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On July 29, The Tablet published an interview in which the still-prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship stated: “No, Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis custodes, and he is not going back to Summorum Pontificum.”
On August 2, La Razón added, citing anonymous Vatican sources, that the liturgy document Roche distributed to the cardinals at the January consistory was drafted at the request of Leo XIV, who reviewed it and “did not change a single comma,” and that it was distributed at the Pope’s direction.
From institutional assignment to papal endorsement is a leap no one has proven
That the Pope commissioned Roche to prepare the report is plausible and has corroboration: Austen Ivereigh, close to curial progressives, already wrote in January that Roche was one of the four cardinals asked to prepare reports on the four topics of the consistory.
But a Pope asking the prefect of Divine Worship for a report on liturgy - subject matter proper to his dicastery and his role - and respecting the text without amending it does not mean endorsement of its content.
It simply means that Leo XIV allowed each prefect to present his own vision within his area of competence, as he did with the other three speakers. A ruler who respects the independence of his collaborators does not thereby endorse every word they write.
The “did not change a single comma” that the anonymous sources present as proof of papal approval admits a much more sober reading: the Pope did not wish to correct his prefect, which is exactly what one would expect from someone who commissions a report, not a magisterial text. Turning that institutional respect into doctrinal commitment on the part of the Pontiff is the logical leap on which the entire operation rests.
Subsequent facts also fail to support the thesis of total backing. The cardinals rejected by a wide majority any debate on the liturgical question, and the text was distributed without discussion.
And the documented gestures of Leo XIV point in a more nuanced direction: the instruction conveyed by Parolin to the French bishops in March asking for “concrete solutions that allow the generous inclusion of those who are sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo”; the letter to the FSSPX before Écône recognizing their “desire for fidelity to Tradition”; the appointment of Monsignor Cordileone to the Signatura.
Fifteen months after his election, the Pope has not signed any document on this matter.
Everything asserted about his will comes from third parties.
Imprudent and targeted leaks
Whether Roche is more or less right on the substance, the Tablet–La Razón sequence is, above all, imprudent and targeted. Imprudent, because it publicly attributes to the Pope a decision the Pope has neither taken nor communicated, apparently closing off a space for discernment that belongs only to him.
Targeted, because it comes from anonymous sources in the prefect’s circle, at the precise moment when Roche, aged 76 and with his five-year term expired since May, is being insistently mentioned for replacement.
The Tablet interview—empty of content except for the sentence on Traditionis custodes, which the interviewer himself admitted having introduced almost at the end—reads like that of an outgoing official trying to bind the successor of Peter to his own thesis, raising the cost of any future correction. As Monsignor Cordileone said this week: “I do not know to what extent he knows the mind of the Holy Father.”
A text with its own problems
The document distributed in January, moreover, does not withstand scrutiny. It invokes Quo primum - the bull that guaranteed the traditional missal in perpetuity - to justify its suppression.
It suggests that tradition without reform is reduced to “dead things, not always healthy,” a qualification no magisterium has applied to the Roman Missal and which clashes with Benedict XVI: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us as well” (2007).
It identifies without nuance the 1969 reform with the will of the conciliar Fathers, when Sacrosanctum Concilium ordered a revision according to criteria (SC 23, 25, 36) whose fulfillment has been the subject of academic debate for decades.
And in its most revealing passage, it states that the use of the ancient books was, “from St. John Paul II to Francis, a concession”: sixteen years of Summorum Pontificum, which recognized the 1962 missal as a right of every priest and not as a concession, simply disappear from the narrative.
The omission is not accidental: it is the necessary premise for presenting the restrictive line as uninterrupted continuity.
Nervousness in the most anti-traditional sector, heir to Bugnini
What is verifiable is little and clear: there was a papal commission for a report, there was no debate, and the Pope has not spoken.
The rest - the supervision “without changing a single comma,” the endorsement of the content, the decided will of Leo XIV - are anonymous attributions in the midst of a battle to define the pontificate.
Respecting the work of a prefect is not endorsing it; and whoever needs leaks to put his thesis in the Pope’s mouth probably knows that the Pope has not yet made it his own.