There has been a dispute over the past several days regarding whether Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, implemented Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum in Buenos Aires. (Summorum is the document that liberated the pre-1970 liturgical books, which had previously required explicit ecclesiastical approval.) Some sources, one of which I quoted, said he had.
Here’s the truth, unfortunately:
And so what was the great and generous application of Summorum Pontificum in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires? One Novus Ordo-TLM hybrid once a month. And, as it happens to any badly celebrated Latin Mass, the number of attending faithful fast dwindled from one hundred to a handful. And, naturally, it was discontinued. So, as correctly mentioned in WikiMissa, there is currently not a single actual traditional Mass strictly according to the 1962 Missal celebrated by diocesan priests of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires. And every priest who tried to truly implement Summorum in his parish – that is, out of their own initiative, without “authorization” from the Bishop – was ordered to stop. It is what happened to a poor priest who tried to do it in the chapel of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, in October 2007, and was personally ordered by the Archbishop to stop in November 2007.
