Cardinal Cupich calls Traditional Latin Mass a “spectacle,” says Vatican II reforms purified courtly elements to center Eucharist on solidarity with the poor.
Newsroom (28/10/2025, Gaudium Press ) Cardinal Blase Cupich has described the Traditional Latin Mass as “more of a spectacle rather than the active participation of all the baptised,” arguing that post-Vatican II liturgical reforms stripped away courtly accretions to restore the Eucharist’s focus on solidarity with the poor.
In a reflection on Sacrosanctum Concilium—the Second Vatican Council’s 1963 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy—Cupich cited scholarly findings that imperial and royal influences had gradually transformed worship into a display of worldly power. The reforms, he wrote, purified these elements “to enable the liturgy to sustain the Church’s renewed sense of herself.”
The cardinal framed authenticity in Eucharistic celebration not by ritual form but by concern for the marginalized. “The criterion by which the authenticity of our Eucharistic celebrations is judged,” he stated, is service to those in need; the Mass must be “the locus of solidarity with the poor in a fractured world.”
Cupich linked the reforms to Vatican II’s vision of the Church as “the Church of all and in particular the Church of the poor,” a phrase Pope John XXIII elevated from the Council’s margins. He quoted Bologna Archbishop Giacomo Lercaro’s 1962 declaration: “This is the hour of the poor, of the millions of the poor throughout the world.”
The renewal, Cupich argued, restored “simplicity and sobriety” to worship, freeing it from aesthetics that had “transformed the liturgy’s meaning” into spectacle.
His comments enter a decades-long debate over the 1969 Novus Ordo Missae, which replaced the Tridentine rite codified by Pope Pius V in 1570. Sacrosanctum Concilium had mandated “full, conscious and active participation” by the faithful; Pope Paul VI implemented the revised Missal to achieve that end.
Use of the older form expanded under Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 Summorum Pontificum but was curtailed by Pope Francis’s 2021 Traditionis Custodes.
Cupich’s statement coincided with Cardinal Raymond Burke’s celebration of a Solemn Pontifical Mass in the Traditional Latin Rite at St. Peter’s Basilica, drawing clergy and laity from multiple continents.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Catholic Herald
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