Pope Benedict XVI has long been a passionate advocate of a renewed sense of beauty in the liturgy. He has taken some steps to encourage this, most notably his 2007 letter Summorum Pontificum allowing the broader use of the Traditional Latin Mass. He has, predictably, met with a great deal of resistance on the part of liturgical conservatives (by which I mean, in this context, those who insist that the liturgy must remain frozen in the exact form it took in the 1970s). But he is making some progress: Today, for the first time in 40 years, a High Mass was celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica according to the pre-Vatican II Roman Rite (the celebrant was American archbishop Raymond Burke, well known to NRO readers). Some lovely video (and even lovelier audio!) can be found here; and here’s a report on the Mass from veteran Vaticanologist Robert Moynihan.