Damian Thompson on the rumors from Rome

A month ago, 18,000 young people walked on pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres Cathedral in order to demonstrate their love of the Traditional Latin Mass — an intricate and solemn ceremony which, to the horror of Pope Francis, is attracting an unlikely following among Generation Z Catholics.

Inside the 800-year-old cathedral, the Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, once Pope Francis’s doctrinal chief and now one of his leading critics. His meticulous ritual actions were followed with rapt attention by the congregation.

Very few of them were born when this rite of Mass was mothballed after the Second Vatican Council in 1970. Even the 76-year-old Müller was ordained priest long after it had disappeared from parish life. He has only recently learned to say it, in response to an unprecedented demand created by Pope Benedict XVI’s bold decision in 2007 to make the Traditional Latin Mass or TLM available to Catholics everywhere.

But will the annual Chartres pilgrimage ever happen again? This week Rome is buzzing with rumours that Pope Francis — a veteran opponent of the old liturgy, which he regards as reactionary and effeminate — is planning to ban the Latin Mass from almost every Catholic church in the world.

Three years ago Francis instituted a partial ban that ejected TLM faithful from churches that, in some cases, they had paid to restore. The retired Benedict was grief-stricken by the decision but had taken a vow of silence. In the United States, the heartland of the Generation Z renaissance, many traditionalists can now hear the old Mass only in church halls, basements or school gyms.

The Vatican official responsible for enforcing Francis’s ruling, ironically entitled Traditonis Custodes (Guardians of Tradition), is his liturgy chief Cardinal Arthur Roche, a native of Batley, West Yorkshire, who has approached his task with Cromwellian zeal.

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