Traditional Latin Mass to end in Detroit archdiocese parishes

The Catholic Herald• April 17, 2025

Archbishop Edward Weisenburger of Detroit (Credit: Archdiocese of Detroit)

Archbishop Edward Weisenburger of Detroit has announced that parish churches in the archdiocese offering the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) will be unable to do so after 1 July.

The archbishop – formerly bishop of Tucson, Arizona, before he was named by Pope Francis on 11 February this year as the new archbishop of Detroit – cited the Vatican’s 2023 direction that diocesan bishops do not possess the authority to allow the TLM to be celebrated in an existing parish church.

In an April 16 announcement, the archdiocese said Weisenburger, who was installed as archbishop last month, recently told his priests that he is unable to renew the prior permissions given to parish churches to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass, reports the Catholic News Agency (CNA). As a result, those permissions will expire at the start of July.

One prominent Detroit shrine will still be able to offer the TLM, and Weisenburger said he intends to identify at least four non-parish locations in the archdiocese where the TLM can be celebrated.

The move comes in the wake of Pope Francis’s 2021 apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes and the subsequent fallout. The apostolic letter directed bishops to designate one or more locations in which priests can celebrate the TLM, but specified that those locations could not be within an existing parish church.

Following Traditionis Custodes, bishops in some dioceses that already had thriving Latin Mass communities within parish churches – in places like Denver; Lake Charles, Louisiana; and Springfield, Illinois – granted broad dispensations that allowed parishes to continue offering the Latin Mass as before, CNA notes.

In February 2023, however, the Vatican issued a clarification to Traditionis Custodes to halt this measure being taken, stating that bishops couldn’t unilaterally authorise these parishes and that such an action is reserved “to the Apostolic See”.

Bishops who received Vatican approval for their dioceses to dispense certain parishes from Traditionis Custodes were only granted that permission for a temporary period. 

“The Holy See has reserved for itself the ability to allow the Traditional Latin Mass to be celebrated in parish churches. Local bishops no longer possess the ability to permit this particular liturgy in a parish church,” notes the Detroit Archdiocese announcement.

“With this in mind, the prior permissions to celebrate this liturgy in archdiocesan parish churches – which expire on July 1, 2025 – cannot be renewed.

Former Detroit archbishop Allen Vigneron, who led the archdiocese from 2009 until his resignation at the customary age of 75 years old in February, issued guidelines, which came into force on 1 July 2022, for parishes to request permission to continue to offer the TLM within certain limits following Traditionis Custodes coming into effect.

The Detroit Archdiocese announcement states: “It is the archbishop’s intention to identify a non-parish setting where the Traditional Latin Mass may be celebrated in each of the archdiocese’s four regions.

“As noted above, and in accordance with recent decisions by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, these locations will not be parish churches. Once these locations are determined, they will be shared with the faithful.”

Detroit is not the first diocese to have announced an end to the TLM in parish churches as a result of the Vatican’s clarification regarding Traditionis Custodes, CNA notes.

In 2022, Bishop Stephen Parkes of Savannah, Georgia, announced his diocese was ending Traditional Latin Masses by May 2023, explaining that the permission he had sought and received from the Vatican to allow two parish churches to continue offering the TLM had expired. 

In 2023, the Diocese of Albany, New York also revoked the permission it had previously given for two parishes to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass in order to comply with the Vatican’s February 2023 clarification.

Photo: Traditional Latin Mass (PIGAMA/Shutterstock).