Co-host, Regina Unscripted | Catholic writer & commentator | Vatican affairs, theology & culture | With the salvation of souls in view.
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I love Archbishop Broglio’s observation that someone described Traditionis Custodes as “a solution in search of a problem.” It captures something of the really troubling nature of the entire approach of the Francis pontificate to the traditional liturgy.
The stated objective was ecclesial unity, yet the practical consequence has often been to alienate precisely those Catholics who are most passionately committed to the Church’s sacramental life, doctrinal integrity and continuity with her own history. Of course there are traditionalists whose attitude towards legitimate ecclesiastical authority is deeply problematic, but that is a question of ecclesiology and obedience, not an inherent defect in a liturgy that nourished countless saints.
Pope Benedict XVI understood something that seems to have been forgotten: unity does not require uniformity, and the Church’s inheritance is not a threat to her future. After all, the Catholic Church is not a liturgical monoculture. She embraces the Byzantine, Alexandrian, Armenian, Syriac and other venerable liturgical traditions, including those of the Syro-Malabar and Coptic Catholic Churches, each expressing the same Catholic faith through its own distinctive spiritual and liturgical inheritance. This extraordinary diversity is not regarded as an obstacle to ecclesial unity but as a manifestation of the Church's universality. What binds these communities together is their common faith and communion with the successor of Peter, not the uniformity of their worship. If the Church can accommodate such profound liturgical diversity across East and West, why should the coexistence of the older and newer forms of the Roman liturgy suddenly constitute an intolerable threat to unity? This reality makes Roche's demands about unity look, frankly, myopic. Indeed, it is rather difficult to explain why a Church that speaks incessantly about synodality, accompaniment, diversity and listening should regard the liturgical aspirations of some of her most committed faithful as a problem requiring suppression.
Surely the genuinely pastoral response is to welcome Catholics attached to the ancient liturgy into the full life of the Church, insisting upon communion with Peter while respecting their legitimate aspirations.
The great irony of Traditionis Custodes is that a measure ostensibly designed to overcome division may have deepened the very divisions it claimed to address. Archbishop Broglio is right to question the premise. Perhaps it is time Rome did the same.
Archbishop Broglio on the Latin Mass – “someone told me that Traditionis Custodes was a solution in search of a problem”
The former @USCCB president & current ordinary of @MilArchUSA called for wider availability of the old rite:
“I believe it’s not necessary to stifle this desire to worship God in this way.”
Details on @CatholicHerald via @tribuchretienne
"When I was in prison, you came to visit me". Pope Leo’s visit to a Buenos Aires prison raises a difficult question: do we believe that someone guilty of a serious crime can become more than the worst thing he has done?
Meeting prisoners today, Leo expressed the hope that a new life is possible, a demanding Christian claim, especially when we remember that the consequences of an offender’s actions may remain with other people for the rest of their lives. Forgiveness cannot restore a murdered person to a family, erase abuse or make betrayal inconsequential. Forgiveness does not mean repentance removes the need for punishment, restitution where possible and protection against further harm. A claim to have changed must never become a convenient way of escaping scrutiny.
Yet despite this responsibility itself assumes that a person is more than an object to be managed. We hold people accountable because their choices matter and that same moral seriousness requires us to recognise that their subsequent choices matter too: whether they acknowledge what they did, abandon their excuses and begin the difficult work of living differently. There's a temptation to divide society into people whose futures deserve investment and people whose pasts have permanently disqualified them. Christianity resists that division without pretending that everyone can safely be trusted. A prison chaplain can believe in a man’s capacity for repentance while accepting that he must remain in custody. Hope does not require the suspension of judgement.
The Church’s presence in prison therefore makes an uncomfortable claim upon the rest of us. We must take wrongdoing seriously enough to demand accountability, and human dignity seriously enough to refuse to declare a person beyond the possibility of conversion. Neither obligation becomes easier because the other exists.
Pope Leo’s most challenging observation during his prison visit was that human beings can flourish through their limitations. That deserves consideration well beyond the prison walls, because we increasingly understand freedom as the removal of whatever obstructs our desires. On that account, dependence is humiliating, restraint is oppressive and fulfilment means acquiring ever greater control over our circumstances. Yet someone can possess considerable freedom of movement while remaining enslaved to addiction, resentment, greed or the need to dominate others. Conversely, a person deprived of liberty can begin to acquire the honesty and self-command that previously escaped him. Recognising this does not make imprisonment good in itself, excuse degrading conditions or diminish the suffering of victims. It does expose the inadequacy of treating freedom simply as the ability to do what we want. Sometimes our desires themselves need to change, and the encounter with a limit becomes the moment when we finally recognise that. Leo’s intervention suggests a demanding Christian understanding of rehabilitation: helping a person become capable of choosing the good, rather than merely waiting for the day when he can resume choosing without external restraint.
I agree wholeheartedly with my friend Professor Larry Chapp. There comes a point when the desire to avoid disruption risks perpetuating a far more damaging instability: the erosion of confidence in the Church’s doctrinal authority.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith exists to safeguard and articulate the deposit of faith, not to generate further uncertainty about its meaning. The appointment of Fr Thomas Joseph White OP would signal something profoundly important about the direction of this pontificate: that theological precision, intellectual seriousness and fidelity to the Church’s perennial teaching are once again paramount.
As Larry rightly observes, this is not fundamentally a question of theological factions. It is about restoring the distinction between authentic doctrinal development and ambiguity masquerading as development. Unity cannot be sustained indefinitely by managing competing interpretations of the truth. Authentic ecclesial unity is founded upon the truth itself.
Pope Leo has increasingly supplied the theological clarity the Church so urgently needs in his preaching. The time has come for that clarity to find expression in the governance of the Church.
It is time for Pope Leo finally to send Cardinal Fernandez back to Argentina. I know that Leo moves slowly and cautiously, with an eye toward non-disruptive change that preserves ecclesial unity, as well as amity between competing factions, but the time has come in my humble opinion. My dream would be to see Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP, currrently rector of the Angelicum, named as the new head of the DDF. And I say that as a "Communio" theologian who does not always agree with Fr. White's Thomism. Nevertheless, the strength of Thomism is its conceptual clarity and the sophistication of its distinctions. And nothing is needed more in the Church right now (at least as far as doctrine is concerned) than clarity and precision in disputed matters. And Fr. White would bring, not just clarity, but a profound scholarly mind.
For the first time in 55 years, fewer than half of Americans support the death penalty, but the most interesting question for Catholics is not whether public opinion has changed, it's whether the Church's teaching has changed and what we actually mean by doctrinal development.
A new Gallup poll finds that just 49% of Americans favour capital punishment for convicted murderers, compared with 45% who oppose it. In 1994, support stood at 80%. Although the latest figure is statistically similar to last year's 52%, the longer-term movement is unmistakable. There are compelling reasons for Catholics to welcome a declining willingness to execute convicted criminals. The possibility of wrongful conviction, inequalities in the administration of justice, the disturbing record of botched executions and the availability of secure imprisonment all raise serious questions about whether the state should exercise such an irreversible power. The dignity of a human being does not disappear because he has committed a terrible crime, and the possibility of repentance remains a profound Christian consideration.
Yet the Catholic discussion cannot end there, because it raises a theological difficulty which I do not believe has been satisfactorily resolved. In 2018, Pope Francis revised paragraph 2267 of the Catechism to declare the death penalty inadmissible because it constitutes an attack upon the inviolability and dignity of the human person. The accompanying doctrinal explanation presented this as an authentic development in continuity with previous teaching. But the Church's historical position was not simply that capital punishment was an unfortunate necessity reluctantly tolerated by less enlightened societies. Scripture, the Fathers, St Thomas Aquinas and successive popes recognised that legitimate public authority could, under certain conditions, impose death as a just punishment for grave crimes. That judgement was understood in relation to justice, the common good and the moral authority of the state.
This creates a serious question about continuity. If capital punishment is intrinsically an attack upon human dignity, how could the Church have defended its legitimacy for so many centuries? Conversely, if the practice was not intrinsically immoral, on what precise grounds has its moral status changed? One possible answer lies in distinguishing an act's moral character from the circumstances in which it may legitimately be undertaken. Modern states possess means of protecting society that were unavailable to earlier generations. We may therefore conclude that executions are no longer justified under contemporary conditions without claiming that the Church's previous moral teaching was fundamentally erroneous.
Indeed, this was substantially the approach taken by St John Paul II, who argued that cases in which execution was absolutely necessary had become extremely rare, if not practically nonexistent. It provided a powerful argument against contemporary capital punishment while retaining an intelligible relationship with the Church's historical position. The difficulty with the 2018 formulation is that its appeal to the inviolability of human dignity appears to go beyond a judgement about necessity or changed social circumstances. Human dignity was not discovered in 2018. If it renders capital punishment morally impermissible in principle, then we must explain how that conclusion relates to the authoritative teaching which preceded it.
This is not an argument for restoring executions, still less for treating the lives of convicted criminals as disposable. It is an argument for theological honesty. Catholics should be capable of opposing the death penalty in practice while acknowledging that the relationship between the revised Catechism and the Church's earlier teaching remains a legitimate subject of serious theological examination. We also shouldn't imagine that a Gallup poll can resolve the matter. Public opinion may help create the political conditions for abolition, but it cannot determine the content of divine revelation or establish whether a proposed doctrinal development is coherent.
What is at stake extends beyond capital punishment. The Church's credibility depends upon our confidence that authentic doctrinal development deepens our understanding of revealed truth rather than simply replacing yesterday's moral conclusions with today's preferred judgements.
We can welcome a society becoming less willing to take the life of a criminal without pretending that the Church has always taught precisely what she teaches today. The task is to explain the continuity honestly, not to make the historical difficulty disappear.
The shocking departure of a former European SSPX district superior, just months after the Society’s schismatic episcopal consecrations, looks like a devastating indictment of the direction it has taken. But it is where he has chosen to go that makes this development truly extraordinary...and raises some profoundly uncomfortable questions for the SSPX leadership.
Fr Patrick Duverger, formerly the SSPX district superior for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, has left the Society and been welcomed into a traditional Latin Mass community served by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP), under the authority of the local diocesan bishop. His successor, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, was among the four men consecrated bishops by the SSPX in July, without the authorisation of Pope Leo XIV.
Consider the historical irony. In 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre's illicit episcopal consecrations precipitated the departure of priests who founded the FSSP precisely because they believed that fidelity to the traditional liturgy could not justify separation from Rome. Thirty-eight years later, following another set of episcopal consecrations, a former SSPX district superior has found a home in the very Fraternity born of that original rupture. We do not yet know whether the July consecrations prompted Duverger's decision, and it would be premature to suggest an exodus. But his departure follows that of another former European district superior, Fr Firmin Udressy, who left in 2024 after more than twenty years of priestly service. Udressy's own explanation was revealing: he had come to desire a priesthood exercised in genuine communion with the Church's hierarchy and the universal Church.
Let's be clear, this is not a dispute between those who love tradition and those who despise it, these are priests formed by the SSPX, deeply attached to the Catholic inheritance, who have nevertheless chosen to exercise their priesthood within the Church's recognised structures. Surely therein lies the uncomfortable ecclesiological question the SSPX cannot indefinitely evade: at what point does an extraordinary response to a crisis become a permanent alternative to the Church's own authority?
Catholic tradition is not a possession to be defended against the Church, nor is communion with Peter some optional administrative arrangement that can be suspended until Rome becomes sufficiently agreeable. Apostolic tradition and apostolic communion belong together.
There are legitimate grievances about the treatment of traditional Catholics, and Rome must take them seriously. But the failures of ecclesiastical authority cannot become a justification for establishing a parallel ecclesial existence.
The tragedy would be for a movement founded to preserve Catholic tradition to lose sight of something essential to that tradition: the Church is not merely where the ancient liturgy is celebrated, but where the Catholic faith is professed cum Petro et sub Petro — with Peter and under Peter.
A full report on this interesting development on @RealAdVaticanum here advaticanum.com/article/form…
Pope Leo XIV has appointed a new Archbishop of Barcelona, I think the choice offers a fascinating insight into the direction of his pontificate.
Fra Octavi Vilà Mayo is a Cistercian monk, former Abbot of Poblet and Bishop of Girona, appointed to that diocese by Pope Francis in 2024. He succeeds Cardinal Omella, a central figure in the Francis-era establishment and member of the former Pope's inner circle of advisers. Interestingly, Vilà was reportedly the preferred candidate of Omella and Cardinal Cobo of Madrid, suggesting that Leo has little appetite for an immediate purge of the existing hierarchy. But there is more to this appointment than ecclesiastical politics. Vilà is steeped in Benedictine spirituality, with its emphasis on prayer, discipline and the centrality of Christ. He has previously warned that the Church cannot afford to lose its identity and predicted a future of smaller, more committed Christian communities, an assessment remarkably reminiscent of Joseph Ratzinger.
Most strikingly, in his first message to Barcelona today, he explicitly identifies evangelisation as the Church's indispensable mission, speaking of bringing the Gospel to unbelievers, bringing lapsed Catholics back to the faith, and proclaiming the Word of God in season and out of season. There are questions about his record, particularly his approach to Catholics attached to the traditional liturgy, and his commitment to synodality places him firmly within the vocabulary of the Francis pontificate. Nevertheless, perhaps something interesting is emerging here. Pope Leo may not be seeking a revolution in personnel so much as a reorientation of priorities: preserving ecclesial communion and institutional continuity while restoring greater emphasis to Christ, conversion and the Church's missionary mandate.
That would be a characteristically quiet form of reform, but its success will depend on whether episcopal appointments translate theological clarity into actual governance. The real test of the Leonine papacy may not be whom Leo removes, but what he expects of those he chooses to retain and promote.
Full report from InfoVaticana here infovaticana.com/en/2026/11/…
Pope Leo XIV is increasingly providing the doctrinal clarity many Catholics have been waiting for. So why is Cardinal Fernández still running the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith?
Cardinal Joseph Zen has now publicly urged Leo to replace Fernández. Posters attacking the cardinal have appeared on the streets of Buenos Aires, while Die Tagespost reports an extraordinary dispute between Vatican dicasteries over an explanatory note whose claims about SSPX sacramental faculties appear to conflict with provisions authorised by Pope Francis himself. These developments are not all equally significant, but together they illustrate something deeply troubling: a growing crisis of confidence in the competence, judgement and credibility of those entrusted with some of the Church's highest offices.
What makes this particularly fascinating is the apparent contrast with Leo's own developing pontificate. In France and Argentina, he has spoken with refreshing clarity about conversion, the sanctity of life, the limits of interreligious dialogue and the impossibility of invoking supposedly "pastoral" considerations to justify what we know to be wrong. Yet Fernández, Roche, Grech and Hollerich remain influential figures within a Curia still profoundly shaped by the priorities of Pope Francis.
I have written a new essay for REGINA Unscripted examining this contradiction, the evidence of tensions within Rome and the increasingly urgent question of whether Leo intends to translate his theological clarity into meaningful institutional reform.
A Pope does not govern the Church through speeches alone. He governs through the men he appoints, the authority he delegates and the decisions he makes.
After eighteen months, surely it is reasonable to ask: when will clarity in preaching become clarity in governance?
Read Leo's Quiet Corrections Are No Longer Enough on REGINA Unscripted: reginaunscripted.org/2026/11…
The newly consecrated Bishop Stephen Wang’s first pastoral message to the Catholics of Arundel & Brighton deserves careful attention, because beneath the warmth of a new shepherd thanking his flock lies a significant declaration of intent.
He has committed himself to continuing Archbishop Richard Moth’s ambitious plan to reorganise the diocese’s 11 deaneries into 11 much larger parishes, with priests sharing pastoral responsibility in solidum.
The stated priorities of prayer, formation and mission are unquestionably right. Indeed, they are precisely what the Church in England so desperately needs. But there is an important distinction to be made here: reorganising the Church is not the same thing as renewing her. Catholicism is profoundly incarnational, a parish is not simply an administrative territory or a convenient way of distributing increasingly scarce clergy, it's a living community of faith (or at least it SHOULD be), centred on the Eucharist, where the faithful should know their priests, receive the sacraments, form their children in the faith and develop those relationships through which Christianity is transmitted from one generation to the next.
Equally, we cannot pretend that preserving every existing structure will somehow reverse decades of decline. Something clearly needs to change. Bishop Wang acknowledges the uncertainties surrounding the plan and promises to visit communities, listen carefully and make adjustments where necessary. That's encouraging, particularly from a bishop whose previous work with Sycamore demonstrates a genuine & personal commitment to evangelisation. But the real measure of success will not be whether the new structures produce more efficient administration or make better use of diminishing resources. It will be whether they produce more conversions, deeper sacramental lives, stronger Catholic families, flourishing vocations and priests who can genuinely exercise spiritual fatherhood.
The Church needs missionary renewal, not merely a tidier map of its decline! Bishop Wang has now taken personal responsibility for demonstrating that structural reform can serve genuine spiritual renewal. I sincerely hope he succeeds, and we should all pray for him. The stakes for the future of Catholicism in this country are considerable.
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Pope Leo XIV has taken one of the most famous phrases of Pope Francis' pontificate “Todos, todos, todos!” and supplied the theological clarity it so urgently needed!
Speaking to an enormous gathering of young people in Buenos Aires last night, Leo recalled Francis' insistence at World Youth Day in Lisbon that the Church must welcome everyone but essentially, he then explained what that universal invitation actually means: “Everyone towards Christ, everyone with Christ, everyone like Christ.” It's a deceptively simple formulation, but one which goes to the heart of a fundamental tension in contemporary Catholic life caused by the previous pontificate: What exactly do we mean when we say that the Church must welcome everyone? Is inclusion itself the destination, or is it the beginning of an encounter intended to transform the human person?
Pope Leo's answer is unmistakably (and increasingly characteristically) Christocentric. Nobody must first become perfect before approaching the Church, nobody is excluded because of their past, their wounds, their failures or the disorder in their lives. The Church is not a sanctuary for the already righteous, but the place where sinners encounter the mercy of God. However that mercy is not an affirmation that we should remain as we are, as Leo explained, Christ loves us as we are, but His love is too great to leave us imprisoned by sin. He spoke explicitly about conversion, recognising our faults, repairing the harm we have caused, approaching the Sacrament of Reconciliation and drawing close to Christ in the Eucharist.
This is the essential distinction that can become obscured when pastoral welcome is detached from the Church's evangelical mission. The Gospel does not offer unconditional love as an alternative to conversion, it is precisely because God's love is unconditional that He calls every one of us to conversion. His mercy meets us where we are, but it does not abandon us there.
The same principle applies to the Church's relationship with the wider world. Christianity is not simply a project of making people feel accepted, nor is evangelisation reducible to creating welcoming communities in which difficult questions about truth and morality are carefully avoided. The Church exists to proclaim Jesus Christ, to call humanity to repentance and to invite every person into the transforming life of grace.
There is also a danger in imagining that doctrinal clarity and pastoral charity are competing priorities. Truth without charity can become harsh and alienating, but charity without truth risks becoming a sentimental refusal to take seriously another person's eternal destiny. Genuine Christian love requires both, because the greatest good we can desire for another person is not merely that they feel comfortable in our company, but that they come to know and love God.
What makes Leo's intervention especially interesting is that he explicitly honours Francis rather than distancing himself from him. He takes his predecessor's universal invitation and unfolds its missionary and sacramental implications. Whether one regards this as continuity, clarification or a welcome change of emphasis, the theological significance is considerable.
Leo concluded by recalling that the Christian invitation must become a mission: go out and proclaim the Gospel. The Church welcomes everyone not because the differences between truth and error, virtue and sin, or belief and unbelief have ceased to matter, but because Christ desires the salvation of everyone.
There is room for everybody in the Church. But the Church is not simply somewhere to belong. She is the place where we are called to become something we could never become by ourselves: saints, transformed by grace into the likeness of Christ. Everyone is invited, everyone is loved, everyone is called to conversion.
That is not a contradiction of authentic inclusion. It is the very reason the Church exists.
There is no doubt that Fr James Martin's increasingly fashionable appeals for unity within the Church are profoundly disingenuous. As Austin Ruse observes in this excellent article for Crisis Magazine, we are apparently expected to believe that the argument over Catholic teaching on homosexuality is effectively over, that the progressive position has prevailed, and that faithful Catholics should simply accept the new reality and move on. But notice the extraordinary asymmetry here. Orthodox Catholics are encouraged to stop arguing in the interests of unity, while the campaign to reinterpret Catholic sexual morality continues unabated.
Consider Martin's own Outreach ministry, which recently published an alternative version of the Confiteor for LGBTQ Catholics, recasting repentance principally in terms of prejudice, discrimination and social injustice, and replacing the invocation of Our Lady and the saints with an appeal to spiritual ancestors and 'queer saints'. This is not an authorised liturgical change, but it is a revealing illustration of the theological direction in which this movement is travelling.
The fundamental question is not whether the Church should welcome people who experience same-sex attraction. Of course she should. Every human being possesses an inviolable dignity, and every soul is precious to Christ. The question is whether that welcome involves inviting people into the transforming truth of the Gospel, including its moral demands, or gradually accommodating the Gospel to contemporary assumptions about sexuality.
Christian unity is not achieved by declaring difficult questions settled, suppressing legitimate objections or treating fidelity to established doctrine as an obstacle to pastoral progress. Authentic unity necessarily presupposes truth.
Indeed, the most troubling aspect of Martin's approach is the suggestion that charity and doctrinal clarity are somehow competing obligations. They are not. A Church that ceases to call people to conversion has not become more welcoming. It has forgotten what it is welcoming them into.
Ruse is right to insist that the debate is far from over. The question is whether those responsible for defending the Church's teaching are prepared to engage in it.
crisismagazine.com/opinion/f…
Argentina has given Pope Leo XIV an amazingly warm welcome, and in doing so has reopened a rather uncomfortable question about his predecessor. Why did Jorge Bergoglio never return as Pope to the country that formed him?
On Monday, an estimated 2.5 million people attended Leo's Mass in Buenos Aires. Last night, around a million young people gathered to pray, sing and celebrate with the successor of Peter. The scenes have been astonishing, full of joy, emotion and unmistakable and very encouraging Catholic enthusiasm.
Yet Pope Francis, who spent twelve years urging the Church to go out to the peripheries, build bridges and overcome ideological divisions, never returned to his own homeland. He explained that a planned visit in 2017 had been disrupted by elections and scheduling difficulties, but that hardly explains an absence lasting his entire pontificate. We have repeatedly been told that Argentina's political divisions made a visit too difficult, but those divisions haven't disappeared. Pope Leo has simply walked into the middle of them and received a welcome of extraordinary warmth and affection.
Shortly before his death, Archbishop Héctor Aguer offered a more uncomfortable explanation: he suspected Bergoglio feared that his reception would not match the enormous crowds attracted by John Paul II. That is Aguer's interpretation, not an established fact, and we cannot know whether Francis himself would have received an equally rapturous welcome but the contrast is extraordinary. An American Pope has achieved something Argentina's own Pope never attempted: bringing millions of Argentines together around the successor of Peter, however briefly, in an extraordinary public celebration of their Catholic faith.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Leo's visit is that he has demonstrated how the papacy can transcend the very political divisions that supposedly kept Francis away. One cannot help wondering what might have happened had Bergoglio gone home.
This was interesting! Warning against the temptation to justify conduct that we know to be wrong, Leo spoke of finding “pastoral reasons” for doing so, actually raising his hands to make inverted commas around the expression. It was a small gesture, but potentially a very significant one.
For much of the Francis pontificate, the language of pastoral discernment became entangled in controversies over whether established moral principles could effectively be set aside in particular circumstances. Critics of Amoris Laetitia, especially, warned that pastoral accompaniment risked becoming a justification for accommodation rather than a genuine invitation to conversion. Whatever Francis himself intended, that ambiguity has had real consequences for the Church.
Leo's warning goes straight to the heart of the problem. Genuine pastoral care cannot mean finding sufficiently compassionate-sounding reasons to excuse what we already recognise as wrong. Mercy does not abolish moral truth, and the circumstances that diminish someone's culpability do not transform an objectively immoral act into a moral one. The task of a pastor is to help souls encounter Christ and respond to His grace, not to provide theological cover for avoiding the demands of the Gospel.
Of course, Leo was speaking about the examination of conscience rather than explicitly revisiting the controversies of the previous pontificate. He also spoke warmly of Francis. Nevertheless, his choice of words, and that unmistakable gesture, seem to reflect a welcome recovery of moral clarity.
Perhaps we are witnessing something important in this pontificate: a quiet but deliberate reassertion that pastoral sensitivity must serve the truth rather than become an alternative to it.
The Church does not become more merciful by making sin easier to justify. She becomes more merciful by helping sinners find the grace to overcome it.
As the UK moves into "THE POLAR VORTEX" faze of operation climate terror, this video is well worth a watch!
Pope Leo XIV has just offered a rather important clarification of what authentic interreligious dialogue actually means and the contrast with Pope Francis' controversial remarks in Singapore is difficult to ignore.
In September 2024, addressing young people from different religious traditions in Singapore, Pope Francis declared that all religions are paths to God, comparing them to different languages expressing the divine. His remarks provoked considerable controversy, not because Catholics object to respectful dialogue with other religions, but because the analogy appeared to place fundamentally different religious claims on the same theological footing.
Yesterday, addressing Christian leaders and representatives of other religions in Buenos Aires, Leo XIV approached the same subject rather differently.
He began by explicitly professing faith in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, acknowledged the Church's spiritual relationship with the Jewish people, and affirmed the respect owed to whatever is holy and true in other religious traditions, in accordance with Nostra Aetate.
But his most significant intervention came when he invoked St John Paul II's teaching that genuine religious dialogue must take place “without relativism or syncretism of any kind”, and should deepen rather than diminish the obligation to bear witness and proclaim.
That distinction is absolutely fundamental.
Catholicism does not teach that other religions contain nothing true or good, nor that God's grace is confined to the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church. The Church explicitly recognises elements of truth and holiness outside her visible communion and acknowledges that those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ may nevertheless attain salvation through His grace.
But this is categorically different from suggesting that the world's religions are simply equivalent routes to God. The Catholic claim is not merely that Christianity offers one particularly helpful spiritual vocabulary among many. It is that God has definitively revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, whose Incarnation, death and Resurrection are the source of salvation for humanity.
The distinction matters because genuine dialogue presupposes that the participants actually believe something. If religious differences are ultimately reduced to alternative cultural expressions of an identical spiritual reality, dialogue risks becoming an exercise in mutual reassurance rather than a serious encounter between people committed to truth.
Indeed, there is something profoundly disrespectful about treating another person's religious convictions as interchangeable with one's own. Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians do not merely speak different languages about precisely the same theological propositions. Their beliefs contain real and sometimes irreconcilable differences, which deserve to be understood rather than politely dissolved.
Francis' defenders were right to emphasise that his remarks arose in an informal encounter intended to encourage friendship rather than theological confrontation. But pastoral context does not remove the responsibility to speak with doctrinal clarity, particularly when addressing young people who may have little understanding of what distinguishes Christianity from other faiths.
Leo, significantly, did not repudiate Francis. Quite the opposite: he explicitly praised his predecessor's commitment to dialogue and concluded with a prayer taken from Fratelli Tutti. Yet he situated that commitment within a more clearly articulated Catholic understanding of revelation, witness and proclamation.
This is precisely what the Church needs. Not a retreat into religious hostility, nor an accommodation which obscures the uniqueness of Christ, but the confidence to recognise truth wherever it is found while remaining faithful to the fullness of truth entrusted to the Church.
Dialogue is not the suspension of evangelisation. Properly understood, it is one of the places where authentic Christian witness becomes possible.
The Church can respect every person, recognise genuine goodness in other religious traditions and cooperate generously for the common good without pretending that the Great Commission has somehow been superseded.
That is the theological clarity which Leo's remarks help to recover, and it deserves considerably more attention than it has received.
The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales @catholicEW have issued an important warning about the Government’s deeply troubling Conversion Practices Bill, with Archbishop John Sherrington calling for it to be abandoned.
The issue here is not whether people should be protected from coercion or abuse. Of course they should, and the Church has no difficulty affirming that. The question is whether the State is about to acquire powers that could make the ordinary expression of Christian moral teaching a matter for criminal investigation.
As Simon Calvert has warned, the implications could extend into the confessional itself. What happens when a priest advises a penitent according to Catholic moral teaching? What happens when a Catholic teacher counsels a troubled pupil, or explains the Church’s understanding of the human person, sexuality and marriage?
The consequences for Catholic education are particularly disturbing. Clause 5 of the draft Bill provides for criminal liability extending beyond an individual offender to certain officers of an organisation, potentially including school governors. In the circumstances specified by the legislation, a teacher's actions could therefore expose others in the school’s leadership to prosecution.
Consider the extraordinary position this creates. A Catholic parent should be free to teach their child the faith at home. Yet when that same child attends a Catholic school, could the very same moral teaching, offered as personal pastoral guidance, become grounds for a criminal complaint?
The Government insists that ordinary conversations will not be criminalised, but if that is its intention, why does the legislation leave such serious questions about the boundaries of lawful pastoral care?
And we should not underestimate the chilling effect. A Catholic teacher does not need to be convicted of anything to have their career destroyed by an allegation, a safeguarding investigation or professional disciplinary proceedings.
Religious freedom means very little if Catholics are permitted to believe their faith privately but must fear the consequences of teaching and practising it publicly.
Archbishop Sherrington is right to challenge this legislation. The Church must be able to proclaim its understanding of the human person without seeking permission from the State.
A genuinely free society protects people from abuse without treating orthodox Christian belief as something potentially abusive in itself.
cbcew.org.uk/archbishops-sta…
This is very moving.
Archbishop Héctor Aguer, the outspoken former Archbishop of La Plata, has died aged 83, just one day after AdVaticanum published a remarkable interview in which he offered a deeply critical assessment of Pope Francis' pontificate, the crisis of vocations, the marginalisation of Catholic tradition and the direction of the Church in Argentina.
Yet it is the conclusion of that interview which now seems almost providential. Explaining that his failing health prevented him from meeting Pope Leo XIV during his visit to Argentina, Aguer spoke of offering his sufferings, in what he described as the purification at the end of his life, for the Pope and the Church.
Here was a bishop who never confused fidelity to the Church with unquestioning approval of every decision made by her leaders. He was unafraid to criticise what he believed was damaging the faith, yet he understood that the proper response to ecclesiastical crisis was neither bitterness nor abandonment of communion with Rome, but fidelity, prayer and sacrifice.
There is something profoundly Catholic about that witness, particularly in an age when criticism of the hierarchy so easily becomes estrangement from the Church herself.
That he should die while the Successor of Peter is visiting his homeland adds a remarkable poignancy to his passing.
Whatever one's assessment of his criticisms, his final appeal was for the peace and renewal of the Church he had served throughout his life.
May the Lord reward his service, forgive his sins and grant him eternal rest.
Requiescat in pace.
Archbishop Héctor Aguer, former Archbishop Emeritus of La Plata, has died at 83.
I have been told this by people who were close to His Grace in hospital and it has now been confirmed via local press
It is a honor to be the last person to interview him, during Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Argentina.
Requiescat in pace
Hegseth’s argument is a classic case of begging the question. He insists no Defence Secretary has ever been impeached for conducting lawful military operations, when the legality of his operations is precisely what is being challenged. His historical comparisons are equally selective: Reagan obtained congressional authorisation for Lebanon, Obama invoked existing statutory powers, and Clinton’s Kosovo campaign was itself constitutionally controversial. Nor does the absence of previous impeachments establish legality. Most seriously, allegations of extrajudicial killings at sea and retaliation against a US senator cannot simply be dismissed as disagreements over military policy. The Constitution exists to constrain executive power, not to excuse it whenever those exercising it claim success.
NEW: “No Secretary of War or Secretary of Defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations.”
Secretary Pete Hegseth pushes back against an impeachment threat, pointing to 250 years of American history and military operations under presidents from both parties.
He cites Reagan in Lebanon, Clinton in Kosovo, Obama in Iraq and Syria, and Biden’s operations in the same region.
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An extraordinary situation is developing in Rome, and it raises further, serious questions about Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández's competence to remain Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
According to an investigation by Guido Horst in the German Catholic newspaper Die Tagespost, the Vatican's own Dicastery for Legislative Texts has repeatedly attempted to resolve serious canonical contradictions arising from Fernández's July decree and explanatory note concerning the SSPX. The reported response? Fernández appears unwilling to cooperate.
Consider what this actually means.
Following the SSPX's unauthorised episcopal consecrations on 1 July, the DDF declared the six bishops involved excommunicated. That decision rests on established canonical principles. I have consistently opposed the SSPX's decision to consecrate bishops against the express wishes of the Roman Pontiff because Catholic tradition cannot be preserved by treating communion with Peter as optional, but what followed is an entirely different matter.
In an accompanying explanatory note, Fernández's dicastery declared that confessions heard by SSPX priests and marriages witnessed by them are invalid. There's just one rather ENORMOUS problem. In 2016, Pope Francis personally granted SSPX priests the faculty to hear confessions validly and licitly, extending an earlier Jubilee concession until further provisions were made. In 2017, he expressly approved arrangements allowing diocesan bishops to delegate SSPX priests to witness marriages under specified conditions. These were not casual administrative suggestions, they were exercises of papal authority. As Archbishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, the former Secretary of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, explained in July, revoking faculties granted by a papal act requires an act of equivalent authority.
A cardinal cannot simply undo what a Pope has decreed by inserting a declaration into an explanatory note & yet this appears to be precisely what Fernández has attempted to do. According to Die Tagespost, the Dicastery for Legislative Texts has already clarified to a papal diplomatic mission that Fernández's note cannot be taken as evidence that the Pope authorised the revocation of the 2017 marriage provisions. Despite repeated attempts to resolve the contradictions, no public correction has followed. Nor, to my knowledge, has Pope Leo XIV issued a public act withdrawing Francis's concessions. The implications are far from trivial. We are talking about the validity of sacramental absolution and the marriages of real Catholic couples. Matters touching the eternal welfare of souls and the stability of families deserve rather more than contradictory pronouncements from departments of the Roman Curia.
There is another deeply troubling dimension.
In 1996, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts issued an explanatory note establishing that merely participating occasionally in SSPX liturgies does not constitute formal adherence to schism. Such adherence involves both a conscious acceptance of the schismatic position and an outward manifestation of that choice. Even exclusive attendance, it recognised, is not necessarily conclusive proof. Indeed, Fernández's own July note expressly incorporates that 1996 clarification and this distinction is fundamental. A Catholic attracted to the traditional liturgy, even one who regularly attends an SSPX chapel, cannot simply be presumed to have committed the canonical crime of schism. An ecclesiastical penalty of this gravity requires proper consideration of the individual's actual beliefs, conduct and culpability. To conflate attendance with formal adherence would be a serious injustice. And here is the extraordinary irony: the same Roman authority that rightly insists that Catholics must respect the jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff has produced an explanatory note whose sacramental conclusions appear to disregard decisions made by that very authority. 🤡🤡🤡
The Church cannot credibly insist upon obedience to papal authority while appearing to disregard its own rules governing that authority! I have no interest in defending the SSPX's decision to proceed with episcopal consecrations, I am convinced that it was a grave mistake, and the argument that a supposed state of necessity justifies episcopal consecrations against the Pope's will is profoundly problematic. But legitimate opposition to schism cannot excuse canonical carelessness, indeed, the gravity of the situation demands precisely the opposite: absolute clarity, impeccable legal reasoning and scrupulous concern for the faithful. If Die Tagespost's reporting is accurate, we now have the spectacle of the Vatican's own canonical experts attempting to correct the doctrinal dicastery, apparently without obtaining the cooperation of its Prefect.
Four months after the decree, these fundamental questions remain unresolved. Pope Leo XIV needs to intervene, establish the precise canonical position, clarify the status of the papal concessions and ensure that Catholics are not left questioning the validity of sacraments because of contradictory Roman pronouncements. And there is a wider question that can no longer reasonably be avoided.
At what point does the accumulation of controversies, ambiguities and questions of judgement surrounding Cardinal Fernández become evidence that he is simply unsuited to the office entrusted to him? The Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith should be a source of theological clarity, canonical precision and confidence in the Church's teaching authority.
If the Vatican's own legal experts cannot obtain that clarity from Cardinal Fernández, why should the faithful be expected to have confidence in his leadership?
“Your lives are not a burden on society. They are a blessing.” — Pope Leo XIV
Yesterday, visiting the Pequeño Cottolengo Don Orione in Argentina, a home for more than 400 people living with disabilities, Pope Leo offered a profound challenge to one of the most dangerous assumptions of our age: that the value of a human life is somehow connected to its independence, productivity or usefulness to others.
He reminded those present that the progress of a nation must be measured not simply by its economic achievements, but by how it welcomes people with disabilities and particular needs. In doing so, he touched upon something fundamental to the entire Christian understanding of the human person, and something urgently relevant to the growing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide throughout the Western world.
We have constructed a culture in which autonomy is increasingly treated as the supreme human good. Independence is celebrated, dependence feared, and dignity subtly confused with the ability to exercise control over our circumstances. Yet every one of us begins life utterly dependent upon others, and many of us will end it in precisely the same condition. Between those two moments, illness, disability, accident and age may remind us at any time that self-sufficiency was never the foundation of our humanity.
The Christian understanding of dignity is radically different. We possess worth not because we are useful, autonomous, healthy or wanted, but because we are human beings, created in the image of God. That dignity is intrinsic, equal and inalienable. It cannot be increased by achievement or diminished by suffering.
This is why the debate about euthanasia cannot be reduced to a dispute about individual choice. Those who advocate assisted dying frequently do so from a sincere desire to relieve suffering and respect personal autonomy. Their compassion should not be dismissed. But compassion alone cannot settle the question of whether deliberately ending a human life is a legitimate response to suffering, particularly when the person concerned may already feel themselves to be an intolerable burden upon those they love.
We should ask what happens when a society tells its most vulnerable members, however carefully and compassionately, that death is among the solutions it is prepared to provide for their suffering.
Consider the elderly widow who knows that her care is consuming her children's savings, the disabled person who hears constant discussion about the cost of social provision, or the terminally ill patient who apologises repeatedly for the trouble they cause. Their freedom is exercised within a world of relationships, expectations and fears. A choice can be legally voluntary while still being shaped by powerful social pressures, including pressures nobody consciously intends to exert.
The danger is not that everyone who supports assisted dying secretly regards vulnerable people as worthless. It is that a society which increasingly measures human flourishing by autonomy and control may struggle to recognise the full dignity of those who have lost both.
There is also a distinction we must preserve between accepting the limits of medicine and making death itself a medical objective. Catholic teaching does not demand that life be prolonged by every conceivable intervention, regardless of its burdens. It recognises the legitimacy of refusing disproportionate treatment and insists upon the importance of effective pain relief, palliative care and compassionate accompaniment. But allowing a person to die naturally is morally different from deliberately bringing about their death.
What Leo witnessed at the Cottolengo was an alternative vision of human community. Here were people whose lives might be dismissed by a purely utilitarian calculation, yet whose presence had inspired an extraordinary work of charity, friendship and human solidarity. They were not merely recipients of care. They were persons whose existence called forth love and revealed something essential about what it means to be human.
That is the deeper challenge his words present to our civilisation. A society does not become compassionate simply by expanding the range of choices available at the end of life. Its compassion must also be judged by the quality of care, companionship, protection and reassurance it offers those who are afraid of suffering, abandonment or becoming a burden.
If we genuinely believe that human dignity is unconditional, we must be prepared to build a society in which dependence does not mean humiliation, suffering does not mean abandonment, and needing others does not make anyone less worthy of being alive.
The measure of a civilisation is not how efficiently it accommodates the death of those who suffer, but how faithfully it honours their dignity when they can offer nothing in return.
Pope Leo's words in Argentina deserve to be heard far beyond the walls of that remarkable institution. They remind us that the worth of a human life is not something society bestows, calculates or withdraws. It is something society has a duty to recognise, especially when that life is at its most vulnerable.
