The Recovering Choir Director

Paragraph 11 of Mediator Dei points out Pope Pius XII’s intention to address this letter to the Western church, while acknowledging at a same level of honor the Eastern rites.

11. If in this encyclical letter We treat chiefly of the Latin liturgy, it is not because We esteem less highly the venerable liturgies of the Eastern Church, whose ancient and honorable ritual traditions are just as dear to Us. The reason lies rather in a special situation prevailing in the Western Church, of sufficient importance, it would seem, to require this exercise of Our authority.

Perhaps we can read into this an implicit acknowledgment on the part of the Pope that his liturgical jurisdiction is limited to the Latin rite. The special situation in the West to which the Pope refers points, in this reader’s view, to the schizophrenic regard for the liturgy in the Latin Church pointed out in previous paragraphs — the carelessness or apathy towards beauty on the one hand, the overzealous liturgical restoration threatening to morph into liturgical deformation on the other.