The Pope has decided to end a 14-year-old experiment in permitting two forms of the Roman Rite to exist side by side. Largely overlooked amid the sound and fury is that he has restored responsibility for ensuring liturgical unity in the local church to the bishops

“My dear Michael”, he said, emerging from the College chapel with his hand to his brow, like someone with a migraine. “This is madness. This is anarchy. This is Enthusiasm.”

That was the reaction of Miles, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, after attending a Mass in the new rite. It is a scene in David Lodge’s novel How Far Can You Go?, which followed a group of Catholics living through the reforms of the 1960s. Lodge captured both the dismay of some and the optimism of others over the consequences of Vatican II, most keenly felt through people’s experience of the Mass. Miriam, another How Far Can You Go? character, did not expect that people would welcome the New Rite, with Mass said in the vernacular rather than Latin, and the priest no longer ad orientem but facing the congregation, which now offered many responses to his prayers. “Catholics aren’t used to participating in the liturgy. They’re used to watching the priest and saying their own prayers privately,” she explained.