He was never a huge player in the Roman Curia. And I don't think his name was ever mentioned as a possible future Pope even in jest. But Cardinal Alfons Maria Stickler was in many ways an extraordinary figure in the Roman Church. A reserved intellectual from Austria he was named as the Vatican Librarian and Archivist in 1983. He received the red hat a couple of years later. After his retirement he spent much of the remainder of his long life becoming something of a joke amongst the trendy curia and liturgists of the Vatican during John Paul II's rock star reign. The shy and physically diminutive Cardinal began writing and lobbying for the liberation of the Missal of Pius V (really Gregory the Great but I digress....).Virtually alone in the College of Cardinals he was a one man rally for the return of the West's ancient liturgy. He became the standard bearer for those in the Roman Church disaffected by the liturgical insanity which swept through its temples like a cyclone in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. He published essays sharply criticizing the manner in which the reform of the liturgy was carried out and advocating for the cause of what is now known as the Extraordinary Universal Rite of the Mass.
Card. ++Stickler lived just long enough to see the triumphant return of the Tridentine Mass. Many of us from New York will recall the day in 1996 when at the invitation of the late great Archbishop John Cardinal O'Connor of New York he celebrated the first Tridentine Mass (Solemn High Mass from the Throne) in a quarter century in St. Patrick's Cathedral to a standing room only crowd and the music of Mozart's Coronation Mass. I don't really recall seeing that many grown men in tears before or since.
His Eminence reposed a couple of days ago at the age 97, the eldest living Cardinal of the Roman Church. May his memory be eternal.
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