Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago has said that restrictions on the Tridentine Latin Mass are necessary to preserve the unity of the Church.
In a recent article published on the Archdiocese of Chicago’s website, Cardinal Cupich discussed the extraordinary consistory convened by Pope Leo XIV and drew attention to a resource document prepared by Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.
Cardinal Cupich wrote that the liturgy before the Second Vatican Council underwent reform throughout Christian history and argued that such change to the Mass is intrinsic to its nature.
Citing Cardinal Roche’s document, he said that “the history of the liturgy” can be understood as a process of “continuous reforming”, marked by organic development rather than rupture.
He added that ritual forms necessarily include cultural elements which vary across time and place and therefore require periodic renewal.
He also referred to comments by Pope Benedict XVI on tradition, quoting the former pontiff’s description of it as “the living river that links us to the origins”, rather than a static inheritance.
Cardinal Cupich maintained that the liturgical reforms mandated by the Second Vatican Council did not threaten fidelity to the Church’s tradition, but were intended to serve it.
Controversially, Cardinal Cupich cited Cardinal Roche’s assertion that the 16th-century pontiff sought to safeguard ecclesial unity when he promulgated the Roman Missal of 1570, recalling the phrase that “there ought to be only one rite for celebrating the Mass”.
He described this principle as key to understanding unity under the ordinary form of the Novus Ordo.
The Chicago cardinal linked that historical argument to the 2021 apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes, in which Pope Francis stated that the post-conciliar liturgy is the “unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite”.
According to Cardinal Cupich, Pope Francis regarded resistance to the Second Vatican Council’s liturgical reform as a threat to the unity of the Church, a concern he returned to in his 2022 letter Desiderio Desideravi.
Quoting from that document, Cardinal Cupich cited Pope Francis’s warning that tensions surrounding liturgical celebration should not be dismissed as disagreements over taste, but understood as an ecclesiological problem.
Summarising his understanding of Cardinal Roche’s text, Cardinal Cupich identified two main conclusions: that the nature of the liturgy itself “calls for ongoing reform”, and that acceptance of reforms authorised by the Church is a matter of preserving unity.
He described this as a continuity of principle between Pope St Pius V and Pope Francis.
The underlying aim of Cardinal Cupich’s recent article appears to be to justify the liturgical reform of the Council as both inevitable and necessary.
However, what the article inadvertently does is produce precisely what it claims to oppose: it generates disunity and exposes weaknesses in Cardinal Cupich’s theological reasoning.
The assertion that the history of the liturgy is one of “continuous reforming”, and that fidelity to tradition requires ongoing adaptation, collapses under historical scrutiny.
The Roman Rite did not exist in a state of permanent flux.
By the early medieval period, roughly between the eighth and eleventh centuries, its essential structure had stabilised.
Later reforms, including those associated with the Council of Trent, were not acts of reinvention but of consolidation and restoration.
The Missal promulgated under Pope St Pius V did not create a new rite but codified an existing one, pruning recent accretions while explicitly safeguarding ancient local usages.
The false equivalence drawn by Cardinal Cupich is a common mistake, and one might give him the benefit of the doubt regarding his knowledge of pre-modern liturgical history and the scale of post-conciliar change.
However, Cardinal Cupich, who grew up under the Tridentine Latin Mass, would know that the reforms following the Second Vatican Council involved structural alterations on an unprecedented scale.
These were guided by principles such as antiquarianism, the idea that earlier Christian practices are necessarily better, against which Pope Pius XII himself had earlier warned.
To describe these reforms as another stage in an unbroken process of reform is therefore inaccurate.
One might also give His Eminence the benefit of the doubt that he has misinterpreted Pope Benedict XVI’s comment on the “living river”.
In Benedict’s thought, the image signifies continuity through faithful transmission, not creative rupture. His insistence that the usus antiquior had never been juridically abrogated, as stated in Summorum Pontificum, directly counters the interpretation advanced in Cardinal Roche’s document.
What is more difficult to excuse is the repeated invocation of Pope St Pius V as a precedent for enforcing a single liturgical expression.
The claim that Pius V mandated “only one rite for celebrating the Mass” misrepresents both his intent and his legislation.
Quo Primum explicitly protected rites of greater antiquity, recognising unity not as uniformity but as shared faith expressed through legitimate diversity.
What Pius V opposed were recent innovations lacking organic roots, not venerable forms sanctified by long usage.
To align Pope St Pius V’s actions with modern restrictions on the liturgy he himself codified is historically untenable.
To understand Cardinal Cupich’s position, one must recognise that, for His Eminence, unity appears to be the product of juridical restriction rather than of shared Catholic commonality, and development as authorised change rather than organic growth.