Pope Francis moved in 2014 to significantly curtail the granting of the monsignor title, instructing that the two lower grades of the honour would no longer normally be given to diocesan priests under the age of sixty-five, effectively removing the honorific as a routine mark of recognition for younger clergy that some critics had come to see as feeding a culture of ambition and status-seeking within the priesthood that sat awkwardly against the simplicity Francis has repeatedly urged on clergy throughout his papacy.
The change did not abolish the title, which the pope retains full discretion to grant, and dioceses vary in how strictly they have applied the new guidance in the years since, but the episode illustrates that even a purely honorific title with no sacramental or jurisdictional content of its own can still become the subject of real institutional reform when a pope decides that how and to whom it is given says something about the character of the clergy he wants to encourage.
Before the 2014 change, the honour came in three distinct grades of differing rank, apostolic protonotary supernumerary, prelate of honour, and chaplain to His Holiness, each carrying its own dress and precedence, and cathedral chapters and papal households had long used the grades to mark internal seniority among diocesan clergy who assisted at the highest level of church ceremonial. Understanding the honour as three ranks rather than one avoids treating every monsignor as holding an identical dignity, since a protonotary and a chaplain to His Holiness were never equivalent even before Francis narrowed how freely any of the three could be conferred.