Cardinal Arthur Roche, the current prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, is the most influential Englishman to have worked in the Vatican for many years.¹The last British cardinal in the Curia was the Scottish-born William Heard (1884-1973), appointed head of the Roman Rota in 1958 and made a cardinal by Pope St. John XXIII a year later, though only ordained bishop in 1962.

Born in Batley Carr, West Yorkshire, in 1950, Arthur Roche was educated at Catholic schools before entering the seminary at St Alban’s College in Valladolid, Spain, where he received a degree in theology from the Jesuit Comillas Pontifical University.

On returning to England, he was ordained priest in 1975 by Bishop Gordon Wheeler, Bishop of Leeds, and his early career was spent entirely in his home diocese, where he was private secretary to Wheeler, vice-chancellor of the diocese, served on the staff of St Anne’s Cathedral, and was parish priest of St Wilfred’s Church, Farnley.

After obtaining a Licence in Theology at the Gregorian University in 1991, Roche served as spiritual director of the Venerable English College and in 1996 succeeded the future Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, as general secretary of the Bishop’s College of England and Wales.

In 2001 he was named an auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Westminster and in the following year coadjutor to the Bishop of Leeds, David Konstant. In 2004 Roche became the ninth Bishop of Leeds, and during his time in office also served as chairman of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy; he was therefore responsible for supervising the 2011 publication of the new English translation of the Roman Missal, whose more literal rendering of the Latin was criticised by some liturgical scholars as antiquated and conservative.

Bishop Roche’s successful introduction of the new translation led to his appointment as Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, now a dicastery, and in 2021 Roche succeeded Cardinal Robert Sarah as its prefect. In 2022 Pope Francis made him a cardinal and also a member of the Dicastery for Bishops.

Since his ordination as a priest, Cardinal Roche had been regarded as a cleric who was being fast-tracked to hold high office. After Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor retired as Archbishop of Westminster in 2009, he was regarded as one of the bishops most likely to succeed him. That he did not do so may have reflected the fact that, despite the relatively conservative style of worship that he favoured in his own cathedral, his work to promote a more accurately translated Missal and his avoidance of theological controversy, Bishop Roche was the member of the English hierarchy most distrusted by liturgical traditionalists inspired by the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI.

In 2007, immediately after Pope Benedict issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum that removed most restrictions on the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in parishes, Bishop Roche of Leeds issued an “interpretation” of the document that was clearly designed to restrict the use of the Old Rite as much as possible while ostensibly implementing it. This interpretation argued that permission to introduce the traditional Mass into a parish, granted by Pope Benedict to a “stable group of the faithful,” applied only to parishioners already belonging to the parish where it was requested. It also implied that these parishioners should be existing devotees of the Old Rite rather than those who wished to begin attending it.

This was an erroneous interpretation of Summorum Pontificum, as the pontifical commission Ecclesia Dei made clear in its Instruction Universae Ecclesiae, emphasising that Pope Benedict was “offering to all the faithful the Roman Liturgy in the Usus Antiquior.”

According to unofficial reports, Bishop Roche’s hostile implementation of Summorum Ponitificum reflected the wishes of Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, who had strongly opposed Pope Benedict’s removal of restrictions on the Tridentine Mass; the Leeds “interpretation” might have served as a blueprint for the undermining of Summorum Pontificum throughout England and Wales had not Rome intervened.

Bishop Roche was also a controversial figure in Leeds for other reasons. In 2010 he had announced a programme of church mergers and closures that cut the number of parishes in his diocese almost by half. In the previous year he had closed seven parishes in the Pontefract and Wakefield region of the diocese, provoking an unprecedented level of fury from parishioners who resented not only the decision but what they perceived as the bishop’s cold and lofty manner.

In one protest, about 40 parishioners of St. John the Evangelist chained themselves to church railings, lit candles and sang hymns. The credibility of Roche’s insistence that such radical closures were financially inevitable was later undermined by revelations that by the time he left Leeds the diocese was heavily in debt as a result of episcopal overspending. Moreover, in 2012, management consultants from the Kinharvie Institute concluded that the aforementioned parish reorganisation had been badly managed, leaving “significant levels of disappointment, sadness, pain and especially anger” in its wake.

Such bad press did not impede Cardinal Roche from being appointed to one of the most influential offices in the Roman Curia, but these and other episodes were likely embarrassing for a prelate whose reputation had been built on his supposed administrative skills.

Although observers have described the cardinal as a church bureaucrat with few theological or other academic qualifications, he is not without skill as a writer of theological reflections. In 2023, Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire published The Gardens of God, a collection of retreat talks by Cardinal Roche. It contains, perhaps surprisingly given his restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass, a fruitful reflection on the Roman canon, whose Latin description of the bishops as fidei cultoribus, argues Roche, presents an image of God as a gardener that is impossible to convey fully in English. The Cardinal writes:

“The word cultor comes from the Latin verb colo, colere, which means ‘to cultivate.’ A cultor fidei is someone who cultivates faith like a gardener cultivates the land. He is someone who plants a tree in the soil that reaches to the heavens! The word ‘column,’ interestingly, has the same derivation. Classical architecture makes it easy for us to recognize trees in the magnificent columns of Greece and Rome where we see before our eyes stone trunks of trees whose capitals bear the semblance of branches and foliage.

“The cultor is someone who plants and harvests, who works and cares for the crops, the vines, who keeps bees and tends the beasts. These are all the original Latin usages. So, from within the context of the Eucharistic Prayer, we can say that bishops and priests are gardeners and farmers, as well as shepherds! They have to work at ground level, in the dust, among the weeds in God’s field.

“The cultor belongs to the land, which is one of the reasons why bishops have a specific territory in their titles. It is here, in his territory, that he plants and cultivates and brings in the harvest.”

The ideas in this essay were welcomed by some theological conservatives, but arguably, given the context – the importance of episcopal authority – they also point to one of the less appealing characteristics of Cardinal Roche: his own authoritarian record as the holder of episcopal and curial office.

This weakness was starkly illustrated in 2021, after Pope Francis published his motu proprio Traditionis Custodes that swept away many of the freedoms granted to the Old Rite faithful, making clear that the Pope eventually wished to see the 1962 Missal banned from parishes churches and the 1970 Missal recognised as “the unique expression of the Roman Rite.” The then Archbishop Roche, as the Vatican’s new head of Divine Worship, was responsible for implementing the ruling. He did so in a notably high-handed manner, sometimes exceeding his brief.

In an attempt to justify the motu proprio, in 2023 Roche went so far as to state on BBC radio that “the theology of the Church has changed.”

Serious questions were also raised about Roche’s grasp of the subject. In a letter to Cardinal Nichols of Westminster, the then Archbishop Roche claimed that the Traditional Latin Mass had been “abrogated by Pope Saint Paul VI.” This was factually incorrect. As Benedict XVI pointed out in a letter to the world’s bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum, “this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.”

Archbishop Roche also said that he had been unable to find any evidence that Pope Paul VI had granted a faculty to English Catholics for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass following an appeal from artistic luminaries including Agatha Christie, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Kenneth Clark and Iris Murdoch. Yet the precise details of the faculty, set out by Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, had been made public in 1971 and were readily available on the internet.

Cardinal Roche’s relentless and canonically questionable implementation of Traditionis Custodes appears to have damaged his reputation in the eyes of bishops, especially in the English-speaking world, who may not like the Old Rite but deplore the harshness of the cardinal’s attitude and the undermining of their own powers to regulate the liturgy in their own dioceses.

In 2024, for example, Cardinal Nichols cancelled the long-established celebration of the Tridentine Holy Week ceremonies in his diocese. It is reported by many sources that he did not want to do so, but was having his arm twisted by Roche.

The prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship also suffers from the perception, dating back to his days as general secretary of the Bishops Conference of England and Wales, that he likes to emphasise the grandeur of his office and has spent an inordinate amount of time in expensive restaurants. Indeed, Arthur Roche’s manner and lifestyle is a much livelier topic of discussion among the clergy than his theological opinions, which are bland rather than distinctive. His tone is neatly captured by his reaction to Amoris Laetitia, which he praised extravagantly without touching on the sensitive question of whether it permitted divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion:

“It’s very easily read – and it’s a very joyful read – because it’s a very encouraging message that the Holy Father is giving to the world on marriage and the family,” Archbishop Roche told Vatican Radio. He continued:

“It’s a light in a very obscure world which really doesn’t believe in the family and in marriage as much as the Church does, so it will be of enormous encouragement to people throughout the world as they make their steps towards marriage – particularly young couples who live in a world that is full of challenges and full of change – because here we have a document which is joyful, and brings to them, really, the tenderness of God.”

Cardinal Roche’s unreserved praise for Pope Francis is one of his hallmarks. It is not, however, evidence that he can be considered part of the Holy Father’s inner circle of advisers.²The traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli has claimed that the Pope blames him for the clumsy editing and implementation of handling of Traditionis Custodes.

Cardinal Roche’s public views on other matters pertaining to the Church and society are less well known. However, he regularly posts pro-life, anti-abortion stories on his X account, listed under a pseudonym. Other posted stories include opposing gender ideology and euthanasia, and during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, he expressed concern about anti-Catholic words and actions of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. He has also shared his strong support for synodality.