Tridentine Mass - Present Practice

Present Practice

The publication of Summorum Pontificum has led to an increase in the number of regularly scheduled public Tridentine Masses. On 14 June 2008 Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos told a London press conference that Pope Benedict wants every parish to offer both the old and the new forms for Sunday Mass.

The cardinal said that the Vatican was preparing to instruct seminaries to teach all students the Tridentine form of the Roman Rite. The complexity of the rubrics makes it difficult for priests accustomed to the simpler modern form to celebrate the Tridentine form properly, and it is unclear how many have the required knowledge.

Some Traditionalist Catholic priests and organisations, holding that no official permission is required to use any form of the Tridentine Mass, celebrate it without regularizing their situation, and sometimes using editions of the Roman Missal earlier than the 1962 edition approved in Summorum Pontificum.

In order to provide for priests who celebrate the Tridentine Mass, publishers have issued facsimiles or reprintings of old missals. There were two new printings of the 1962 Tridentine Missal in 2004: one, with the imprimatur of Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, by Baronius Press in association with the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter; the other by the Society of St. Pius X's publishing house, Angelus Press. There was a new printing of a facsimile 1962 Tridentine Altar Missal in 2008 by PCP books. Some other missals reproduced date from before 1955 and so do not have the revised Holy Week rites promulgated by Pope Pius XII. They are used by traditionalists who reject Pius XII's liturgical changes. As well as such altar missals for use by the priest, old hand missals for those attending Mass have been reproduced, including a St Bonaventure Press facsimile of a pre-1955 edition of the St Andrew's Missal.