Some of the preliminary results suggest the TLM community, while drawn to a different aesthetic than the typical parish experience, holds onto the beliefs of the Catholic faith more consistently than the wider population of Catholics,
Recently rumors have been flying that Pope Francis is preparing to impose stringent restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass. Of course, unfounded rumors out of the Vatican are not new, and some journalists have not been able to identify anybody who has actually seen the document in question.
Still, even if it ends up being in the class of “Pope Francis is dying” rumors that we have heard for years, such a document would be in character for a pontificate that has emphasized placing hedges around the more conservative, traditional elements of the Church. While his predecessor’s position towards the Latin Mass community can be broadly characterized as one of accommodation, Pope Francis has taken a more confrontational approach.
But why? What is the problem with allowing what is by all measures a small fraction of Catholics to participate in a licit Mass that they find beautiful, reverent, and holy? The very real fact is that Traditional Latin Mass participation has been associated with factions inside the Church who do not accept Vatican II and may even be quasi-schismatic, and multiple popes have taken a variety of approaches in how to deal with groups such as the SSPX.
It is not our place to tell the Holy Father what to do; we are social scientists, not bishops, and one of us is not even Catholic; however, the extent to which the TLM community is a schismatic hotbed of negative attitudes towards Vatican II is ultimately an empirical one that is scientifically investigable, and on this point there has been a clear lack of objective, systematically collected data.
The Prefect for the Dicastery for Divine Worship, Cardinal Arthur Roche, has made it clear that he thinks the TLM has a different liturgical theology than the Novus Ordo. There is also the argument that the TLM is an implied, if not explicit, rejection of Vatican II. It seems the Holy Father himself holds this view. Conclusions based on impressions are suspect if they are not supported by more objective evidence.
In announcing Traditiones Custodes (the 2021 round of Latin Mass restrictions), the Pope invoked a survey that he had disseminated among bishops on the question of the Latin Mass. However, in addition to the fact that the survey was of bishops and not Traditional Latin Mass-goers themselves, the wordings used, the exact responses, the representativeness—any one of many things that would be required for a professional survey statistician to objectively gauge the validity of the survey—were completely unknown. Therefore it is difficult to know how seriously to take the results of the survey when only the vaguest details are known.
We, a professor of sociology and theology (and a TLM attender) and a demography/sociology dual-PhD data scientist, have been striving to remedy the lack of transparent, systematically collected, objective data on the TLM community in preparation for a book we are writing: collating all previously published information on the demographics and attitudes of the TLM community (it is not a lot), as well as conducting our own surveys and supplementing our quantitative data with approximately 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews of TLM Catholics across the country. While our study is on the United States TLM community in particular, given the American Church’s reputation as a hotbed of conservativism, we believe our findings have broad implications.
Read the rest: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/09/03/data-and-the-traditional-latin-mass/
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