It would definitely attract some people. An old friend of mine (from our Catholic high school), who almost never goes to Mass, told me he’d be willing to venture back if it were in Latin, just for the experience. We started looking into it, we were going to go together, but lost interest in the idea when we realised there weren’t any convenient to attend. I don’t know how common that attitude is, but I’m sure he’s not the only person like that.

And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.

There are clearly people who are interested very specifically in the Latin mass. But even though the church is losing practicing members, it's still huge; normie Catholics dwarf tradcaths.

But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.

> He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird.

What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.

I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.

And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance

[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them

I'm just going to point out that it's not surprising that laypeople and clergy who reject Vatican II also have an unusual habit of faceplanting into antisemitism, given that Nostra Aetate was a product of Vatican II.

The Vatican first condemned antisemitism by name in 1928, so I don't think disagreeing even with Nostra aetate necessarily has antisemitism as a consequence. The perennial problem with antisemitism, however, is nobody (Jews included) can agree on how to define it, and how essential Nostra aetate is to ruling it out for Catholics may depend on how broad or narrow a definition of it you adopt.