Sometimes it helps to have a different perspective. The quesiton by the OP would seem to indicate that the poster has a rather simple view of the Church, and one that is shared by many people.
There is something like 1 billion Catholics in the world (it helps, on occasion, to realize that the Church has to shepard a few more people than we realize).
So what does 1 billion people mean? Try this: if there were 10,000 cardinals, bishops and clergy in all the dicasteries in Rome, they would each be “responsible” for 100,000 people. And that presumes that those in the dicasteries are actually responsible for those people; many, if not most of the dicasteries are busy about many things other than what someone - a priest, a bishop, a parish - is doing or not doing.
The pope - this one or the previous one - meets with a bishop about once every 5 years; the time is limited (the pope meets them in groups, and his time with any one of them may be limited to an hour individually), and he won’t generally be meeting with that bishop again for another 5 years.
The pope does not hear each and every complaint that heads to Rome; I would doubt that he hears about 10% of the complaints.
The Church is not set up on a business model; the pope is not the CEO, with the bishops as mid-level department managers. The pope may well be “where the buck stops”, but most “bucks” don’t ever get to his “desk”. Most of it ends up in a dicastery; and they can only physically handle about so much - remember the ten thousand to 100,000 figure above? Well, there are not 10,000 members in the dicastery which would deal with liturgical abuses. There aren’t 1,000 (which would mean 1,000,000,000 they would be resposnible for…).
Further, we may be in the age of instant messaging; but that does not mean that Rome gets on the internet and burns off an email to a bishop every time someone complains about something the bishop has or has not done, or let or didn’t let some priest do…
Everyone - priests, bishops, cardinals, the pope - are busy, and most of them are busy every day, and with matters that often have nothing whatsoever to do with how Mass was said. And most of them have more matters than can be handled in the time that we as mere mortals are allotted in a day, which means that matters go through a constant triage of what crisis is currently in most need of attention.
The net result is that most of what goes on in any parish is not even noticed by the bishop, and literally almost none of it ever gets the attention of Rome. For that matter, most of what goes on in a diocese is not noticed by Rome. Major issues of long standing time - take for example the issue of liberation theology which has been rampant in much of South and Central America - goes on for a number of years before Rome rally gets focused on it; it then goes on for a good period of time before Rome makes much response. And the short of it is that Rome rarely ever makes a fast decsion, nor does it take a short route to resolving the issue; not now, and not really within the entire history of the Church. Issues in the earliest Church (you can read about them in the Acts of the Apostles) took a long time to solve, and the Church wasn’t a whole lot larger in terms of total Catholics than what we have today in a large diocese.
Take another relatively minor issue in rubrics - holding hands during the Our Father. That started over 40 years ago; there should be little doubt that Rome had not heard of it by the first time they re-wrote the GIRM - nothing happened. They re-wrote the GIRm a second time and there still has been nothing out of Rome about it. They appear to have bigger fish to fry.
There is a lot of frustration by a number of people of things which may be wrong. The Church is huge, and many of the things people complain about are often not even really noticed by Rome; and when they are, rome may make a response and then move on to other matters (meaning that the issue may not be resolved at all).
For all the claims of Modernism (most of which have nothing to do with Modernism) being the cause of everything that is wrong or is perceived to be wrong, most of it has more to do with the size of the church, the constant flow of issues the Church has to deal with, and the overall way that the Church deals with issues.
By making the pilgrimage to Lourdes and offering that beautiful Mass, I think that the Holy Father was reminding Europe of her dignity.