RORATE CÆLI: “Everything that contributes to rootedness [in the faith] must be encouraged”

The following are excerpts from an interview done by Famille Chrétienne with Father Laurent-Marie Pocquet du Haut Jussé, a canonist and theologian, former head of the application of the motu proprio Summorum pontificum in Compiègne. The interview first appeared on July 20, 2022; a translation is made now (from this source) because the issues continue to be entirely relevant.

FC: One year after the motu proprio Traditionis custodes, the pope reaffirmed his will to drastically limit the use of the Tridentine rite in his apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi in the name of the unity of the Church. In what way does the Tridentine rite threaten the unity of the Church more than the other rites admitted within it?

PHJ: The unprecedented crisis that the Christian West is undergoing today is first and foremost doctrinal and pastoral. The Church derives its unity not from the liturgy but from the same profession of faith and the same fidelity to the grace that saves us, communicated principally through the sacraments. We are living in a paradoxical situation: there is a collapse of unity in the faith which goes hand in hand with the affirmation of the absolute necessity of liturgical and even pastoral unity…

FC: Does it pose a problem in itself that there are two forms of the same Roman rite?

PHJ: When St. Pius V, at the end of the Council of Trent, granted freedom to all priests of the Roman Church to celebrate the missal in use in the Roman curia, he intended to offer to all a liturgy which was the fruit of a homogeneous development which went back in its essential elements to the great patristic period. But he also maintained the freedom to celebrate the liturgical forms of more than two hundred years. Moreover, there is a real breakdown in the celebration of the missal promulgated in 1969, a breakdown that goes far beyond the possible adaptations foreseen by the text. The Council recognized Gregorian chant as the proper chant of the Roman Church, it wanted it to have the first place in the liturgical celebrations, the rubrics of the ordinary of the Mass seem to indicate that the Mass is celebrated ad orientem, thus allowing the whole of the people of God, ministers and faithful, to turn together towards the Lord (avoiding a very clerical face-to-face confrontation?), and yet it is almost impossible to find in France a liturgy that meets the requirements of the Council, except in places where the traditional liturgy is celebrated…

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RORATE CÆLI: “Everything that contributes to rootedness [in the faith] must be encouraged”