In April of this year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) sent a letter to all the world’s Latin Rite bishops asking them about the implementation of Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum. Issued on July 7, 2007, Summorum Pontificum restored the Traditional Latin Mass (described by Pope Benedict as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite) to a place at the heart of the Catholic Church’s liturgical life. It gave priests the right to celebrate, without the need to obtain special permission, this older form of the Roman Rite, codified by Pope St. Pius V in 1570 and last revised by Pope St. John XXIII in 1962. It also asked pastors and bishops to provide for the celebration of this Mass wherever a group of lay faithful desired it. And it envisioned the co-existence of both the Extraordinary Form and the newer Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite in the same parishes, as well as the establishment of personal parishes dedicated to the Extraordinary Form.
The CDF letter of April 2020 asked the bishops to submit their answers to nine questions by July 31. To supplement the bishops’ responses, the International Federation Una Voce (FIUV) also presented the CDF with a report about the world-wide implementation of Summorum Pontificum. With detailed information from 368 dioceses in 56 countries in six continents, the FIUV Report complements the CDF survey in terms of both content and perspective, especially the perspective of the laity.
An analysis of the CDF survey questions and an account of how the FIUV Report was conceptualized and assembled is found in Edition 10 (Winter 2020) of the FIUV newsletter Gregorius Magnus. This edition also features “select comments from those filling in the FIUV’s world-wide survey … Each paragraph … comes from a different diocese; they have been selected to illustrate both common themes and the variations found even within a single country.” Six conclusions and three recommendations found in the Report to the CDF are reproduced in this special FIUV World Survey section of Gregorius Magnus.
