Undeterred by the scorching sun in Washington, D.C. or by opposition from the hierarchy of their church, scores of Roman Catholics marched on Saturday to support restoration of the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis and his associates in the Vatican are trying to end.

Billed as “The National Summorum Pontificum [The late Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 apostolic letter addressing the celebration of the Latin Mass] Pilgrimage for the Restoration of the Latin Mass,” the seven-mile march began at St. Thomas More Church Arlington, Virginia, and concluded at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C.    

At both churches, prayers were recited and hymns sung in Latin.

The marchers were almost all young — many of them born after the Catholic Church began in the late 1960s phasing out its 500-year worship in Latin with the priest facing the altar (ad orientum) in favor of a service in which worshippers chant with the priest in the vernacular language of their particular country. 

And those who spoke to Newsmax made it clear they loved the Latin Mass and were not going to stand still over threats to its continuance.

“It’s a defining part of my life,” said Emily Nielsen, who drove from Wilmington, Delaware for the march and brandished a sign reading “I Love The Latin Mass.” “I first went to a Latin Mass when I was 13 because my parents thought it would improve my mastery of the Latin language in school.  Now I’m 35 and the Latin Mass has been a defining part of my life — it’s incredibly beautiful.”

As for traditional Latin Mass, Catholics who insist they are uncomfortable with the vernacular Mass and the priest facing the worshippers, Nielsen said: “I believe people when they describe their own experiences.”

The march Saturday is the latest response to a three-year-old controversy which, while alien to most non-Catholics, has proved incendiary and divisive within Catholicism worldwide. In July 2021, Pope Francis issued his apostolic letter “Traditionis Custodes” to curtail traditional worship — requiring the permission of bishops to say the Latin Mass and banning the 500-year old rite from celebration at funerals, weddings, and baptisms.

This was a stunning reversal of the legacy of his two immediate predecessors. Pope John Paul II, in the 1988 document “Ecclesia Dei,” called for “wide and generous application” of previous orders permitting celebration of the Latin Mass and admonished that “respect must everywhere be shown for the feelings of all those who are attached to the Latin liturgical tradition.”

Pope Benedict’s “Summorum Pontificum” went further, stating that priests could freely celebrate the Latin Mass privately, and “in parishes where a group of the faithful attached to the previous liturgical tradition stably exists, the parish priest should willingly accede to their requests to celebrate Holy Mass according to the rite of the 1962 “Roman Missal” [the last Catholic prayer book containing the words and choreography of the Latin Mass].”

The reversal of effect of Francis’s ruling can be seen in the Archdiocese in Washington, D.C.  At the time “Traditionis Custodes” came down, no less than nine churches in the Washington, D.C. area offered at least one Latin Mass on Sundays.  But Wilton Cardinal Gregory, archbishop of the nation’s capital, has since reduced that number to one Mass at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington and two others in Maryland.

“It is folly to try to restrict a particular Mass to which people are so devoted,” said Carmen, a marcher for the Latin Mass from North Potomac, Maryland, who requested her last name not be used, “I reserve any comment about Pope Francis because I have to respect the Pontificate, but I only pray the next Pope will restore our opportunity to worship in the Latin Mass.”

Samantha Kearney of Falls Church, who freely admitted she had “fallen away” from the Catholic Church because “of some of the new forms of the Mass in the 1970s and ‘80’s,” told Newsmax she recently returned to the church after she and her husband received its sacrament of confirmation in a Latin Mass in Charleston, West Virginia.’

“I’d never been to a Latin Mass before and I found it awesome,” Kearney said. “I wish it was available at every church.”

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