(LifeSiteNews) — A high-ranking cardinal has said the Catholic Church is waiting for Pope Leo XIV’s decision about the future of the Latin Mass.

Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, vicar general for the Vatican State and a Pope Francis loyalist, was asked by the Catholic Herald in an exclusive interview on Sunday whether Catholics could “inquire about the Traditional Latin Mass and its future status.”

“Better not answer that. I have been told that we will wait for the Holy Father to decide,” Gambetti responded.

Latin Mass-attending Catholics have been anxiously awaiting a clear statement or directive from Pope Leo about the Vatican’s permissions for the traditional liturgy, hoping he will reverse the severe restrictions imposed on the TLM by Pope Francis via Traditionis Custodes.

Prelates and academics have already asked Leo and the Vatican for “freedom” for the Latin Mass, both publicly and privately. A historian who accompanied the Polish president to the Vatican to meet Leo earlier this month said that he addressed the “injustice” of restrictions on the TLM in talks with Vatican prelates.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider this summer also called upon Leo to “free” the TLM.

While the Vatican under Leo has granted one parish in Texas a two-year extension to offer the Traditional Latin Mass, the pope has not given any indications thus far, including in this decision, that he will declare Traditionis Custodes abrogated or modify its diktats. 

On the contrary, the two-year TLM extension in Texas, as well as the TLM suppressions ordered by bishops since Leo took office, suggest the pope will not undo Traditionis Custodes.

While Leo has said in the past that he didn’t always agree with Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, his own appointment by Francis as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops appears to indicate a significant level of common ground between the two men. Several prelates and Leo’s own brother have suggested this is the case by predicting that Leo will continue in the footsteps of Francis.

Heterodox Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., predicted in a May interview that “the substance of Francis’ pontificate will endure” under Leo. The Pope’s brother, John Prevost, has also previously said that he expects the new pope to continue “the tradition of Pope Francis.”

Traditionis Custodes, which has led to the suppression of dozens of Latin Masses around the world, has been denounced by clergy and scholars as a repudiation of the perennial practice of the Catholic Church and even of solemn Church teaching.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has affirmed that the traditional liturgy cannot be proscribed, even by the Pope himself. “It is a question of an objective reality of divine grace which cannot be changed by a mere act of the will of even the highest ecclesiastical authority,” the cardinal wrote in 2021.

St. Pius V’s 1570 bull Quo Primum permanently authorized the traditional Mass, declaring that it may be used “freely and lawfully” in “perpetuity” and even that the wrath of God would fall upon those who would dare to restrict or abolish the Traditional Latin Mass, also known as the Tridentine Mass.

“This present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remains always valid and retains its full force,” Quo Primum added.

While members of the Conventual Franciscan community have described Cdl. Gambetti as an “obedient man of authority,” according to the Catholic Herald, Gambetti has a history of promoting heterodox ideas in conformity with Pope Francis.

For example, as archpriest of Saint Peter’s Basilica, he said last year that clergy at St. Peter’s Basilica would bless homosexual “couples,” in order “to show the world the maternal face of the Church and along the lines of what [Pope Francis] has asked for.”

In December 2021, Pope Francis named Gambetti chair of the newly created Fratelli Tutti Vatican Foundation. Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’ encyclical “on fraternity and human friendship,” is widely argued to promote religious indifferentism and was condemned by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the U.S., as promoting a “blasphemous” form of brotherhood without God as well as “religious indifferentism.”

Fratelli Tutti’s publication was welcomed by the Masonic Lodge of Spain, which stated that Francis “embraces the Universal Fraternity, the great principle of Modern Freemasonry.”