Nostalgia and conflict in the Roman Catholic Church

David Gibson, Pope Leo Faces the First Crisis of His Pontificate, NYTimes, June 30, 2026.

The article starts out with (2nd paragraph):

The focus of the uproar is a breakaway faction based in Ecône, Switzerland, the Society of St. Pius X, which is devoted to the celebration of an outdated version of the Mass in Latin. Why is the group, named after Pope Pius X, a fiercely anti-liberal early-20th-century pontiff, causing such problems? Why should anyone care about such a recondite internal church dust-up?

And works its way around to this:

In fact, if today’s “trads” were sent back in time, they would discover that the old Mass was often a perfunctory affair celebrated in dodgy Latin with little participation by the faithful. Nor should it be forgotten that the Mass has undergone revisions over the past 2,000 years to adapt to social changes, such as the switch from Greek to Latin or the incorporation of Old Testament readings.

Linked to the traditionalist pining for a lost golden age is a reaction against a tectonic demographic shift in Catholicism. Yes, Christianity was born in the Middle East, but Catholicism grew up in Europe. “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe,” the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote a century ago. No more. Thanks in large part to Vatican II, Catholicism has grown enormously, more than doubling from 653 million members in 1970 to 1.4 billion today. The vast majority of that growth has come in the Southern Hemisphere. Catholicism is far more African, more Asian, more Latin American than it is European.

That’s not the story that the traditionalists want to tell. For them, modernization has been the death knell of the church, because the reforms of Vatican II correlated with the sharp decline of practice in Europe and the West. Their faith is tethered to Western Christendom, which the numbers illustrate. Latin Masses celebrated by the society and those celebrated with Vatican approval are overwhelmingly confined to the United States and parts of Europe. But thanks to their base in the industrialized West, traditionalists have money, influence and visibility.

What will happen? Strong action by Leo could prompt a backlash from the right, but it could also divide it. Conservatives have so far tried to put the best spin possible on Leo’s year-old pontificate and may be loath to turn on a 70-year-old pope who could be around for a long time.

There's more at the link.