Cardinal Sarah says restricting the TLM is ‘harmful, destructive for the Church’

 Niwa Limbu

Aug. 27, 2026

In an interview with Il Giornale Vatican correspondent Nico Spuntoni, Cardinal Robert Sarah described restrictions on the TLM as “unpastoral and un-Christian” and “harmful, destructive for the Church”. “We cannot wage war on those who devoutly attend Mass simply because they prefer one form over another,” he said

Cardinal Robert Sarah has said that the Traditional Latin Mass has had a positive effect on the celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Giornale,

conducted by Vatican correspondent Nico Spuntoni, the former Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments defended the continued availability of the traditional liturgy and criticised restrictions placed upon it under Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes.

Asked by Spuntoni whether Benedict XVI had been right to believe that the Extraordinary Form could positively influence celebrations of the Ordinary Form where a greater sense of sacredness was lacking, Cardinal Sarah replied: “Among the effects of the liberalization of the extraordinary form has been the positive influence, I would even say the correction, of potential abuses in the celebration of the ordinary form.”

The Cardinal stressed that abuses in the celebration of the modern Roman Rite should not be confused with the rite itself. “Such abuses are extremely serious acts, but we can never equate them with the ordinary form itself,” Cardinal Sarah said.

The Cardinal added that he had heard from priests who believed that their experience of the older liturgy had changed the way they celebrated Mass. “Many priests testify that the discovery of the extraordinary form has helped them celebrate better,” Cardinal Sarah said.

The Prefect Emeritus linked this to the intention of Benedict XVI, who in 2007 issued Summorum Pontificum, expanding access to the 1962 Roman Missal. Cardinal Sarah argued that Benedict had sought to give the traditional liturgy a broad place within the Church and to give Catholics greater freedom in determining which form assisted them in living their faith.

“I believe Benedict XVI’s intention was also profoundly humble and democratic: to ensure its widest possible diffusion to allow the people of God, over the decades, to choose which form best corresponds to the implementation of their faith,” His Eminence said.

That approach, Cardinal Sarah argued, was halted by Traditionis Custodes, issued by Pope Francis in 2021, which introduced significant restrictions on the celebration of the older form.

“But all of this was nipped in the bud by Traditionis Custodes while the Pontiff Emeritus was still alive,” he said.

Asked directly for his assessment of the restrictions, Cardinal Sarah said: “It didn’t seem like a wise or respectful choice to me.”

He also spoke of Benedict XVI’s response to the decision, portraying the Pope Emeritus as having accepted the restrictions without public confrontation. “But Benedict, a man as gentle as a lamb, allowed himself to be humbled, and so, in silence and prayer, he offered his suffering to God, the better to identify with Christ’s pain for his Church and purify it,” Cardinal Sarah said.

The Cardinal was also asked about calls for the restrictions on the traditional liturgy to be lifted. His answer rested on the argument that longstanding forms of Catholic worship should not be artificially restricted through administrative decrees.

“Access to recognised ritual forms that have existed for centuries can never be artificially limited by decrees,” he said.

Cardinal Sarah said that the survival or decline of a liturgical form should ultimately be determined by whether it continues to serve the faith. “If a rite did not serve the faith, it would die on its own; if, on the contrary, it preserves and promotes the faith, we must not limit it, for we would limit the preservation and spread of the faith itself,” he said.

The interview also addressed the continued attraction of the older liturgy, particularly among Catholics who have to travel considerable distances to attend it. Cardinal Sarah said that the willingness of Catholics to travel for the traditional Mass should be regarded positively rather than as a source of suspicion.

“I can only admire this great expression of love for God,” the Cardinal said, adding that “the phenomenon is becoming increasingly widespread”.

He called for a different approach from Church authorities, arguing that dialogue should be possible with Catholics attached to the older form. “If the hierarchy is truly capable of reading the signs of today’s times—and not those of ’68, which are still too late—then spaces for fraternal and serene dialogue can open up,” Cardinal Sarah said.

His Eminence’s remarks also contained a direct criticism of treating Catholics attached to the traditional liturgy as opponents within the Church. “As a Church, we cannot wage war on those who devoutly attend Mass simply because they prefer one form over another,” he said.

Cardinal Sarah called such an approach “a shortsighted and entirely ideological attitude”, describing it as “unpastoral and un-Christian” and warning that it was “harmful, destructive for the Church”.

Five years after Traditionis Custodes, a number of American dioceses have used the motu proprio not merely to regulate the older Mass but to close it or relocate it outside parish churches.

In the Archdiocese of Detroit, Archbishop Edward Weisenburger’s 2025 implementation norms ended Traditional Latin Masses at parish churches and confined public celebration of the 1962 Missal to four designated sites, one of them St Joseph Shrine of the Institute of Christ the King. Other public celebrations were ordered to cease. The same decree banned ad orientem celebration of the Novus Ordo and required freestanding altars in parish churches.

In western Kentucky, Bishop William Medley of Owensboro ended the diocese’s only weekly Traditional Latin Mass at Immaculate Conception in Earlington in June 2026 after declining to seek a further Vatican extension. In the Diocese of Tyler, following the removal of Bishop Joseph Strickland, the Vatican-approved implementation ended the older Mass at the cathedral and at several parishes, leaving a single FSSP site.

In Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich has long required written permission, barred the older Mass from parish churches without a Vatican exemption and forbidden it on Christmas, the Triduum, Easter, Pentecost and the first Sunday of each month. In 2022, the Institute of Christ the King was suspended from celebrating public Masses and hearing confessions at its Chicago shrine after declining to sign a statement that treated the reformed Missal as the unique expression of the Roman Rite.

This same hostility towards the Old Rite finds a blunt spokesman in Father Thomas Reese, S.J., former editor of Americamagazine. In an August 25 of this year Religion News Service columnstyled as a mock confession and titled “Why I hate the old Latin Mass”, Fr Reese wrote: “Bless me Father for I have sinned. … Since that time, I have expressed hatred toward the old Latin Mass.”

Set beside Cardinal Sarah’s remarks, the contrast is clear. One cardinal prelate treats attachment to an ancient rite as a pastoral fact to be approached with humility. Others treat its survival as an offence against the post-conciliar settlement.

Niwa Limbu

Vatican Correspondent for Advaticanum

BREAKING: Liturgy Wars—The Latest Volley: A Papal “Thus”

 Diane MontagnaAug 26, 2026

(Pope Leo XIV at Aug. 26 Wednesday general audience, St. Peter’s Basilica; Photo: Vatican Media)

VATICAN CITY, 26 August 2026 — In recent months a number of prominent attempts have been made to double down on the party line that the liturgical reform following the Second Vatican Council conforms to the Council’s own desires and is beyond criticism, and that the older liturgical rites have little, if any, place in the life of the Church.

One only need recall three recent examples: Cardinal Arthur Roche’s July 29 interview with The Tablet; the subsequent article in the secular Spanish daily La Razón claiming that Cardinal Roche’s discredited report on the liturgy — distributed to Cardinals at Pope Leo XIV’s first extraordinary consistory — conveys the mind of the Pope on the traditional Roman rite; and Andrea Grillo’s recent assertion that “the old rite has no longer existed since the approval of the Novus Ordo.”

The latest appeared today at the Pope’s general audience, in his final catechesis on the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. 

Dom Alcuin Reid, an internationally recognized liturgical scholar — whose doctoral work on liturgical reform was published as The Organic Development of the Liturgy, with a preface by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger — offers some analysis and commentary.

Dom Alcuin Reid

Popes are busy men and rightly have drafters assisting them in preparing discourses. When speaking on particular subjects these drafts often originate in the relevant dicastery or department of the Roman Curia, and it is almost certain that the General Audience addresses of recent months on the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, originated in the Dicastery for Divine Worship. There is nothing exceptional about that and, for the most part, the General Audience addresses have been a reasonable liturgical catechesis making good points at times.

Today’s General Audience address, however, was not about the liturgy itself. Rather, it waded into the political minefield of what has become known in recent decades as “the liturgy wars”, the central issue of which is whether the liturgical reform following the Council was in fact faithful to the mandate given by the Council (and organic development of the liturgy as article 23 of the Constitution required). If it was not, the rites promulgated subsequently could be legitimately questioned and even be set aside in favour of the unreformed rites or be subjected to a “reform of the reform” that seeks to be faithful to the Council’s actual directives.

Once delivered, a draft becomes a Papal text, and to have the Pope express an opinion in a discourse (let us be clear, a General Audience address is not of itself a binding, infallible teaching) is certainly a coup of some importance. And in his general audience today the Holy Father — intentionally or not — has certainly rallied the troops of those on the Vatican II fundamentalist side of the war (who cling to the reformed rites more rigidly than any so-called ‘traditionalist’ ever known).

He did so in the simple line: “the liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thusfirmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.” His “thus” implies a deduction and a decision that the demands of Sacrosanctum Concilium n. 23 that “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing” were respected. And if they were, there would be no problem — there would be no grounds for talk about a “reform of the reform” or of a need to continue to celebrate the unreformed rites.

The problem is, however, that whoever in the Dicastery of Divine Worship most probably put these words in the mouth of the Holy Father has had him utter the greatest liturgical non-sequitur of the past sixty or so years. So too, whilst the “thus” is clearly believed by the drafter, it does not follow from the evidence produced in the text. An undergraduate in any reputable faculty would have such work returned to him as unsatisfactory.

There are many instances of inadequate drafting here: the Council called for a renewal of the Sacred Liturgy (“instauratio”) not for it to be “streamlined” — an a posteriori term which clearly indicates what in fact the partisans of the newer rites wish to believe. The Magisterium did not positively intervene in the history of the liturgy to adapt its forms to the needs of different eras; it extended local developments to the universal Church or added them to the Roman use by way of example, which was often then imitated elsewhere. As the likes of Cardinal Ratzinger observed, what happened following the most recent ecumenical Council had never been seen in the history of the Church until then. No centralized liturgical dicastery (the Sacred Congregation for Rites) existed until the latter part of the sixteenth century. Even then, it had no mandate to overhaul the liturgy periodically. Local Churches and religious orders maintained their own traditional rites. A radical reform of the liturgical rites was not in fact necessary in order to make the liturgy more accessible after the Second Vatican Council — a reality that the full, conscious, actual and extraordinarily fruitful participation in the unreformed rites today makes perfectly clear. One could note much more, but there are perhaps three more important issues to underline.

The first issue is the unfortunate yet enthusiastic citation of Cardinal Montini’s 1962 letter in which the future Paul VI asserts that the liturgy is “on the one hand…a vehicle for divine teaching; on the other…a voice in dialogue with God.” The problem is that whilst the liturgy is indeed formative, it is not primarily didactic or catechetical. It is cultic activity, i.e., it is worship and forms us as Christians by drawing us into the divine at work in and through its sacred rites. So too, the liturgy is not dialoguing with God in any modern sense of “dialogue” whereby we sit down as equal partners to work out some solution. The liturgy is the privileged place where we listen to God’s Word attentively and receptively and participate in the fruits of Christ’s saving action and respond appropriately through the conversion of our lives and by faithfully living out our vocation and Christian mission. To be fair, later on the text does cite Paul VI’s address at the closing of the Second Session of the Council in which he rightly describes the liturgy as “the primary source of that divine exchange in which the life of God is communicated to us”. Paul VI’s drafters were clearly better. So too is Sacrosanctum Concilium’s own theology of the liturgy (see especially articles 7-8).

The second is this rather pedestrian exegesis of article 48^[1]: 

“Through the Church’s ritual actions, whilst the memorial of the work of salvation is celebrated, the opportunity is provided to experience a true relationship with God, coming into contact with the salvific event. Since the gestures, the words of the sacred liturgy are critical to realizing this experience, the participation of the faithful cannot be passive.” 

None of this is false, but it is anaemic — and the Holy Father deserves better for his discourse.

For the Sacred Liturgy is not an “opportunity” (amongst others) to experience a true relationship with God. It is, as the Council teaches, the “summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time, it is the font from which all her power flows.” (Constitution, art. 10) That is, it enjoys a primacy, an objectivity in the Christian life to which other “opportunities” are subordinate.

In this context “the gestures and words” are not merely “critical to realising this experience,” they are the very vehicles of this privileged divine encounter itself — hence the terms “sacred liturgy” and “sacred rites.” The complex of actions and words that constitute a liturgical rite thereby take on a sacrality, they themselves become sacramentals. Incense, Latin, Gregorian chant and praying Eastward are not of the same status as the use of bread and wine and the Lord’s own words at Mass, clearly, but the Church has rightly employed them in her tradition not simply appropriate as elements of the liturgical rites, but as more than apposite ones that have become privileged by their use in the Church’s tradition. This is precisely why the Second Vatican Council did not call for their abolition or replacement, but instead underlined their privileged place in the Western rite whilst calling for widespread liturgical formation of clergy and laity to facilitate full, actual and conscious participation in the rites of which they are important pillars so as further to nourish and sustain Christian life and mission.

Here we touch on the third issue: the distinction between divine, immutable elements, and seemingly merely human elements, in the liturgy. This distinction leads to a downplaying of the latter which, it is said, “admit of various modifications, as the needs of the age, circumstance and the good of souls may require.” To a certain extent, this is true, and the liturgy has developed (organically) in history. But at another level this distinction is pernicious in that it permits a reduction of anything not “immutable” to the level of almost changeable at whim. This is not what the Council intended at all but, as Cardinal Ratzinger observed, it can become:

“the wrong path up which we might be led by a Neoscholastic sacramental theology that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that basis, people might reduce the ‘substance’ to the matter and form of the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament; the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really necessary; everything else is changeable … As long as the material gifts are there, and the words of institution are spoken, then everything else is freely disposable.”

The drafter can perhaps be forgiven for this error: the subtleties involved are quite advanced, but they are nevertheless real, and ignorance of them does risk reducing the liturgical rites to matters of passing preference (as the various abuse of the modern rites demonstrate so clearly). The Council called for an instauratio (renewal) of the rites in continuity, not a substantial rupture with the received liturgical tradition that edited and remade them according to the preferences of those involved whilst preserving only what was necessary for sacramental validity.

Recent decades have seen a considerable body of scholarship examine all these issues — amongst them of course the future Pope Benedict XVI himself. Pope Leo is not himself a liturgical scholar — and there is no reason he should be. However, the Holy Father should be served and supported by those who can furnish him with less embarrassing and, shall we say, more “inclusive” texts.

Unfortunately, today’s General Audience text will be read more as the scoring of a political point by some and will be experienced as a disappointing blow by others. I am sure that the Holy Father intends or wills neither. His Holiness’ constant calls for unity and inclusivity whilst respecting legitimate diversity stand above such politicking. So too does sound scholarship and actual liturgical history.

Let us continue to pray for the Holy Father, particularly that in respect of the Sacred Liturgy, he shall indeed promote a policy of inclusivity and mutual respect, eschewing the ploys of those who would use his words to advance their cause. Pope Benedict offered some sound advice in respect of the liturgy wars: “Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows.” His policies led to liturgical peace. Pope Leo may do well to revisit them.

^[1] 48. The Church, therefore, earnestly desires that Christ’s faithful, when present at this mystery of faith, should not be there as strangers or silent spectators; on the contrary, through a good understanding of the rites and prayers they should take part in the sacred action conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full collaboration. They should be instructed by God’s word and be nourished at the table of the Lord’s body; they should give thanks to God; by offering the Immaculate Victim, not only through the hands of the priest, but also with him, they should learn also to offer themselves; through Christ the Mediator, they should be drawn day by day into ever more perfect union with God and with each other, so that finally God may be all in all.

Source: https://x.com/dianemontagna/status/2092650584155603067?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w

The adulterous union of the Church and the Revolution is concretized through dialog

“The adulterous union of the Church and the Revolution is concretized through dialogue. Our Lord said: ‘Go, teach the nations, convert them’ [Matt. XXVIII, 19], but He did not say: ‘Dialogue with them without trying to convert them.’ Error and truth are not compatible; to dialogue with error is to place God and the devil on the same footing. This is what the popes have always repeated, and what Christians easily understood, for it is also a matter of common sense. To impose a different attitude and reflexes, it was necessary to act on minds, so as to render modernist the clerics called upon to spread the new doctrine. This is what is called recycling, a conditioning process intended to reshape the very instrument that God gave to man to guide his judgment.”

-Mgr Marcel Lefebvre, historic sermon of August 29, 1976 in Lille.

“Islam is the sanctification of man’s most corrupted instincts.”

Islam is the sanctification of man’s most corrupted instincts. 

It takes what is base in human nature and give it a divine sanction.

Man’s desire to dominate women? Islam codifies it. Veiling, polygamy, child marriage, testimony worth half a man’s, all justified as God’s will.

The tribal impulse of “my group over yours”? Islam raises it to the level of theology: believers vs. infidels, the ummah against the world.

The lust for supremacy and conquest? Islam call it jihad and makes it a religious demand.

The primal rage at dissent? Islam turns it into law: apostasy punishable by death.

Man’s lust for unlimited sex? Islam provides it: four wives, temporary marriages, concubines, sex slaves, and the promise of virgins in paradise. 

This is why Islam went global. It spread because it indulged what was already animal in humans. 

It is like pornography, irresistible to the flesh, destructive to the soul.

It thrives because it removes all discipline from sexuality, power and ego. 

It appeals to the raw, the unrefined, the barbaric impulse in man, and calls it holy.

The West, by contrast, was built on the exact opposite impulse. The Judeo-Christian tradition does not legitimize man’s depravity, it restrains it.

Western civilization is not the freedom of instincts but the discipline of them. 

It is the recognition that man’s raw impulses lead to tyranny, slavery, and barbarism unless they are checked by higher law.

The clash between Islam and the West is not merely geopolitical. It is civilizational at the deepest level: 

Whether human nature should be indulged or disciplined, whether man’s lowest instincts are to be worshipped or restrained.

Source: @DanBurmawy

Why are women defending Lindsay Clancy after she killed her three children?

“Why are so many women so angry? They won. They got everything they wanted. Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well. They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates … they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer … they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat.” 

- Peachy Keenan 

TikTok videos of women sobbing and holding their babies with the phrase 'Same, Lindsay' have gone viral, with the implication that many mothers may perpetrate similar horrors.

 Shutterstock

---

Jonathon Van Maren

Fri Aug 21, 2026 - 4:58 pm EDT

(LifeSiteNews) — On January 24, 2023, 32-year-old Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, sent her husband Patrick to pick up takeout food and go to the pharmacy. Then, she strangled her three young children – 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan – with rubber exercise bands, slashed her own wrists and neck, and threw herself out of a second-story window. Patrick returned to find two of his children dead in the basement and his wife bleeding outside. Callan died in the hospital three days later.

Lindsay Clancy was charged with the first-degree murders of her three children, and her trial began last month in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Clancy is now divorced, paralyzed from the waist down due to her suicide attempt – and the subject of an outpouring of support that feels vaguely reminiscent of the cult following surrounding Charles Manson.

Her supporters have donated nearly a million dollars to her via GoFundMe; gathered outside the courthouse; and posted viral videos and social media posts insisting that Clancy, too, is a victim – of the pharmaceutical industry, of a society that callously ignores female struggles, of a medical system that trivializes female mental health.

Nobody denies that Clancy killed her children. The prosecution states that she “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly” rather than in a moment of postpartum psychosis; she very deliberately planned the murders by researching them ahead of time and ensured her husband was out of the house. The defense insists that the killings were triggered by a lethal combination of psychiatric medications and her postpartum struggles.

Scores of TikTok videos of women sobbing and holding their babies with the phrase “Same, Lindsay” have gone viral; the disturbing implication that many mothers are on the verge of perpetrating similar horrors provoked equally viral responses. These, predictably, range from boorish minimization of postpartum depression to genuine and justified outrage that women are willing to invoke the name of a child-killer in videos featuring their own babies.

Other viral videos feature women shrieking and breaking things to vent their postpartum pain or melting down in other ways. The videos, of course, were very carefully filmed, edited, and posted, negating the idea that they feature uncontrollable psychosis or raw glimpses of involuntary moments. In fact, the critiques of the videos are almost identical to the prosecution’s case against Clancy herself: Both the moments in the videos and the murders (allegedly) are meticulously premediated rather than spontaneous and involuntary. The resulting “debate” has been a vicious doom loop.

These videos might as well be custom-made to serve as fodder in the culture war of attrition between the sexes. Those posting them are demanding from viewers recognition of their pain, affirmation of their experience, understanding of how difficult postpartum depression is. But the very act of creating this content appears to affirm the most misogynist possible responses to the reality of postpartum depression by cynically presenting crisis porn as spectacle and inviting the world to watch.

As Samuel D. James wrote in one of the best columns analyzing the “debate” that is currently roiling the digital world, the internet is making men and women hate each other.

Several things can be true at once. It is true that postpartum depression – and indeed, mental illness in general – is often woefully addressed and badly understood. As I’ve noted many times, that is precisely why legalizing euthanasia for mental illness would be such a social catastrophe. It is also true that women viewing Lindsay Clancy’s decision to destroy her own children as an opportunity to say “Same, Lindsay” is inviting people to view them as clearly unstable and obviously dangerous to their children. Lindsay Clancy killed her babies. What do you mean by “same”?

More: https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/why-are-women-defending-lindsay-clancy-after-she-killed-her-three-children/

Deeply immoral AI destruction of books

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books. 

They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.

They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong. 

An internal memo from 2024 stated: 

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Why used books? 

Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work. 

So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet. 

The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.

Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website. 

When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”

Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from  Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books. 

They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling. 

Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country. 

But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning. 

Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever. 

AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils. 

May the most moral company win. 

Source: @BBHerodotus

It’s about souls. Not clicks.

Please stop turning Catholics over to the inquisition.

Please let Catholics attend the TLM in peace. The news cycle will forgive you if you forgo a scoop about who goes to Mass where.

If you’re living behind a keyboard and amassing clicks and views online, that’s fine for you, but please remember souls are in the balance. Catholic families just want to attend Sunday Mass in peace without publicity.

If you’re a Catholic, please put souls first. There will be a judgment. Be on the right side of it.