. The Second Vatican Council ordered a general reform of the liturgy in 1963, and the missal Paul VI promulgated in 1969 and 1970 restored an expanded lectionary, permitted the vernacular languages, allowed celebration facing the people, and added new eucharistic prayers alongside the Roman Canon. The two books are held by the church to be forms of the one Roman Rite rather than two rites, but their coexistence has needed governing.

Benedict XVI widened access to the older form in 2007, describing the 1962 missal as an extraordinary form of the same rite, and Francis restricted that permission again in 2021, returning authority over its use to the bishops. The dispute is not merely aesthetic: the two forms embody different balances between fixity and participation, between Latin universality and local speech, and the arguments around them rehearse the oldest questions in liturgical history about who owns a rite and who may change it.