Francis obviously just wants to seem a bit Catholic sometimes, to deceive those who accept him as "pope".
That is why he makes empty, ineffective, gestures like this.
If he had any genuine good will for the Traditional Latin Mass, he would ban the Novus Ordo, get himself validly ordained, and then celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass in the Vatican.
But Francis I won't do any of that, because he detests the true Faith.
I know where you're coming from, SC, but I'm sorry to disagree. For one,
it is not entirely fair for any of us to presume to know that someone else
"detests the true Faith." And when you hold that as a foundational principle,
then you will derive all manner of opinions as a result of it.
The problem is the heresy of Modernism. It is an infectious disease of the
spirit that is rooted in a philosophical error. When you tamper with the most
basic principles of thought, you are asking for trouble, and that is what
Modernism does.
We are all subject to its wiles and schemes even if we don't know it, because
one of the symptoms of the disease is that you don't know you are infected.
Pope Francis is infected with Modernism, just as you and I are, and with the
experience he has been through in the Church over the past 50 years, there
is no wonder that he would be all the more unaware of his infection.
But there is more to this. What about Our Lady? The first official act Pope
Francis did was to make a personal pilgrimage down the street in Rome (it
only takes a few minutes when you live in the Vatican and have a car), to
the basilica of St. Mary Major, where he went inside and knelt to pray before
the icon of the Virgin Mother of God that was painted by the hand of St. Luke
the Evangelist, the physician and artist who wrote the third Synoptic Gospel.
If you don't know about St. Mary Major, it is the oldest church in the world
dedicated to Our Lady, and rests on the foundation that was laid out by a
miraculous snowfall in the heat of Roman summer, thus the Feast Day we
still have today, Our Lady of the Snows.
Are you going to say that Our Lady cannot effect a change in the heart of a
man? She can put down a pattern for the foundation of a church with snow
in 100+ degree weather, but she can't melt the coldness of a man's heart?
What Pope Francis needs is prayers, yours and mine and all of ours. It's up
to us, because God doesn't hear the prayers of heretics. So if we don't pray
for the Pope and we sit around waiting for heretics to pray for him, we are
no better than they are!
Stew on that for a while.