Why Do Bishops Ignore the TLM as a Solution?

[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:14] So last week I wrote an article, crisis and also talked about on the podcast, the recent Pew Research center study, a survey that showed that people are leaving the Catholic Church in droves and that number of practicing Catholics is declining at precipitous rates. That it just is not good news for the Catholic Church in America that just so many people are leaving. And I talked about that, and I had a few solutions, a few ideas for how we can make that better. But one of the most common things I often hear when these numbers come up is people say, people who attend the traditional Latin right Mass, why don't the bishops just start having people celebrate traditional Latin Mass, or at least expand a lot more? After all, those Masses are growing in attendance over the past 10 years, whereas attendance at Novus Ordodiocesan masses is decreasing. So it seems like the obvious answer is to have more TLMs. [00:01:22] And so this is a question I hear a lot. This is kind of an answer I hear a lot. A question I hear a lot. And I have it. I've done it, too. I've mentioned this numerous times in the past. [00:01:33] And so the question does become, why are the bishops ignoring the traditional Latin Mass as a solution to the problems we're having, not necessarily the only solution, but as a solution. [00:01:48] Because most TLM goers will tell you we're not saying that if you just simply institute the tlm, everything's gonna be hunky dory. [00:01:56] But we are saying it's at least one step in the process of solving the problem. [00:02:02] So why aren't they doing that? I think there's a number of reasons, but I think one of the reasons is something I don't think we recognize. At least those of us who attend a church like Mass don't recognize enough. So I want to talk about that some today. [00:02:16] First, though, I want to give kind of some of the standard reasons which I think are true. The first one is simply because there is a cohort in the Catholic Church, in the leadership of the Catholic Church, that has a deep antipathy towards anything from before Vatican ii, anything that suggests that we should go back or that something from before Vatican II was maybe something that we should do. Again, there's a certain demographic of the hierarchy that resists that very strongly. And yes, it is typically boomers, people who are older, in at least their 60s, 70s, 80s. [00:03:06] They feel like they buy the narrative that everything before Vatican II was bad and Vatican II brought in new springtime, no matter what the numbers say. And so we can't go back to the traditional Latin Mass, because that is a step backwards and we're all about the future, progressivism, things like that. And so definitely I think that is a significant factor. [00:03:35] But I don't think that's most bishops. I don't think most bishops are like that because most bishops aren't that old. And I've talked to enough bishops and I've known enough bishops to know that's simply not true. [00:03:49] So whereas I do think there are some bishops who have a deep hatred of the traditional Latin Mass and so they will not do anything that would help promote it, I don't think that's most. Now, another reason why I think bishops don't look to the TLM as a solution is simply because it's politically incorrect to do so in the church today. After teresinus custodis in 2021, it became clear that the powers that be at the Vatican did not want the traditional Latin Mass to be promoted, extended, expanded, whatever the case may be. And so if you are a bishop who simply wants to stay in good graces with the Vatican, you're not going to do anything like celebrate the traditional at Mass or promote it that might get you out of their good graces. [00:04:43] This is the more cowardly approach, the more middle management approach, the more just like, status quo approach. So in the first case we have, there are bishops who have a hatred for anything pre Vatican ii. Now we also have a case of a lot of bishops simply don't want to rock the boat, don't want to go against the Vatican. You know, they put their finger up in the wind and they say, okay, this is the way the wind's blowing. We don't want to go against what the Vatican is telling us. Okay, so that's definitely some. That's probably most of them even. I do think there's another reason. [00:05:26] I do think there's another reason why bishops don't look at the Traditional Latin Mass as a potential solution. And I think this one is a legitimate reason in a lot of ways. And it's one I think traditionalists, including myself, need to take very seriously. We need to not just act like, oh, all the bishops are against us, they all hate us, or all the bishops are cowards. I think that is a sloppy answer. It's a lazy answer. It's true in some cases, but it's not the only thing. I think if we're going to be honest with ourselves, honest with the situation, we have to look at all the reasons. And I think that a major reason is because we simply don't register on their radar because we're too small. [00:06:15] Now, I know for the perpetually online like me, this might seem crazy. If you get on Catholic Twitter for even five minutes, it's. You're inundated by trads. I mean, I'm one of them, so I can say this. And so it really does appear like, wow, there's a lot of traditional Catholics now. I will say there is a lot of energy. If you look at where the energy is in the Catholic Church today in America, it is with the trads. It's kind of like in the 80s, 90s, it was with the charismatics. If you look for energy, this isn't size, but energy, meaning where are the dominant thinkers? Where the dominant people who are really trying to advance the cause of the church, really proclaiming the gospel, doing everything you can in the 80s and 90s is probably the Charismatics today. It's a traditionalist. It does not give us numerical significance, however. [00:07:12] And I kind of really came to this. I've thought this for a while, but I really. This came to me very much because some recent data I just found. This isn't the Pew Research Center. This is other data. [00:07:26] I live in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, and like a lot of diocese, the Archdiocese Cincinnati is going through one of these restructuring processes where they're combining parishes or moving priests around, stuff like that. A lot of parishes are doing that because they just see they have too many parishes for the number of Catholics who are actually going to Mass. They don't have enough priests for the number of parishes they have. And so they're trying to restructure things. Well, to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati's credit, they are being very public and transparent about this process. And not only that, but they actually have put up the data of the number of Catholics who are attending Mass each year. [00:08:10] And they have a spreadsheet up on their website dating back to 2014 of how many Catholics are attending Mass. And what they do is. And this. Every diocese does this, really. They do a survey in October and they ask every parish, and October's picked because it's a month. Not a lot of people are traveling. It's not during, like, Easter season or Lent or something like that where you might have a bump or Christmas. And so October is a very average month for Mass attendance. It's where you're going to get the people who just go every week. They're probably going to be there in October. They're not going to be traveling. They're not, you know, you're not going to have the Christmas and Easter people, stuff like that. So the archdiocese in silent, like most diocese, they take this survey, they ask every parish, tell us how many people were at Mass, count how many people at Mass, send it to us, and then they count it all up. And so what does this data show? What I did was I looked at this data, but also since I know the traditional Latin Mass parishes in our diocese, and by the way, this breakdown showed for every. It showed the data for every single parish, I can then extrapolate and say, okay, how many people are attending the Traditional Latin Mass in our diocese? And the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, I think, is a very typical average diocese in America. I'm not saying every diet, you can extrapolate for the whole country based on this one diocese, but I think it's a good bellwether how the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, people going to Mass, going to traditional Mass, things like that, I think would reflect the whole country very well for a one diocese. So what does the data show? That's what I'm going to show up some charts here. So if you're listening to this podcast, you might want to view it instead on YouTube or rumble. So you can see the charts, but I will explain them. First, I just want to show a chart here, which is the overall attendance at Mass Every year since 2014 in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. And what you see is in 2014, you see that there are over 150,000 people going to Mass on a typical Sunday in October in Cincinnati. It's like 155,000, I think, is what it is. Then it steadily declines until all of a sudden you have a huge drop in 2020. Obviously that's the pandemic, and then it does go back up, but it's not at pre pandemic levels. In 2024, it was like 113,000. In 2019, I think it was like 120, 130,000, something like that. So it's still down. The overall trend line is down even if you take out the aberration of 2020. However, I will say, and this is a side point, but I think it's important we shouldn't take out the aberration. That's 2020. Because, remember, the reason Mass attendance was so low is because of the bishop shutting down masses. [00:11:13] Home Depot didn't see a decrease in sales in 2020, I'm willing to bet, because they remained open. Mass attendance cratered, though, because this would have been taken October 2020, when masses were open, but it cratered because they had shut down the masses. So you, you can't just kind of act like that, wave that away as a statistical aberration. It was, in fact, when we see the TLM numbers, we'll see the opposite happen. [00:11:39] The point is, is that the overall numbers have declined. This is not surprising to anybody who pays, who's paying attention. This is the case in every single diocese in America. I bet you has a chart that looks almost exactly like this, that if you look at the numbers from 2014, 2024, last 10 years, you will see an overall decline with that blip in 2020. And we're not back to 2019 levels now. [00:12:05] Let's look at TLM, because what I did was I took the parishes that I know celebrated TLM and I looked at their Mass attendance. Now, this is not exact, because these parishes, not all of them celebrate only the tlm. Some of them celebrate the Novus Ordo as well as the tlm, and also there are sometimes other TLM celebrated. I do think, though, this gives a very good ballpark, just having my finger on the pulse of the archdiocese, knowing where the TLMs are and who goes, stuff like that. This is a pretty accurate, you know, ballpark. I'm not saying it's exact, but it's. It's a good ballpark. If you look at this chart, what do we see? [00:12:42] The numbers go from around 1100 or so, 11 or 12 less than 1200 in 2014, to almost 2000 by 1800 in 2024. What we see, in other words, is an increase. In fact, what we can see here is, is that if you compare the two charts, overall attendance declined by 37% since 2024. 37% decline in the past, really 11 years, past 10 years in your. In overall attendance, TLM attendance, however, went up by 36%. So literally almost the opposite. 37% decline, overall attendance, 37%. 36% increase in TLM attendance. Also, you see a bump in the 2020 numbers. [00:13:41] So it's not like people stopped going to the TLM in 2025, more people started going. And so if we look at this again, it just seems pretty clear. [00:13:52] On the one hand you have people attending Novus Ordo going down. The other hand you have people attending the Traditional Latin Mass going up. So why not just Simply have more TLMs? Wouldn't that be a solution to the problem? [00:14:06] Or at the very least, why don't they steal some of the aspects of the Traditional Latin Mass and incorporate them into the NOSO ordo more generally, ad orientum, communion on the tongue, no altar girls, no eucharistic ministers, ultra rails, you know, more chant, incense, things like that. [00:14:27] Why don't they at least do it? Because what we see is actually a lot of bishops, they go the opposite direction. [00:14:32] They ban the ad orientum. In fact, in our archdiocese, Archbishop Schner, he basically banned the ad orientum in the Novus Ordo about a year or two ago. And that's not uncommon. A lot of bishops did that. So again, the question is, why not just look at these numbers and why don't the bishops who see these numbers, why don't they just simply do this? [00:14:58] And I think it's because of the next charts I'm going to show. [00:15:02] Traditional Latin Mass attendees are a statistical blip. [00:15:08] When bishops see these numbers, they don't even register the tlm. Not because they're like antagonistical to it. I mean, some are, but even the ones who aren't antagonistical to it, they just don't even. It doesn't even register them. Because look at this next chart. This is a pie chart. This is 2014 mass attendance. [00:15:27] In 2014, 0.8% of all mass attendees in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati attended terisha. At Mass, 0.8% move to 2024, it's now 1.6%. So it doubles. Yay. We know that. I mean, we see that more people retain trail slanted Mass, less people retain no sort. Obviously that percentage goes up. It's now it's double what it was just 10 years ago. There's twice as many people. In comparison to overall Mass goers, there's twice as many. It goes from 0.8% to 1.8%. But still, look at the chart. [00:16:09] Blue represents non TLM attendees. Orange represents TLM attendees. White, what color dominates? [00:16:16] The blue obviously dominates. [00:16:20] In the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, there are less than 2,000 people who attend the traditional Mass on a given Sunday, in comparison to over 110,000 people who attend the Novus Ordo. And let me just show the next chart. If we then take every single person who self identifies as Catholics, that's 450,000 people in our diocese. 0.4% of them go to the TLM. So when a bishop says, okay, I'm looking at all the Catholics in my archdiocese or in my diocese, 0.4% of them attend the traditional Latin Mass. [00:17:07] Honestly, they don't even see that. [00:17:10] Because a lot of times what we say is, if I was corporate head, if as a CEO, looking at the numbers, I'd be rolling heads. I'd be doing something to change the decline. And that is true. [00:17:23] But we can't say a CEO might look at these numbers and not look at the TLM as a statistically significant number enough to do anything about it, to say, okay, let's look at those guys. It's just too small. [00:17:40] And I think this is true in most dioceses. Now. I am not giving a free pass to bishops who attack the tlm, who shut it down, who, you know, are too cowardly to support it. I'm not giving them a pass. What I am saying though is let's not be so knee jerk, you know, simply, you know, us other, you know, traditional Catholics and be immediately say, oh, they just hate us. No, I think they just don't even know about us. They ignore us because we're such a small number. [00:18:13] And I think again, this is something when we're on the Internet all the time on social media, we don't see this because trads dominate the conversation. And that's just a fact. And by the way, I think that's a good thing because like I said, that's where the energy is. And the fact is that's where we're seeing conversions. That's where we're seeing, you know, the proclamation of the gospel is often among traditional Catholics, teal and attending Catholics. I'm not saying no novus ordo Catholics do it. Of course they do. But what I'm saying is, is when you. It's a disproportionate. It's not 0.4% of Catholic online dialogue isn't with is just is trads. It's high, much higher than that. I mean, obviously we don't have exact numbers, but it feels like at times it's 40 to 50% of the discussion is geared around traditionalists and what they're saying and things like that. [00:19:09] But bishops aren't on social media typically. Yeah, they post on it, but that's probably not even them or they barely even look at it. Very few bishops will do will actually be online. In fact, just today I was a little bit surprised. Archbishop Corleone of San Francisco, who's great in supportive of the tlm, he posted something and I replied to him and he replied back to me. And honestly, that was a little bit surprising simply because most bishops aren't really actually on social media. And I'm not saying they should spend all their time on social media, but the fact is most of them aren't on there at all. They let somebody else post in their account. [00:19:47] And because of that, they don't see that energy of the trans. They just hear the narrative. They might hear from mainstream media, mainstream Catholic media, that is. And so it's not that they don't like there are bishops out there who just simply they're good natured. [00:20:05] But the teal is just still so small. [00:20:09] The number of people who attend to Tehlam is still tiny. [00:20:13] Now, I would say that what that means is for people who attend the traditional Mass like me, or at least are sympathetic to it and do understand that it's one of the solutions to the crisis we have in the church today, expanding it, that is, I would say what we need to do is we need to continue to promote the traditional Mass as one of the solutions going forward. We need to continue to help it to grow until it can't be ignored. Let's look at these numbers again. [00:20:43] In 2014, 0.8% attended church at Mass. 2024, 1.6%. [00:20:52] That's a good direction. [00:20:56] In 10 years, what will it be? I'm actually going to go out there on a limb and say, barring some miraculous thing happening, I'm going to say it's at least over 5%. It might even be close to 10%. In fact, I'm just going to say I think it's going to be close to 10%. Then 2034, the number, the percentage of Mass goers that attend the TLM in America will be close to 10%, if not more. [00:21:23] And at that point, bishops won't be able to ignore it. You can ignore 0.8%, you can ignore 1.6%. [00:21:32] Once you start getting beyond 5% though 10%, it's just like in politics now. You can't ignore it. It's like the third party candidate who comes in at 1.6%, most candidates don't care about. And if they're 0.8%, they definitely don't. And if they're 0.4%, nobody even heard of them. But if they're at 5%, if they're at 10%, all of a sudden it's like RFK levels. Guess what? They get heard and they start getting listened to. I think that's a good analogy. What happened with rfk, he was pulling very well and that's why Trump wanted to bring him on board, because he realized this could only help him. This would bring his people on board. And I don't want to speak completely politically and crassly about this, but I think it's a way the church works because it's a human institution as well, a divine institution. But I think if we get those numbers up, and sadly I think the number is going to be near 10% in 10 years simply because, not just because more people be attaining church, not en masse, but because that less people know Sordo. Because more people, people just continue leaving. And by the way, I want to bring up another point is I think this number is suppressed a bit to 1.6% because there could be more traditional Latin Masses in archdiocese than there are. Some were shut down. There are certain limitations because they're only at two locations that are both in not very good neighborhoods. You know, certain people, a lot of people might not want to go for that reason and they wouldn't be exposed to it. So I get that is true. It probably will be higher, I think over time though it just won't help it. But it will grow. And I think with a new administration, so to speak, in the church at the Vatican at one point perhaps it will, you know, it will grow even more. But like I said, I think it's just inevitable. Even if the number of people attending the church Lent Mass doesn't increase very much next 10 years, I think the number of people attending no sorrow will decrease so much that we'll still get near 5 to 10%. And like I said, then the bishops can ignore it. So my point in all this, why am I rambling on here? My point in all this is simply for those who attend church Latin Mass, continue to promote it charitably, of course, as always, continue to let other people know about it. Invite people to your church Lent Mass, educate people who aren't aware of it, educate them on the differences between it and the Novus Ordo. People who attend Novus Ordo but are supportive of the church Lent Mass, continue to be supportive. You know, don't attack it, you know, be, be open to it. And I think what will happen over time is the bishops will simply not be able to ignore it anymore. Even the, you know, especially the good natured ones, they'll just see it in the numbers. Right now, they don't see it in the numbers. It's statistically insignificant for them to really pay attention to it. So once we get up those numbers up higher, I think they will start to pay attention to it. I think that's when we'll see really, it's like the gradually but suddenly phenomenon that happens in business and things like that, where I think we're in that right now, we're in the gradually stage. Of the traditional masses gradually growing, then we're going to hit the suddenly stage, where all of a sudden it will seem like almost overnight, it'll grow incredibly. And I think one of the things that happens in that stage is once you get to a certain tipping point, which I think would be between 5 and 10%, the momentum just really picks up. Bishops start to embrace it because they see it's. It's a good thing. More and more people see no people who go. And so they start to go. So I think that's. That's what we're in. We're in the gradually phase. But it is a gradually then suddenly type of phenomenon with the traditional Latin Mass. So I think it's a reason for hope. I think it's a reason for continuing what we're doing as far as promoting traditional Mass. And it's something we should continue to do and be optimistic about the future. Even though I know these numbers look dire in so many ways, let's be optimistic about the future of the church. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up there. Hope this was helpful. I just found these numbers very interesting from the architect of Cincinnati. I'm sure other archdiocese are very similar, and they really do tell us a lot about the state of the church and also what the bishops are seeing when they're looking at populations, at numbers and growth and things like that. Okay, I'll leave it there for now, though. Until next time, everybody. God love.