Preconciliar rites after the Second Vatican Council

In the Catholic Church, preconciliar Latin liturgical rites ("preconciliar": before the Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962) coexist with postconciliar rites. In the years following the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI initiated significant changes. Some of Paul VI's contemporaries, who considered the changes to be too drastic, obtained from him limited permission for the continued use of the previous Roman Missal. In the years since, the Holy See has granted varying degrees of permission to celebrate the Roman Rite and other Latin rites in the same manner as before the council. The use of preconciliar rites is associated with traditionalist Catholicism.

In the decades immediately after the Second Vatican Council, each of the various grants of permission to use the preconciliar Roman Rite Mass was in the form of an indult (i.e. a concession). The term universal indult was used to describe a hypothetical broadening of these concessionary permissions, but in his 2007 apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI went even further than the proposed "universal indult" by elevating the status of the preconciliar forms beyond that of a concession. In 2021, Pope Francis reinstated restrictions on the use of the Tridentine Mass with his apostolic letter Traditionis custodes.