Traditional Latin Mass lacks approval at Texas A&M University

CNA Staff, Sep 26, 2025 / 13:36 pm (CNA).

The Diocese of Austin said Catholic students in College Station, Texas, did not secure required permissions to hold a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) on the campus and did not permit it to proceed.

Texas A&M sophomore Nick Cardone, president of the local chapter of a group known as Juventutem International, said in a press release Sept. 24 that a priest from the Diocese of Victoria, Texas, was scheduled to say the Mass for members of the group in a reserved room in an on-campus conference center. The priest called the night before the Mass was scheduled, however, saying the chancellor of the Austin Diocese sent him a directive “expressly forbidding him from traveling to College Station.”

Church law requires permission from the host diocese for a visiting priest to celebrate Mass to ensure priests in good standing are publicly ministering and to preserve mutual respect between jurisdictions.

Camille Garcia, communications director for the Diocese of Austin, told CNA in a statement the student group did not seek or receive permission from newly-installed bishop Daniel Garcia for its plan to hold a Mass “outside of a sacred space on the university campus,” maintaining that “… the approval and regulation of the Mass in the older rite is entrusted to the diocesan bishop, in accordance with current Church norms (cf. Traditionis Custodes).”

“When the priest who was to celebrate the Mass learned that the student organization had not secured the required permission, he informed them that he would not be able to celebrate the Mass,” the statement said.

Cardone expressed disappointment and said the diocese was “silencing one of the most vibrant and growing expressions of Catholic faith among young people in America.”

The student group, which is not affiliated with St. Mary’s Catholic Center, cited Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum in which the pope “reaffirmed the TLM, saying ‘what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred … and cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.’” 

While Benedict’s 2007 document granted greater freedom for priests to use the TLM, also known as the Tridentine liturgy, in its 1962 form, Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes changed the norms regulating the traditional rite’s use.

In one of his final acts as the bishop of Monterey, California, Garcia issued a letter to the Latin Mass community, located at Sacred Heart Church in Hollister, California, on Sept. 14 terminating the TLM in the diocese “in order to strengthen our unity with the universal Church” and “to support [Pope Francis’] goal of moving toward greater unity in the postconciliar Roman rite.” 

Cardone, a convert to Catholicism, told CNA that the group of over 100 students invites priests to say the TLM “once a month” and hosts a social event afterward. The Masses normally take place in students’ homes, he said.

He said after attending the TLM in his home parish, he was “shocked” by the modern liturgy at St. Mary’s and sought the traditional rite. Cardone wanted to find a way to attend the TLM in College Station, he told CNA.

He initially emailed Father Will Straten, the pastor at St. Mary’s, asking for the traditional Mass but received a response saying that “under Traditionis Custodes, they can’t do it.”

He then emailed “all the priests in College Station.”

“They all said it’s in the bishop’s jurisdiction,” he told CNA. 

Last spring, the group asked Austin’s Bishop Joe Vasquez, now the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, for permission, submitting over 100 signatories on a petition requesting the TLM. The students were told in an emailed response that “the bishop appreciates that they enjoy the liturgy, but because of Church law and a vague situation in the diocese,” he could not authorize it.

Cardone said they have not yet reached out to Garcia, who was installed as the Austin bishop on Sept. 18, but the students have been praying a novena for him since his installation, and when it ends they will email him and ask for permission to have the TLM on campus.

“We’re Roman Catholics, we belong to the Roman rite,” Cardone said. “It is the Mass that was celebrated for almost 2,000 years. We like the steady foundation; the patrimony that formed so many saints.”

A priest from the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) who has said the traditional Mass for the students on occasion suggested they affiliate with the Juventutem.

The Juventutem A&M chapter, which now has nearly 140 members, says it is part of the international Juventutem movement, which is “a network of young Catholics dedicated to sanctification through traditional liturgy, prayer, and community life. Juventutem International, founded in 2004, is recognized by the Holy See and active in more than 25 countries worldwide.”

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/266795/traditional-latin-mass-lacks-approval-at-texas-a-and-m-university