The Pope's legal creation of a kind of Anglican Rite within the Catholic Church is the kind of thing I have been hoping for for decades. Anglican usage deserves to be preserved, whatever happens to the Anglican Communion.
The people who would care are the literally millions of decent but unschooled Catholics who are taken on bus or air tours to this place because, not following the details of church activity, they never heard of the local Bishp's condemnation. Would the Medjugorje conspiracy of noise and silence, the agreement between rebellious Franciscans, profiteering travel agents, and opportunistic locals, be enough to silence the voice of the Pope? I doubt it. Whatever else may be said of the condemnation of abortion and of JPII's intervention against female ordination, one thing is certain: everyone in the world knows that they happened. You cannot, as Medjugorje does, deceive people through ignorance. And we are talking about a different public: one doubts whether very many of the pretend Catholics who claim the right to murder their and others' babies would be deeply interested in Marian pilgrimage. Anyone who wishes to visit a Marian shrine (which is what Medjugorje claims to be) must be assumed to belong to the most traditional and most idiomatic kind of devout Catholic. Such persons would not treat the word of the Pope with contempt.
You're right - I forget that most Catholics probably don't even hear when their own bishops do something, much less a bishop in another country. It's not that I thought the Catholics on pilgrimage are indifferent or hostile to the two statements I quoted, but that if they'd ignore the local bishop, why wouldn't they ignore the Pope? But of course if they haven't heard, they aren't ignoring what he said, they're ignorant of it instead.
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