ROME — Pope Francis made his debut on TikTok Sunday to promote his new autobiography, written with Italian journalist Carlo Musso for Mondadori.
“I would like to thank Mr. Carlo Musso who had the patience to help me remember so many things about my life,” the pontiff said on the controversial Chinese social media platform in regard to his book titled Hope: The Autobiography.
“It is an autobiography, but for me autobiographies are to thank God for what he has done with my life,” he said from the study of his Santa Marta residence in the Vatican. “Ultimately, the real protagonist is the Lord who took me by the hand and led me forward.”
On Sunday evening the pope appeared on Italy’s number-one television talk show Che Tempo Che Fa (“What Weather We’re Having”), during which he also spoke of his autobiography with host Fabio Fazio.
The book “gives a sense of what I am like,” Francis said.
The pope has suffered criticism from conservatives for doubling down in the autobiography on his decision to ban the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) in Catholic parishes, specifically lamenting its appeal to the “younger generations.”
The “rigidity” of those who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass “is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which is none other than an ecclesiastical version of individualism” the pope declares.
“These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties,” he continues.
“Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness,” he adds.
As one review noted, the pope comes close to “conflating a love of the Old Mass with psychosexual disorder” and to “equating liturgical conservatism with effeminacy.”
The pope’s de facto ban on the TLM was also sharply criticized by a number of high-ranking Catholic prelates, including Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former chief of the Vatican’s doctrinal office (CDF), Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, former head of the Vatican’s highest court.
Cardinal Müller rebuked Pope Francis for his severe clampdown on the TLM while allowing progressives to reject central tenets of the faith with impunity.
Pope Francis has “drastically restricted” the celebration of the Latin Mass with the clear intent to “condemn the Extraordinary Form to extinction in the long run,” Müller stated.
By punishing the conservative peripheries, Francis “ignores the religious feelings of the (often young) participants in the Masses according to the Missal of John XXIII” without the “slightest empathy,” he wrote.
“Instead of appreciating the smell of the sheep, the shepherd here hits them hard with his crook,” Müller declared, with an allusion to one of Francis’ favorite sayings.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, similarly insisted that the measures were unreasonably harsh and hurt “the hearts of many good people.”
The pope’s attack on the TLM “considers the very existence of a parallel rite to be an evil,” Zen declared, and reflects wishes “for the death of the [traditional] groups.”
Cardinal Burke published an essay bemoaning the pope’s attack on conservative Catholics.
Those who are attached to the Traditional Latin Mass “are deeply disheartened by the severity of the discipline” imposed by Pope Francis in his letter and “offended by the language it employs to describe them, their attitudes and their conduct,” Burke wrote.
“It is apparent from the severity of the document,” Burke said, that Pope Francis issued it “to address what he perceives to be a grave evil threatening the unity of the Church.”
The pope’s message to the “devout faithful who have a deep appreciation and attachment” to the Traditional Latin Mass is that “they suffer from an aberration which can be tolerated for a time but must ultimately be eradicated,” Burke declared.
