This year's Ad Petri Sedem 'Summorum Pontificum' pilgrimage was preceded by more-than-usually frustrating negotiations with various entities of the Holy See, In the end, we did not have Mass, or even some collective prayers, in St Peter's, but we did have Mass in St Mary Major, and the usual Vespers in the Pantheon.
I have written about it for 1Peter5 and the Catholic Herald.
The 1Peter5 article begins:
Last year’s traditionalist pilgrimage to Rome – the Ad Petri Sedem ‘Summorum Pontificum’ pilgrimage over the weekend of the last Sunday of October – was a big media story. It escaped containment, as they say, on the traditionalist news sites, and was picked up not only by EWTN but by AP, which made it available to the whole world. It had many of the ingredients of a good story: something apparently controversial and also rather photogenic was happening that wasn’t expected to happen. It doesn’t matter that the source of the controversy is obscure, even to the participants; it was enough that an opposing faction was available to provide outraged quotes to balance the story.
Pope Leo XIV, we have it on good authority, disliked the reportage, saying that the Mass he had permitted had been ‘instrumentalised,’ and it is reasonable to infer that this is why permission was not forthcoming for a Traditional Mass in St Peter’s this year. One can’t interrogate the Holy Father, but it would be helpful to know who he thinks instrumentalised it, and to what end. I’m sure the professionalism of AP’s excellent Rome correspondent, Nicole Winfield, is not in question – unlike a surprisingly large number of Rome journalists, she is not herself a Trad – but instrumentalization by others wouldn’t have been so effective if AP hadn’t sent the story around the world. Then again, the organisers can hardly be said to have done any instrumentalising themselves, as apart from engaging a photographer they had no role in reporting at all: they don’t even have a press officer.
The Catholic Herald article is paywalled, but here is a snippet:
The decision about the pilgrimage and St Peter’s was therefore taken at a high level. The higher you are in the Roman Curia, the more contact you have with the Pope, and it seems overwhelmingly likely that the matter was on the agenda for one of the regular meetings between Pope Leo and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Parolin: yet another man with little love for the Traditional Mass.
Cardinal Parolin and Pope Leo would not have been ignorant of the pilgrimage’s plans to use the Pantheon and St Mary Major, but they did not step in to frustrate these. As a rebuke to the traditionalists, it is a calibrated one, and one made between Pope Leo and a group of people with a long history of disliking the Traditional Mass, who are simultaneously crucial to the running of the curial machinery and St Peter’s Basilica itself.
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