ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — With incense wafting to an elevated pulpit and 13 altar boys looking on, the priest at the Church of Saint Agnes preached about merging old Catholic customs with fidelity to the Vatican this week — as Pope Leo XIV tackled a major challenge from a traditionalist breakaway group.“Our Catholic faith is a living tradition, and there is a difference between being rooted and being stuck,” the Rev. John Ubel said in homilies Sunday at English-language and Latin Masses.Since the Second Vatican Council modernized the liturgy more than 60 years ago, celebrating Mass in the traditional Latin Rite that preceded those reforms has become a lightning rod of the theological, cultural and increasingly partisan divides among Catholics.The conflict made global headlines when Leo declared Thursday that one traditionalist group — the Society of St. Pius X, founded to reject the Council’s reforms and celebrate exclusively the old Latin Mass — had formally broken with the Catholic Church.The Vatican excommunicated the SSPX bishops and priests and warned its thousands of faithful after the society consecrated four men as bishops in defiance of Leo.
While the Latin Rite was not the cause of the rift, the acrimony and the lingering suspicion that all those who like it are ultraconservative rebels is an open wound at Saint Agnes, which isn’t affiliated with SSPX and has the church’s permission to celebrate Mass in Latin.“For all who are attached to Tradition, I pray that they seek to maintain full ecclesial communion with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV,” Ubel said Thursday.
