Pope Leo XIV met two sociologists of the Latin Mass. Their data may reshape the Vatican’s long war over “Trads” and Vatican II.
Newsroom (28/03/2026 Gaudium Press ) On March 5, the papal agenda looked like a classic day of high diplomacy: audiences with the president of Austria, the president of Singapore, the governor of Canada, and the president of the World Bank. Yet for Pope Leo XIV, the most consequential encounter was not with any head of state, but with two scholars whose work goes to the heart of a war that has convulsed Catholic life for decades: Stephen Bullivant and Stephen Cranney.
Their subject is not geopolitics or macroeconomics, but the Church’s own internal front line: Catholics attached to the Traditional Latin Mass, often caricatured as “Trads,” and the long, bitter conflict over whether the ancient liturgy is a source of division or a reservoir of faith. It is this liturgical war— Cardinal Walter Brandmüller has begged the Church to lay down—that Pope Leo seems determined to understand before he decides how to govern.
From Benedict’s Opening to Francis’s Clampdown
The present confrontation over the old Mass has a clear modern hinge point in 2007, when Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. Convinced that the “two forms” of the Roman rite—the older, pre‑conciliar liturgy and the post‑Vatican II Mass—could “enrich each other,” Benedict sought not only to regularize the celebration of the Tridentine liturgy but to pacify a conflict that had already lasted decades. His bet was theological and pastoral: that coexistence would produce mutual enrichment rather than factionalism.
Pope Francis, Benedict’s successor, drew the opposite conclusion from the ensuing years. For him, the expansion of the ancient Mass did not heal divisions but intensified them, feeding what he judged to be a rejection not only of the Church’s contemporary liturgical discipline but of the Second Vatican Council itself. On July 16, 2021, with the motu proprio Traditionis custodes, he declared the post‑conciliar missal the “only expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite,” relegating the older liturgy to narrow, tightly controlled “residual” spaces and signaling that its flourishing was no longer compatible with the vision of unity he sought.
To justify this reversal, Francis appealed to responses to a 2020 questionnaire he had ordered sent to bishops around the world, describing the feedback as evidence that the old Mass was undermining communion and the Council. The results, however, were never published by the Vatican, leaving the impression of a closed evidentiary process at the very moment a new wave of restrictions was imposed.
When the Data Finally Spoke
The silence around that questionnaire began to break in the summer of 2025, when two Vatican journalists—American Diane Montagna and Italian Saverio Gaeta—published the official results of the consultation, drawing on the responses from roughly one thousand dioceses out of more than three thousand contacted worldwide. Far from confirming a landscape of liturgical civil war, the data largely pointed to a “good neighborhood” between the old and new rites, with bishops reporting positive pastoral fruits where both coexisted.
Bullivant and Cranney, whose new book with Oxford University Press bears the telling title Trads. Latin Mass Catholics in the United States, step into this contested terrain with something that has been conspicuously lacking in the debate: a full‑scale, methodologically rigorous sociological portrait of Catholics attached to the ancient rite. Their work, anticipated in an article on Substack, begins with a stark methodological warning: the 2020 survey commissioned by Pope Francis may have been influential, but it was not scientific in design, regardless of how later policy choices leaned upon it.
Most strikingly, the two scholars note that before their project, no reliable empirical test had ever been made of the central accusation hurled at devotees of the old Mass—that they broadly reject the teaching of Vatican II. The charge had hardened into common wisdom without the benefit of rigorous field research.
The Numbers Behind the “Trads”
Bullivant and Cranney’s surveys and interviews, conducted on representative samples of Catholics who prefer the ancient rite, paint a more nuanced picture, beginning with attitudes toward the Council itself. Asked to respond to the statement “I accept the teachings of Vatican II,” respondents divided as follows:
-
22 percent strongly agree.
-
27 percent agree.
-
15 percent partially agree.
-
15 percent neither agree nor disagree.
-
10 percent partially disagree.
-
7 percent disagree.
-
4 percent strongly disagree.
A minority clearly signals dissent or partial dissent, and that minority is real. But the data show that, taken as a whole, Catholics attached to the old rite accept the Council’s teachings in significant majorities, undermining the trope of a nearly schismatic bloc defined by wholesale rejection of Vatican II.
Equally important is where the dissent is actually directed. Bullivant and Cranney observe that, as their interviews reveal, the rejection is aimed less at the documents of Vatican II in themselves and more at the way the Council has been implemented and interpreted in subsequent decades. In other words, the conflict is often about what was done “in the name of the Council” rather than about the Council’s texts. That distinction has seldom been made in polemical exchanges, where “anti‑conciliar” has functioned as a blanket label.
On core pillars of Catholic doctrine, the picture shifts even more dramatically. Devotees of the ancient liturgy emerge as significantly more faithful to official teaching than Catholics in general, and even more so than Catholics who regularly attend the new rite. Ninety‑five percent of those surveyed say, “I believe that the pope is the vicar of Jesus Christ,” a robust affirmation of papal primacy that sits uneasily with the persistent caricature of “Trads” as proto‑schismatics.
The same pattern appears in Eucharistic belief. A staggering 98 percent profess faith in the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Mass. This stands in stark contrast to findings from the Pew Research Center, which suggest that around 69 percent of Catholics overall view the Eucharist as “only a symbol,” a gap that has fueled alarm among bishops and catechists about doctrinal erosion. In the demographic most often lampooned as obsessed with externals, belief in the central mystery of Catholic worship is, if anything, unusually intense.
On moral questions, and especially on life issues, the pattern continues. Among Catholics attached to the old rite, 85 percent say abortion should be illegal in all cases, 13 percent say it should be illegal in most cases, while only 1 percent say it should be legal in all cases and 1.6 percent say legal in most cases. This puts “Trads” near the pro‑life maximalist end of the Catholic spectrum and marks them out as a community where bioethical orthodoxy is not marginal but mainstream.
Bullivant and Cranney restrict their analysis to the United States, the world’s most visible and densely populated field of Latin Mass communities, yet their work—because it finally brings hard numbers to a global debate—helps test assumptions with implications well beyond American borders. In the U.S. alone, there are scores of parishes served by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a community deeply identified with the older liturgy; worldwide, the number of such parishes exceeded 800 before Pope Francis’s limitations took full effect, indicating how far the old rite had spread under Benedict’s more permissive regime.
At the end of their analysis, the two scholars state the point bluntly: the caricature of lovers of the ancient Mass as “quasi‑schismatic” is, in itself, inconsistent with the evidence. On the contrary, they argue, this subset of Catholics adheres to the principles of the faith with greater coherence than the wider Catholic population, including many who routinely attend the newer liturgy.
Brandmüller’s Plea and Leo’s Method
If Pope Leo XIV wanted to listen to the protagonists in this war, he could have filled his schedule with advocates and polemicists. Instead, on March 5 he received two relatively quiet scholars whose only weapons are survey instruments and statistical analysis. The choice is telling when read against the backdrop of Cardinal Walter Brandmüller’s recent appeal, published on the blog Settimo Cielo and elsewhere: “Per l’amor di Dio: abbassate le armi!”—for the love of God, lay down your arms.
Brandmüller, a veteran of 97 years, has called for nothing less than a “reform of the reform” aimed at liturgical peace, warning that the conflict between progressives and traditionalists over the Mass risks fatally wounding ecclesial unity. The “arms” to which he refers are not merely polemics but the hardening of structures and permissions into entrenched trenches, where every concession or restriction is interpreted as a victory for one side and a loss for the other.
For Leo XIV, the first imperative appears to be clearing the battlefield of “improper weapons”—chief among them the accusation that traditionalists flirt with heresy. Those claims, he seems to recognize, have shaky foundations when they are not backed by real research on the ground. Bullivant and Cranney are the first to engage in such research with scientific tools, and the pope’s decision to hear them out suggests a determination to ground any future decisions in verifiable fact rather than inherited suspicion.
Those who know Leo describe a temperament suited to this approach. In a recent book presented in Rome by his friend, Augustinian Father Joseph L. Farrell—Leone XIV. Chi dite che io sia?, published by Cantagalli—the pope is portrayed as “a methodical man, like a good mathematician: first of all he analyzes the idea or the argument in question, then he consults others and finally he makes a decision.” The March 5 meeting fits that pattern: analysis first, consultation with experts, decision later.
Toward a Fragile Peace in the Liturgy
So far, Leo XIV has not pronounced definitively on the future of the old Mass. When he gathered the heads of dicasteries on March 7 and 8, the question was on the agenda, with a report introduced by Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the liturgy office, but any concrete decisions were deferred. The choice to wait, in an environment primed for quick verdicts, signals not indecision but a desire to align policy with a path of pacification that will take time and care to lay out.
Hints of that path emerged on March 18, when Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin wrote in the pope’s name to the plenary assembly of the French bishops in Lourdes. “He is concerned,” Parolin wrote, “that in the Church a painful wound continues to open regarding the celebration of the Mass, the sacrament itself of unity.” To heal it, he continued, a “new mutual perspective” is necessary, with “greater understanding of others’ sensitivities,” a perspective that allows brothers, “enriched by their diversity,” to welcome one another “in charity and in the unity of faith and liturgy.”
It is difficult to read those lines without seeing in them the outline of Leo’s hoped‑for destination: not a return to the free‑for‑all of pre‑2021, perhaps, but neither a perpetuation of a punitive regime birthed in distrust. If sociology can dispel caricatures and distinguish between doctrinal rejection and critiques of post‑conciliar practice, it can also provide the factual soil out of which a more stable peace might grow. Bullivant and Cranney themselves end on this note, writing that this is a case where sociology and its scientific method have the power to correct decisions based on first impressions.
On March 5, while presidents came and went through the Apostolic Palace, the pope sat with a different kind of delegation: two researchers bearing charts, percentages, and the lived complexities of Catholics often spoken about but rarely listened to. In that quiet audience lay the promise of a Church that, before it reaches again for legal weapons in its liturgy wars, will pause to look through the lens of evidence—and perhaps, finally, to lay the arms down.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Sandro Magister
Related Images:
