Latin Mass benefits from the "Barbara Streisand" effect

In March 2003, an amateur photographer, Kenneth Adelman, posted a series of 12,000 aerial photographs on his website to expose the effects of erosion and real estate development on the California coast with, to be generous, little impact.

But one of those photographs featured the mansion of actress and singer Barbra Streisand, who considered it an invasion of her privacy and sued Adelman. The result was a lawsuit that was made public, which the Hollywood star lost, and which resulted in Adelman's website registering 420,000 hits in a single month. The 'Streisand effect' was born, when the attempt to censor or cover up certain information results in the exact opposite effect.

Traditionis custodes has failed, and it has done so, in large part, by a process very similar to the 'Streisand effect'. The adherents of the traditional Mass are a tiny, statistically negligible minority in the Catholic world, but at the time of the publication of the Papal motu proprio it was much more so and, above all, the very existence of this tiny redoubt was virtually unknown to the average practising Catholic. And that is what Francis' document ended up with.

Suddenly, the Pope was dealing with an issue that seemed to be a non-issue to no one, about which the overwhelming majority knew nothing at all. That alone made it intriguing.

Even more intriguing was to watch this Pontiff who has made mercy his watchword singling out for censure an insignificant group without being able to justify his restrictions except with vague accusations and suspicions without proof; to watch a pope who is particularly fond of diversity, anxious to bring more or less distant religions together, take the trouble to charge a perfectly orthodox set of Catholic faithful. God, it seems, wants plurality of religions, but not of rites.

Even more: the Catholic reader was perplexed by the justification of unity, when he, any practising faithful, witnesses that the rite of the Novus Ordo Mass varies enormously from one parish to another, with flagrant liturgical abuses that few denounce any more and that never provoke Rome's response. And all this, repealing a Motu Proprio only fourteen years earlier promulgated by a Pope who was still alive and inhabiting the same city.

So the Motu Proprio had the effect on many to take an interest in this ancient rite, common to Catholic Christianity for centuries, which had somehow become a danger in the Vatican's view. And the effect was not exactly as expected.

The French Episcopate's unofficial organ, La Croix, reported on the extraordinary success of this year's pilgrimage to Chartres, where Masses are celebrated according to the 'usus antiquior'. "This year, the pilgrimage attracted a record number of 16,000 walkers, young people, and this figure could have been higher if the organisers, for logistical reasons, had not closed registrations more than a week before departure. And many observers, including the mainstream media, were impressed by the fervour and faith of the pilgrims, in complete contrast to the general sadness of the Church in France, paralysed by the abuse scandal," reads the French publication.

Once it has been seen, it is impossible to deny it. "The question, therefore, is no longer if and when the traditional Mass will be definitively replaced by the 1969 missal", La Croix continues. "The traditional Mass is not going to disappear and everything leads us to believe that it will continue to grow, in absolute terms but above all in relative terms, given the gradual attrition of a certain number of ordinary rite parishes."

"It is therefore more a question of determining in what modalities and in what framework this continuous growth of the traditional Mass will take place, because it is in this aspect that the Church still has a certain room for manoeuvre. Now, in this sense, this fundamental movement, of which the Chartres pilgrimage has become a symbol, poses two great challenges to the universal Church, that of the unity of the faithful and that of the posterity of the Second Vatican Council in liturgical matters".

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