Cardinal Francis Arinze, the head of the Vatican’s worship office, and the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, are scheduled to celebrate solemn vespers with the group, while Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, will lead them in the recitation of the rosary. Bishop Fernando Arêas Rifan of Brazil (see panel below) and two other bishops will celebrate Masses in the Old Rite for the group of young traditionalists, while at least three other bishops from France, the United States and Poland are to give lectures to the Tridentine youngsters. As well as in Brazil, there is a revival of interest in the Old Rite in other parts of the world – especially the United States and France. In England and Wales, the Latin Mass Society has more than 3,500 members.

This would have been nothing less than shocking back in 1986 when WYD was first instituted. Except for a handful of ultra-conservatives, it would have been difficult to find so many high-ranking prelates willing to be seen giving support to a group of traditionalists. But in recent years opponents of the modern Mass have found acceptance and sympathy from many of the Church’s leading authorities – especially the Pope. When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was one of the most powerful men in the Roman Curia, he gave continued and strong – even if qualified – support to traditionalists in their efforts to gain institutional approval for celebrating a liturgy that almost all the bishops present at the Second Vatican Council believed had been consigned to the ecclesiastical attic. Now that he has ascended to the Chair of Peter, Benedict XVI is in a position to encourage further the “concession” that the late John Paul II first granted in 1984 for the celebration of the sixteenth-century “Mass of Pius V”, a uniform and strictly rubricised ritual codified at the Council of Trent to counter the Protestant Reformation.

The desire that groups have to celebrate the old Mass cannot be relegated merely to a type of nostalgia for the use of Latin, or a predilection for ornate vestments and arcane ritual – although this aspect should not be altogether dismissed. Actually, the crux of the matter is much more serious and boils down to this: can there be two existing Roman Rites, or does the new Mass necessarily replace and suppress the old? This is the debate that has raged from the very beginning of the Second Vatican Council’s liturgical reform. In those days the near unanimous view of the world’s bishops was that, while the Church could have a number of different Latin Rites (the Ambrosian or Mozarabic Rites, for example), there could only be one Roman Rite. One replaced the other. It was that simple. But a minority of bishops and Roman Curia officials – and vociferous pockets of lay people who resisted the liturgical changes – said they had a right to continue using the old Mass. The most extreme among them were vicious in their attacks, going so far as to call Pope Paul VI a heretic for replacing the Catholic Mass with a Protestant prayer service.

The Pope was wounded by the assault on his person and on papal authority, yet he stood resolutely behind the reform, which – he pointed out – was aimed at making lay people active participants in a simplified and more intelligible liturgy. “We wish to render the liturgy more pure, more genuine, more in agreement with the source of truth and grace, more suitable to be transformed into a spiritual patrimony of the people,” he said on 4 December 1964 at the close of the second session of the Council. The final vote on the Council’s liturgical document, exactly one year earlier, had been 2,147 in favour and only four against. Even though the Council called for the retention of Latin as the principal language of the liturgy, the call for the introduction of the vernacular was so strong – even among the majority of the bishops – that the ancient tongue of the Church was gradually judged to be a relic of the past. This wounded traditionalists to the heart and only hardened their resistance to the new Mass, which was finally promulgated in 1969.

Some of those people (and even many today) mistakenly believed that the Second Vatican Council invented the liturgical reform, failing to realise that the development – which Pope Pius XII in 1956 called a “movement of the Holy Spirit in the Church” – was already well under way in the early decades of the 1900s in places like Belgium, Germany and the United States. Pope Pius – a revered figure for most traditionalists – actually paved the way for the Second Vatican Council by encouraging Catholic scholars to undertake a more scientific study of scripture and by forming a commission in 1948 to lay the foundation for the general reform of the liturgy. The restoration of the Easter Vigil in 1951 was one of the first results of the group, which continued working right up to 1961 and the eve of the Council.

But the traditionalists’ resistance had another element, as well. Archbishop Annibale Bugnini CM – who was one of the main architects of liturgical reform from 1948 to 1975 – was painfully conscious that some people were waging “war against the Council” in its entirety by using the liturgy as a pretext. History has shown that he was probably not far off the mark. According to the maxim “lex orandi, lex credendi”, people’s worship reflects their beliefs. Under the Old Rite, the priest and the congregation face the same direction as he consecrates the bread and wine. He recites many of the prayers, including the Eucharistic Prayer, alone and sotto voce. Only the priest and male acolytes are permitted in the sanctuary during the Mass. The faithful kneel to receive Communion and the priest places the host on the tongue.

The old Mass mirrored a vertical hierarchy of truths, a strict discipline, legalism, conformism, and marked separation of clerics from the laity; the New Mass highlighted a dialogical dimension between priest and people, the active participation of the laity, and the possibility of adaptation (although this was often exaggerated early on). The argument was that the Tridentine Rite was not just a different way of celebrating the Mass, but that it was undergirded with a theology and understanding of the Church that was inconsistent with the Second Vatican Council. This was one of the reasons why the vast majority of members and consulters at the Congregation of Divine Worship – of which Archbishop Bugnini was secretary – believed any concession to traditionalists on the old Mass would be “harmful to the liturgical reform and the pastoral efforts of the bishops to apply it”.

Then John Paul II, within a year of becoming Pope, consulted the world’s bishops on how the Second Vatican Council liturgical reform – barely a decade in process – was proceeding. Aside from scattered abuses, due especially to experimentation, most of the bishops responded favourably. According to a 1984 letter to the bishops from the Congregation for Divine Worship – known as Quattuor abhinc annos – “the problem of priests and faithful holding to the so-called ‘Tridentine’ Rite was almost completely solved”. But the Pope surprised many people by granting an indult (it was defined as a “concession”) to those who, under very limited conditions, wanted to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. There was no doubt that the Pope’s concern was that the traditionalist movement – at that time closely united to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who also rejected most of the documents of the Second Vatican Council – was in danger of falling into schism.

Brazil is still the largest Catholic country, but the numbers attending Mass have been dwindling in recent years, while evangelical churches have gained millions of converts. But, against all the odds, the Campos outpost, once regarded as schismatic, has not only survived but prospered: so many young men wish to study for the priesthood there that candidates are being turned away.

Bishop Rifan has been apostolic administrator of Campos since 2002. He is, effectively, a parallel bishop, under an arrangement agreed with Pope John Paul II, by which the traditionalist Society of São João Maria Vianney was received back into full Communion with Rome after a 14-year schism. The accord, under which the Society acknowledged the authority of the Pope and of the Second Vatican Council, and the Holy See recognised the right of traditionalist priests to continue celebrating Mass according to the Tridentine Rite, was negotiated by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, the Prefect for the Congregation of the Clergy, who is from Colombia. Cardinal Ratzinger, as he was then, was also very supportive, Bishop Rifan’s personal repre-sentative in Britain, Carlos Colón, told The Tablet this week.

The Brazilian Catholic hierarchy accepts that Bishop Rifan and his team of 28 priests and 100 nuns perform an important function: the apostolic administration’s 17 parishes run a total of 15 schools, with more than 3,000 pupils, and there are also two orphanages, caring for 170 children. The seminary accommodates 25 candidates for the priesthood, but it is overcrowded, and a new one, with 80 places, in a pleasant location on the edge of town, is under construction. That will solve the apostolic administrator’s main problem, of not having enough places for all those wishing to study – in striking contrast to the decline in the number of vocations in other parts of Brazil, in particular, and Latin America in general.

The influence of Campos appears to be spreading to other parts of Brazil. A small church accommodating about 150 people in São Paulo, South America’s largest city, is full to bursting for the Latin Tridentine Mass every Sunday afternoon. The church was made available by Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, Archbishop of São Paulo, who was a strong contender to succeed Pope John Paul. There is also an energetic traditional rite priest at Nova Iguaçu, just outside Rio, where there is a school for 80 pupils. According to Carlos Colón, priests from about 18 other dioceses around Brazil, including Recife and Salvador, in the north east, have contacted Campos asking for advice about celebrating Mass in the Old Rite.