The meeting announced by the Pope on the traditional Mass has already taken place in August

In his first interview with journalist Elise Ann Allen, from the portal Crux, Pope Leo XIV acknowledged in July that “he had not yet had the opportunity to sit down with a group of people who promote the Tridentine rite”, but added that “that occasion would come soon”. The interview took place in two sessions —on July 10 at Castel Gandolfo and July 30 at the Vatican— and was published on the past September 18.Many readers have understood those words as the promise of a future meeting. However, when placing the interview in its temporal context, everything points to the fact that the encounter to which the Pope referred has already taken place. On August 22, 2025, Leo XIV received in private audience Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, accompanied by several priests close to the traditional liturgy.Nothing has been communicated at all about what was discussed in that audience: neither Cardinal Burke nor the Vatican have made any information public, keeping everything within a framework of total discretion.

The truth is that a few days later the celebration of the Tridentine Mass at the Chair of St. Peter was authorized for the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage, a gesture loaded with meaning. Although there is no official confirmation that the two events are linked, the closeness of the dates allows us to think that the August 22 audience could precisely be the meeting that Leo XIV had planned and anticipated in July, or at least part of it.

The Pope, paradoxically, has appealed to synodality as a method to address this debate. If in that space of listening they attended to what seminarians, young priests, and analyzed in depth the origin of vocations think, the future of the Tridentine Mass would be guaranteed.

Thus, far from a meeting still pending, it is most likely that the meeting mentioned in the interview with Allen has already taken place in August, leaving as the first positive indication of it the authorization of the traditional Mass at the Chair of St. Peter.