With an institution as colorful and as ancient as the Catholic Church, you never lack for papal prognosticators who spend a lot of their time huddled in corners, dissecting plots and hidden motives. A surprising number of these tea-leaf readers are priests. And now, after the two big pronouncements from Rome in the last couple of weeks, on the Latin mass and the primacy of the Church, they’re breaking from their huddles, standing up straight, and clearing their throats:

The papal decree on the Latin Mass might be “not just about the liturgy but also about the teaching of Vatican II,” said the Rev. James F. Puglisi, an American who runs the Centro Pro Unione, an ecumenical research center in Rome.

For instance, Puglisi noted, the Good Friday liturgy in the Tridentine Missal contains a prayer for the conversion of the Jews that refers to their “blindness” and the “veil [on] their hearts.” The post-Vatican II Missal replaced that with a more conciliatory prayer for the Jews as “the first to hear the word of God.”

The Vatican’s statement last week that Protestant denominations are not churches “in the proper sense” but mere “Christian communities” is also potentially problematic for ecumenical relations.

According to the Rev. William Henn, an American who teaches at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, the insistence that Vatican II did not change the church might detract from the council’s historic support for ecumenism.

“My fear would be that stressing the identity of Vatican II as one of continuity might give the impression that there was nothing new that happened at Vatican II,” Henn said. “In that case, there would have been no point in holding it.”

My take: the pope just wanted to clear off his desk before vacation, and needed to get a couple things out of the way. Neither of these “big” documents will likely have the earth-shaking effect most worry-warts predict.

But then, what do I know? I’m not a papal prognosticator. And I drink coffee, not tea.