French bishops muted over Pope’s appeal to ‘include’ old rite

The abbot of Solesmes Abbey wrote to Pope Leo last November suggesting one could solve the ‘liturgy wars’ by printing a new Roman Missal with texts for both Masses.

Pope Leo XIV has encouraged the French Church to find concrete solutions to integrate traditionalists into their liturgies. The bishops nodded in agreement but may have been thinking that the devil is in the details.

In a message to the bishops’ spring assembly in Lourdes, Leo said “a painful wound remains open in the Church” concerning the Mass. They should find “a new perspective towards one another with a greater understanding of each other’s sensitivities” to heal it.

The Archbishop of Marseilles Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, the president of the conference, mentioned this in his opening speech and said “we should begin to address it together, in our assemblies, in connection with the work of the consistory in June”. He pointedly added they must respect “all the councils, including the Second Vatican Council”.

Bishop Olivier de Cagny of Évreux, a liturgist who led a one-hour session on this issue, told KTO television that many bishops hear “demands, sometimes even insults, so we sense a tension, a crisis in relations between the so-called traditionalist world and the question of the liturgy”.

But like both Leo and Aveline, he had no final answers. “This touches on questions of faith – what is tradition, what is obedience, what is freedom in this area?” Cagny said. “We must come to an understanding.”

French traditionalists committed to pre-conciliar liturgies are divided. About two-thirds are loyal to the Vatican – the so-called Ecclesia Dei groups – while the rest support the schismatic Priestly Society of Pius X (SSPX) and rejects the Second Vatican Council outright.

About five per cent of the French are regular Mass-goers, and just seven per cent of all those attend Mass in the old rite.

But traditionalist tendencies are slowly gaining ground, both in their separate communities and also among diocesan clergy. Dioceses still lose members overall despite a recent increase in young adult baptisms.

The SSPX announced in February that it would consecrate its own bishops soon, thus reverting to the excommunication it suffered when it defied Rome and proceeded with its first four episcopal ordinations in 1988.

In a letter only made public in mid-March, the abbot of Solesmes Abbey Dom Geoffroy Kemlin OSB, wrote to Pope Leo last November that some monasteries of his congregation celebrated the Vetus Ordo and others the Novus Ordo without problem.

He suggested one could solve the “liturgy wars” by printing a new Roman Missal with texts for both Masses. A priest could then say the version he preferred or mix elements of both as he wished.

“That would reestablish liturgical unity because the whole Latin Church would use one Roman Missal,” wrote Kemlin, who added the texts “might have to be revised a minima to make it conform to Vatican II”.

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