On Bishop Schneider’s Homily at St. Mary Major

 

Last Saturday, on the traditional feast of St. Raphael the Archangel, Bishop Athanasius Schneider preached at the Basilica of St. Mary Major for the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage Ad Petri Sedem. He offered the Mass for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis, whose tomb lies in that basilica. (The full English text of the homily was published here; access requires a paid subscription.) The homily is gentle in its tone and full of Marian devotion. It speaks of a mother’s sorrow and of an olive branch. It is also, I regret to say, a masterpiece of disingenuousness.

The bishop asks for “liturgical peace.” But read what kind of peace he wants. He prays for a peace “that would restore the full use, without discrimination, of the traditional form of the Roman Rite.” He asks the Regina Pacis to bring “the olive branch from the hand of the Child Jesus, heralding the coming of liturgical peace, which will ensure the full and free use of the traditional Roman Rite.” This is not a truce. It is a set of terms of surrender, offered to the Church of Rome.

The sentence that gives the game away

The heart of the homily is this paragraph:

Saint Pius V did not undertake a reform of the rite of the Mass in the strict sense, for he had a profound respect for the liturgical tradition of the Church of Rome. For centuries, the Church of Rome had possessed a rite which, by virtue of its doctrinal integrity, ritual beauty, and maturity, required no reform, but on the contrary served as a guarantee and a sure point of reference amid the widespread liturgical anarchy of the sixteenth century, brought about by the Protestant pseudo-reforms.

Mark the logic. Respect for tradition means no reform. A rite of such integrity and maturity “required no reform.” What then is the reader to make of a Church that did reform it? The bishop does not say. He does not need to. The conclusion is left lying on the floor for anyone to pick up.

Here is what he leaves out. On December 4, 1963, the bishops of the Second Vatican Council approved Sacrosanctum Concilium by a vote of 2,147 to 4. Four. In union with Pope St. Paul VI, the whole college of bishops declared that “holy Mother Church desires to undertake with great care a general restoration of the liturgy itself” (SC 21), and directed that “the Order of Mass is to be revised” (SC 50). This was not the project of a committee or a fashion of the sixties. It was the solemn act of an ecumenical council, cum Petro et sub Petro.

In a homily of well over a thousand words on the Roman Rite, preached in Rome, the Second Vatican Council is never named. Not once. Neither is its constitution on the liturgy, nor the Missal of Paul VI, nor the nearly sixty years in which that Missal has nourished the holiness of hundreds of millions of Catholics. When an argument about the Church’s liturgy must remain silent about the Church’s highest teaching authority on the liturgy, the silence is the argument.

What Quo Primum does not say

Bishop Schneider then turns to Quo Primum:

Saint Pius V guaranteed — in a particularly solemn manner, by the apostolic constitution Quo Primum — the free and perpetual use of the traditional form of the Mass to all priests of the Roman rite. He expressly established that no priest could ever be compelled to celebrate the Holy Mass according to a form other than that of the missal he had promulgated, and that his apostolic constitution Quo Primum could not be revoked in the future. Thus, St. Pius V, in a certain sense, canonized the traditional rite of the Mass.

His Excellency knows better. Every student of canon law learns the principle par in parem non habet imperium: an equal has no authority over an equal. A pope cannot bind his successors in matters of discipline, and the form of the liturgy is a matter of discipline. The “perpetual” clauses of Quo Primum were standard chancery language of the period. The same kind of language appeared in Clement XIV’s 1773 brief suppressing the Society of Jesus, and Pius VII restored the Jesuits in 1814. No one claims he defied a “canonized” decree.

History makes the point even more plainly. Quo Primum did not freeze the Missal. It was itself a reform, carried out at the mandate of the Council of Trent. Pius V’s successors kept revising it. Clement VIII issued a revised edition in 1604, and Urban VIII another in 1634. St. Pius X reordered the psalter of the Divine Office in 1911. Pius XII restored the Holy Week rites in the 1950s. St. John XXIII inserted the name of St. Joseph into the Roman Canon in 1962. That last change touched the very prayer the tradition had held most untouchable. It appears in the 1962 Missal Bishop Schneider celebrated on Saturday. The rite he calls “canonized” is a rite that popes kept reforming, right up to the eve of the Council.

His appeal to Summorum Pontificum is just as selective. Benedict XVI did write that the older Missal had never been juridically abrogated. Yet in his letter to the bishops accompanying that motu proprio, Benedict insisted that the Missal of Paul VI remains the ordinary form of the Roman Rite. He also wrote that priests attached to the older usage cannot, as a matter of principle, refuse to celebrate according to the new books. Bishop Schneider quotes the half of Benedict that serves his case and buries the other half.

Ventriloquizing a dead pope

Most troubling is the homily’s closing move. Standing near the tomb of Pope Francis, the bishop imagines what Francis “might perhaps say” now:

Restore and preserve the pristine and very beautiful form of the Roman Rite, canonized by Saint Pius V.

Pope Francis gave his own answer while he lived. In Traditionis custodes he declared that the liturgical books promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II are “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.” In Desiderio desideravi he wrote that he could not see how anyone could claim to recognize the validity of the Council and at the same time refuse to accept the liturgical reform born of it. To put words of the opposite meaning into the mouth of a man who can no longer answer, beside his grave, is not piety. In a word, it is shameful.

The appeal to John Paul II’s Ecclesia Dei is similarly trimmed. That document was written in response to the schismatic episcopal consecrations of 1988. That same year, in Vicesimus quintus annus, John Paul II celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium and affirmed the reform as the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

The bishop also reminds us that the pre-reformed rite was the Mass of Pope Leo XIV’s First Communion. So it was for me, and for every Catholic my age. I was ordained in 1974, and I have celebrated the reformed rite for more than half a century. That a rite formed us in childhood is a reason for gratitude. It is not an argument that the Church had no authority to reform it.

Peace begins with truth

I do not doubt the sincerity of the young families who love the pre-reformed rite. I do not wish anyone to feel like a “second-class Catholic,” to use the bishop’s phrase. Pastoral charity toward them is a duty. But liturgical peace cannot be built on a history with the Council cut out of it. Bishop Schneider has said in interviews and in his book Christus Vincit that the reformed rite is doctrinally deficient. Saturday’s homily said the same thing more quietly, by leaving out every word that would contradict it.

That is not an olive branch. It is another bomb dropped on the faithful who, for nearly sixty years, have been fed and sanctified at the altar by the Missal of Paul VI. Love for the sacred liturgy begins with the truth. It cannot begin by bending or denying it.

Source: Homily of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Holy Mass, Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage Ad Petri Sedem*, 24 October 2026, Basilica of Saint Mary Major, Rome. Full English text available here (paid subscription required).

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.

As many of you know, some of my essays have grown into a book, The Right Pope at the Right Time, from ACTA Publications, which is now in its second printing. It was chosen by U.S. Catholic magazine as its October Book of the Month. You can order it at https://actapublications.com/the-right-pope-at-the-right-time/ or wherever you buy books. You can also call the publisher, Greg Pierce, at 800-397-2282 if you have questions or are interested in multiple copy discounts. If it speaks to you, a short review on Amazon helps more than you might think.