You were not asked to manage your vices. You were asked to crucify them.

Let us reflect on that contrast for a moment, because the majority of us have, without conscious intent, smoothed it over in our minds into a gentler idea. We picked up this chunk of Saint Paul at Mass this week: qui autem sunt Christi, carnem suam crucifixerunt cum vitiis et concupiscentiis.1 They who are Christ’s have crucified their flesh, with its vices and its concupiscences. Not disciplined it. Not gradually improved it with the right habits and the right life coach, though heaven knows an entire industry now exists to sell you exactly that. Crucified it.

A crucifixion is not a wellness routine. It is a death, and deaths, properly executed, are final.

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The Therapeutic Rewrite

The prevailing account of sin sounds more like case notes from a counselor or consultant rather than from Calvary. Here’s how it goes: Identify the pattern, excavate the wound, manage the trigger, and make modest annual progress. Patience has its place, and Our Lord is patient with souls. Treating a soul, however, is not the same as bargaining with one. A great deal of what is sold today as formation is compromise dressed in the vocabulary of holiness.

Saint Paul’s list is blunt on purpose. Fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, idolatry, enmities, contentions, envies, and murders.2 He is not cataloguing tendencies that might be nudged toward improvement. He is describing a corpse that has not yet been buried, and asking why we keep setting a place for it at dinner.

The fruits that follow, charity, joy, peace, longanimity, goodness, are not the reward for properly managed sinfulness. They are what a soul looks like on the far side of an actual death. Once you see that, the passage stops reading as severe and starts reading as the greatest evangelization you will hear all week. Nothing you are battling needs to be battled forever. Let it die once, and leave it dead.

Not a Private Arrangement

It is here that the Gospel moves from the narrow to the wide instead of continuing back down into self, and where I think that we have quietly, collectively missed the point in modern piety, traditional and novus ordo alike. Our Lord is not contained by the limits of our conscience. He expands immediately to quaerite ergo primum regnum Dei, et justitiam ejus, et haec omnia adjicientur vobis.3 Seek first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.

A kingdom is neither a mood nor an abstract feeling. It is an order, visible and social, with a King who actually reigns rather than simply inspires you to be your best self. And the man who has crucified his own disordered wanting is the only kind of man equipped to help build it. This is the piece our age has misplaced on every side of the religious spectrum at once. The therapeutic Christian goes looking for his own calm first and hopes the neighborhood sorts itself out around him as a pleasant side effect. The rigid corner of traditionalism seeks first the correctness of the rubric and treats the actual person across the pew as an afterthought, sometimes as an obstacle. Neither charity nor a true zeal for souls is often present. In contrast, Our Lord proposes a Kingdom, sought first, ahead of food and clothing and the anxious arithmetic of a modern paycheck and price of gas at the pump. He promises the rest gets added, not earned through some separate spiritual side hustle.

The Social Kingship of Christ the King is not a phrase for a banner at a rally.4 It is simply a description of what a society looks like once enough baptized souls have stopped trying to serve two masters at once and begin to truly live the First Commandment.

The Lily Does Not Manufacture Its Own Clothing

Consider the lilies of the field. I used to read that line that verse and thought meditation. I was wrong. The lilies do not bloom because they’re running a “chill routine”, they bloom because they’ve accepted the deal at the end of the preceding verse. You can’t serve God and Mammon, and when you actually die to that latter worship you find that every demand Mammon made upon you suddenly has nowhere to go. Peace is not a bonus you add once the vice is under control. Peace is what remains once the vice is gone.

Stop negotiating with what needs to die. Fight to the death with what must die and stop making deals with the devil. And when you’ve finished, when the field lies empty before you and your cravings finally have no place to demand your attention, know that you haven’t just celebrated some personal achievement but have picked up the first brick of a Kingdom to which you, the baptized, are an heir. Your day will come, as it comes for every soul willing to walk with the Holy Ghost rather than fulfill the lusts of the flesh, and on the far side of it you will find, like the man standing in the field with the lilies, that your Father already knew what you needed before you thought to ask Him.

God bless and protect you this day, and all who labor beside you toward that same Kingdom.

The Road Ran Through Samaria on Purpose

St. Luke goes out of his way to tell us about the setting because the geography speaks volumes theologically. “And it came to pass, as he was going to Jerusalem, he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.”1

Our Lord did not need to travel through Samaria. The Jews of His day avoided it at all costs. They didn’t dip down into Samaritan territory; they crossed the Jordan and went around because fraternizing with half-breed apostates was, to them, gruesomely literal pollution.2 Our Lord walks right through the heart of it, teaching by His act before He even speaks or heals anyone. Ten lepers find Our Lord on the outskirts of a village. Each of the ten keeps distance both from one another and from Him. Together they shout at Jesus to take notice, because of the distance the law required. Leprosy erases the differences both Samaritan and Jew normally worked so hard to insist on. Suffering had already put together what religion had kept apart.

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The Law Demanded Compliance; Only One Man Looked for Our Lord

Our Lord Jesus sends them all to the priests before doing anything else. To be declared clean was still regulated by the Law of Moses through the priestly caste.3 All ten obey and go; all ten are healed on the way. But they were healed before they ever needed to see a priest. The requirements of the Law were not why they were healed; they were why they went. The healing was not transactional here; it was given while they walked.

Nine kept walking away from Our Lord, toward Jerusalem, toward the temple, toward the priests who would declare them clean and allow them back into the world they had lost. They were healed and returning the Lord’s kindness on the best terms they knew. This is not ingratitude, but obedience. The letter of the Law demanded no more, and the system worked exactly as it was meant to by rewarding only compliance.

One man stopped going forward: “And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, went back, with a loud voice glorifying God. And he fell on his face before His feet, giving thanks.”4 Glorifying God comes first because by the time St. Luke finished that sentence he already knew Our Lord Jesus and God were one and the same. “And this was a Samaritan.”5

Our Lord’s reaction is surprise, or at least impressed enough that when St. Luke quotes His words, he doesn’t soften them: “Were not ten made clean? And where are the nine? There is no one found to return and give glory to God, but this stranger.”6 Then, directly to the man, where no other healing story in the Gospels goes: “Arise, go thy way; for thy Faith hath made thee whole.”7 The other nine were healed bypassing Him. This man was made whole by faith in Our Lord Jesus. Salvus te fecit. Stronger than healed. “Saved you.”

McReligion Takes the Blessing and Keeps Walking

I have watched this exact scene play out for years in ordinary parish life, and I suspect you have too. Nine people receive Holy Communion, a healing, an answered prayer, or some other spiritual gift, and they keep walking toward whatever errand they were already running. The blessing gets absorbed into the world’s schedule. Nobody is being wicked. They are simply doing what they were told to do, checking the box the Law required, and moving on with their restored life.

This is the quiet failure mode of a consumerized faith, and it rarely announces itself as unbelief. It looks like gratitude; it’s felt privately, expressed nowhere, and offered to no one in particular. McReligion does not reject healing. It just never turns around to consider the will of the Author of the healing. There is gratitude, but often not transformation.

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Watch the trap: the man Our Lord holds up had no claim “by the book” at all.

Typically, this is where many Christians can fail: there can be a temptation to read this account as a story about who is inside and who is outside. The man Our Lord holds up is the one with no claim at all, and Our Lord Jesus does not spend a single word correcting his theology before commending his Faith.

If you are reading this with years of accumulated distance from the Faith, some genuine hurt from institutions that should have known better, some tangle of belief and doubt that you are not sure qualifies you to come back properly, the Samaritan is your permission slip. He did not need the right pedigree or the credentials of a particular Church faction. He needed to turn around.

The company Our Lord is gathering on that road is wider than the nine who kept their distance and wider still than the one who is remembered. It is everyone willing to turn around, whatever road brought them to the edge of the village in the first place, to learn to seek and align with the Divine Will; to discover or discover again the God who loved them into life and has a mission for them in this age.

God bless and protect you; may we both be counted among those who turn back to give thanks and live it, not merely say it.

Our Lord placed His fingers into the man’s ears.1 He heals the man’s ears via spit and then his speech via his tongue. Lifting His eyes to heaven, He pronounces Ephphatha: “Be thou opened.” Immediately the man’s ears were opened and his tongue loosed; and Scripture tells us what came out of that tongue when it began to speak. He “spoke right.” 2
Notice the order because you will never speak straight until you first hear straight.

The Order We Rarely Choose for Themselves

Most of us would have it backwards if we were left to our own devices. We would rather listen to ourselves speak and listen later, if we choose to listen at all. Online forums, hot takes, and partially educated laity with podcasts but no formation provide judgements and often presumption. Grace doesn’t work that way though, nor does the Church. Christ cleansed His disciples’ ears before He cleansed their tongues because a man who speaks before he hears cannot speak truly. Such a man only makes a rude sound with the shape of words.3

I think of young friends who were married a few years back, raised with nothing but the Old Mass. The new bride had encountered morning sickness and could not make the drive to attend my parish. They were forced to visit a round church near their home with a similar name on the door. It was their first experience of the novus ordo. Afterwards, they told me it was horrible to witness, not because they were difficult people wanting to pick a fight, but because once to come from Tradition in this polarized age and to see what the fruit of the Council had wrought so abruptly was a moment of trauma. Most of those reading this are like me; we came from the new to rediscover the Old of our ancestors and the saints. The Old is welcomed as a “coming home” but for those without that background, the New is a trauma. A defilement. Formation in both clerical and lay forms does not make us comfortable in this age. It allows us to recognize the true voice from the counterfeit instantly when the counterfeiter begins to speak.

In a busy and indifferent age it is common that most of the baptized do not hold to their Sunday Obligation, and many that do are tempted to treat the duties of baptism in a compartmentalized way. The answer to this is continual formation, in which some parishes are more successful at than others. One of the discouragements some seeking laity after a period of lapse is the well-intended local guide who themselves have never received formation. They are not literally deaf; quite loquacious, in fact, when it comes to a certain tone. They can discourse on “spirituality” and “journey” and “being good people” till you’re blue in the face. They cannot tell you what the Church teaches about the Real Presence. They cannot tell you the Four Last Things or why the modern catechism appears to change so often. They do not know, and have never known, why we need the Old Faith once delivered instead of a curated surrender of the Faith (bit by bit) and our civilization itself. They have a tongue and a social media account but have never had their ears unstopped. Instead of receiving the Ephphatha; they were given rainbow construction-paper banners and juice boxes instead. And we wonder why the world and the Church are in the state they are in today?4

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What St. Paul Received, and What He Delivered

Consider the Early Church Corinthians, and you see the same pattern played out at the level of the entire Church. St. Paul does not begin by saying what he thinks. St. Paul begins by telling what he was given. "I delivered unto you first of all which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures."5 Traditio, in its oldest and least sentimental sense: a handing on of something that was not his to invent, nor ours today to synodally create or reimagine.

This is the whole difference between the Faith and McReligion. McReligion begins with the mouth.6 The Faith begins with the ear. It’s the difference between hearing and speaking. McReligion springs from man’s need for psychological comfort. The Old Faith springs from men who heard the resurrected Jesus and refuse to be fooled by the temptations of modernity.

Notice how careful St. Paul is to give us the references7 for what he speaks. He does not begin with himself but reserves that “myself” for the very end of the line. Because he knew the difference between men who heard Christ and men who make him up.
That deposition changes everything about how we understand the nature of Church and the duties of the baptized.

Ordinary Things Consecrated for Holy Purpose

St. Mark in his gospel shows us a different manner of healing than when he healed the centurion’s servant.8 in the Gospel9 we read today, Our Lord inserts fingers into ears and makes use of His own saliva. He sighs deeply, as a man hears a man sigh when he labors with his hands. None of it comes from through the ether. It is solid material, exercised faithfully in His service. Flesh and blood and breath.

And Acts supplies the mirror-image example from the other end of it. When the angel comes to rescue Peter from jail, there is no flash of light, no disappearing chain. The angel hits Peter on the side to wake him up, and tells him to tie his belt around his waist, put his sandals on, and follow.10 Peter gets up, dresses himself, and walks right past the first guard and the second, and a gate of iron that flies open on its own, but he keeps walking. God could have rescued him any number of ways. He chose instead a perfectly natural one. Our Lord prefers in many instances to use ordinary things to be consecrated to new purpose. Whether that be spittle or your soul at baptism. You and I were consecrated to new and holy purpose. The question is do we live up to that election or do we defile it via indifference or the quest of comfort over duty?

Look at the matter of the many of the sacraments that use ordinary substances, water, wine, oil but set them aside and, in some cases, transform them for His purpose. That’s how God chooses to confirm His grace in the world. Because grace doesn’t short-circuit nature. It elevates it. It isn’t in the instruments themselves, and that includes the wine and the oil. The power is in what God chose to permanently tie Himself to whenever those things are used with intention for His purposes, in the manner of the Church and ancient Faith received.

Told to Be Quiet, and Could Not Manage It

Here is how the two Sunday texts slot together. Immediately after the healing, Our Lord tells the crowd not to tell anyone.11 They refuse. “But so much the more a great deal did they publish it.”12 The man who could not speak can now never stop speaking, and the men who were told to keep silent cannot keep their silence. This is not in stubbornness. It is what occurs when what has been received is too True to suppress. It is physically difficult for a man who really hears the Gospel to keep from talking about it, as it would be difficult for us to keep sitting on our hands if someone were drowning right before us.

St. Paul knew what this felt like on the other end. “Necessity is laid upon me: for woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.”13 Not “I have chosen to preach,” but a necessity. If you have really received, you cannot, at last, be quiet about it, whatever it may cost you from an institutional or social point of view; and St. Paul’s costs were not light.

The Test, Then

Has anyone ever put his fingers to your ears? Has the Faith ever actually been opened to you, the doctrine, the discipline, the whole received weight of it, or have you only ever been handed a tongue and told to use it? Because if it is the second, no amount of sincerity will fix that. Sincerity was never the missing ingredient; actual reception was. To fall in love with God to the extent that you love what He loves and hate what He hates with conviction and resolve. Pir Lord does not hate people, but He does hate sin and the destruction of innocents, be they unborn or teenagers given a false gospel.

If you have heard and embraced the whole depositum fidei St. Paul was so careful to hand it on unaltered, then the second half of the miracle is coming for you whether you plan for it or not. You will not be able to keep it to yourself either. Nobody who has actually heard ever can.

I hope you have an excellent Sunday. God bless and protect all of you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes it needs it.

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Recently, I spent some time with a priest from a traditionalist community not affiliated with my own. By the end of the evening we both had better insight into our current work in the midst of this spiritual crisis.

He’s doing holy work. He’s forming souls. I disagreed with him about various things. He disagreed with me. But we spent three hours talking in a manner that’s become rare on account of the internet: two men who actually wanted to understand where the other person was coming from rather than “win.”

Today’s Gospel, the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, gives us the corrective for anyone inclined to think themselves superior in that regard. 1 We have a Pharisee and a publican going up to the Temple to pray. One of them comes having already decided the prayer will go well because of his fast-counting and tithe-checking. The other man is too ashamed even to lift his eyes to heaven.

The prayer of the Pharisee is not invented by St. Luke. It’s what every reform or restoration movement thinks and speaks when it’s talking to itself. Every one. Including this one. “I thank God that I am not like other men.”

Replace “other men” with “Novus Ordo Catholics” or “the wrong flavor of Trad” and you’ve got a description of the temptation this movement faces if we let down our guard.

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One Spirit, Many Works

Nor does St. Paul, in today’s lesson, leave us without the antidote even before we name the disease. Wisdom, knowledge, Faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, the discerning of spirits, tongues, the interpretation of tongues: many gifts, many ministries, many workings, but one Spirit, one Lord, one God working all of it in all men.2 St. Paul does not rank and compare the gifts here. He does not inquire which Apostle says the proper editioned breviary. He lays down one test and only one: no man speaking by the Spirit of God blasphemes Jesus Christ, and no man confesses our Lord Jesus save by the Holy Ghost.3 Whatever lies beyond that test is distribution, not division; the Spirit gives to every man what He desires, and the distribution is His concern, not ours.

The Same Test, Across Communities

Through our conversations we discovered we shared one standard for what would definitively settle our cases, where we have differences: a pope, however he arrives to us, clearly dedicated to the twenty ecumenical councils in their de fide teachings, and firmly denying whatever in the modern agenda conflicts with them.

Not a point of preference between ourselves. It’s a shared standard, arrived at by two communities that would differ in practical ecclesiology but are united by a deep concern for the same people seeking to know and live the pre 1960s Catholic Faith.

That really ought to resonate with Trad Catholics, shouldn’t it? The divisions between us are Real. But they’re not, mostly, about what would qualify as clarity. They’re about whether we’ve seen clarity and where it’s from and through whom.

What Gamaliel Knew

The Sanhedrin dealt with something very similar, and the wisdom that kept them from making a monstrous mistake came, ironically enough, from a Pharisee. Gamaliel stood and advised his peers to leave the apostles be: if the work was human, it would amount to nothing without human effort, and if it was divine, nobody present had the authority to stop it no matter how they tried.4 That is not indifference, but rather having the right posture before a question you have no competence to answer. Whether a certain jurisdiction has legitimate exercise of orders in this time of extremis. Whether a certain occupant to Peter’s chair actually holds the office. Whether the See of Rome is vacant, occupied by the false prophet to a future antichrist, or something that nobody even in the wildest dream of Hugh Benson5 expected: these are not things you decide by appealing to who has the best argument or Twitter thread. They are God’s business, and failing a word direct from Him, they belong to an authority so obviously legitimate that to inquire is to answer.

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The One Judgment We’re Qualified to Make

Here’s what we know we have standing to judge: contradiction. The law of non-contradiction is not a philosophical party trick. It is closer to discoverable principles,6 the source code of a universe created by a God who is Truth and who cannot lie to Himself.

A thing cannot be Catholic and not Catholic in the same respect at the same time. Any Catholic Christian who has been baptized and possesses the use of reason can understand that much. They must understand it. And it’s precisely why communities like ours exist at all.

But being able to identify how modernity contradicts what was always taught, Christianity does not on its own tell you which irregular community is on firmer footing or when clarity will come across the wider Church or through what doorway it will arrive.

The gap between knowing those things and knowing that particular thing is not a scandal we should be embarrassed about. It’s just the space we have to occupy honestly rather than paper over with false confidence in any direction.

The Unpleasant Surprise

The Parable of the Talents should prevent any of us from getting too comfortable on either side of that divide. Our Lord tolerated that servant who buried his talent and blamed his caution, but he won’t tolerate those who are foolish enough to conflate institutional comfort with spiritual safety for long.7 Those who blithely assume they’ve stayed inside the Church Christ established may well be shaken by that assumption in ways they cannot imagine. The antidote to that kind of shaking is not despair. It is the attitude of the publican: eyes lowered, chest pounded, mercy begged rather than demanded, on both sides of the aisle.

More Than Enough Work to Go Around

None of that should bring you down. If anything, it’s reason to rejoice. A priest travelling all over the country to bring the Old Faith, a bishop forming a new generation of clergy that have never known modernism or attended a single novus ordo Mass, a hundred tiny chapels working thankless, invisible, faithful service: it all matters. It matters whether any of us will live to see the telos of apostasy exposed and corrected or not. We don’t have to see eye-to-eye on juridical matters to see legitimate labor before us. We are only called to do the work with our own two hands, deny the obvious falsehood, and let God worry about the rest.

So please take this as my thanks, not just to the holy “R and R” priest who sat across from me last week, not just to the sedevacantist with legitimate questions to which few will offer answers, but to everyone working toward the Restoration. The indult priest trying to explain the theological circus to his flock, the SSPX chapel that (like us) never closed during the plague, the sedevacantist parish that will never accept veneration of the Pachamama, the Eastern Catholics preserving rites older than both of our problems. The Restoration was never something any one group owned. It’s a task to be undertaken, and there’s plenty of it for everyone.

If we fail to place our shared mission over and above our differences in the details, we will only drive more to the Orthodox. If you are baptized in the West, fight for the West.

God bless and protect you; may He provide the wisdom we often cannot bear to give each other, may He find us, and whatever our paperwork or sign on the door says, still doing the work.

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She isn’t mentioned once in Scripture. Not a line, not a name, not so much as an aside in any of the four Gospels. And yet her feast has been kept for centuries by the Church in the East since the fourth century and in the West since the high Middle Ages. The fact that the Fathers never placed a direct record of her in the canon does not mean the events never happened. It only means we have to receive them another way. That is St. Anne’s story: the Church didn’t canonize the Protoevangelium of James1 and yet she mattered anyway.

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Where we get the story

Everything we know2 about Sts Joachim and Anne comes from one place: the Protoevangelium of James, a mid-second century work that never made it into the Canon. The Fathers rightly rejected it as authoritative Scripture, but a few centuries later the Church still found value there, extracted the good, and left behind any exaggeration.

The reality of St. Anne was simple enough: she gave Our Mother Mary to God. The Church never officially endorsed any of the Protoevangelium’s details about her conception and birth, but the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, proclaimed in 1854, effectively validated the very essence of those narratives.

The tale itself is simple; St. Joachim was a wealthy man of David’s line. He went to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice at the Temple but was refused on the grounds that he and his wife had borne no child.

Feeling ashamed, he went into the wilderness rather than go home. St. Anne, left behind and also mocked for her barrenness, took herself to prayer and vowed that whatever child she was given would be consecrated back to God. Angels visited them each in their place of exile with the same promise: a son and daughter would be granted.

St. Joachim came back to Jerusalem at the same time St. Anne went out to meet him at the city gate; and from that reunion, in the Church’s telling, came the child who would herself bear God.

How the veneration spread

In the East, devotion to her took hold much sooner. Evidence of devotion to St. Anne comes from the Christian East from as early as the fourth century. Her feast was already present in the Calendar of Constantinople by the first half of the eighth century; and the canon of her Greek Office, written by St. Theophanes (c. 817) draws on still older material associated with Anatolius of Byzantium, who died in 458. Rome, meanwhile, did next to nothing with her for the better part of a millennium, save for a residual devotion in the south of France.

In this respect the Crusades helped things along; returning pilgrims and clergy brought back the Eastern devotion with them to the west, and when Dominican Jacobus de Voragine incorporated her story into the Golden Legend in 1298, the floodgates opened. Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Carmelites all adopted her as a particular patron; shrines dedicated to her proliferated, and by the end of the medieval era, she was counted among the most widely invoked intercessors of Latin Christendom by mothers, by those who lacked children, by grandmothers and, by miners. Miners prayed to her3 because she once carried Mary who carried the Treasure of the world within her womb, so the miner too descends into the earth, carrying his lamp before him, toward a treasure.4

What she means for us now

The thing about Anne that should jump out at anyone who’s been paying attention (especially this year) is that her entire importance in salvation history centers around the fact that she was able to pass on the Faith from within a family while simultaneously finding herself, for her particular season in life, outside the Temple power structure. Joachim was rejected at the gate. The religious leadership of his time had, essentially, no place for him. And it was in and through that rejection that God elected to do what was most important: to prepare, in the silence of a regular home, the woman who would give birth to the Mother of God.

I think of my own grandmother here, though I do not want her story to eclipse Anne’s, only to illustrate it. She taught me to pray at the age of three. Years before that, she had stopped attending Mass after the changes, for reasons she never fully explained to a child, and by the time I was old enough to understand what had happened in her Church she had already made her peace with praying at home.5 She was no saint that I know of, certainly no Anne. But she belongs to the same species of fidelity: the hearth outlasting the institution’s convulsions, the lex orandi kept alive at the bedside when the parish down the road had moved on to something else. Every grandmother who has ever taught a child to make the Sign of the Cross, is doing in miniature what Anne did in full: bearing Tradition forward through the one channel no synod can close, which is Love and Faith, patiently and stubbornly handed down.

That is why today’s readings suit her so perfectly. The woman of valor in Proverbs gets up while it’s still night and does not fear snow for her household; her worth, says the text, exceeds pearls and her children rise up and call her blessed, not the elders at the gate. And the Gospel gives us the field with the treasure hidden inside of it, and the merchant who sells all he has for one pearl of great price. St. Anne is both of those women. She is the one who maintained the house when it should have produced no fruit. She also is the field itself: an ordinary and overlooked plot of ground in which the whole treasure of the Incarnation lay hidden until the day it was found.

She was never a priest, a bishop, a doctor of the Church, or the subject of a single verse of inspired Scripture. She raises no doctrinal disputes and settles no controversies. She just kept the treasure safe until the world was ready for it and then gave it away. On her feast, that is enough of a program for the rest of us: whatever office we hold or lack, whatever institution has or has not certified us, we are asked only to keep the house, mind the child entrusted to us, and let the Treasure grow until He is ready to be found by someone else.

St. Anne, pray for every grandmother who ever taught a child the Our Father with no one watching, and pray for the households, inside every communion and none, still quietly keeping the Faith alive.

There is a map circulating in New York City this summer. The Mamdani administration published it as a tourism guide for the FIFA World Cup, a directory of the city’s immigrant neighborhoods for the millions of international visitors arriving this month. Little Yemen is on it. Little Bangladesh. Little Haiti. Little Guyana. Little Pakistan.

Little Italy is not.

One of the oldest, most organically rooted immigrant communities in American history; the neighborhood where families from Sicily and Calabria arrived between 1880 and 1920 and built something from nothing, where the Feast of San Gennaro has run for a century, where the stones of the street carry the memory of people who came with callused hands and stubborn Faith. That neighborhood simply did not appear. No argument was made against it. No decree was issued. The map was drawn, and the neighborhood was not on it.

The Italian-American community noticed. They organized. They named the omission publicly and refused to accept administrative invisibility as a verdict on their existence. The mayor caved. Little Italy went back on the map.

I want to talk about a map that has not yet been corrected.

The Mechanism

What Mamdani did to Little Italy, the aggiornamento settlement did to the Old Faith; and it did so with a patience and consistency that took sixty years to complete.

No dogmatic definition declared the ancient Roman Rite invalid. Summorum Pontificum in 2007 confirmed what canonists had long argued: the ancient Rite was never abrogated, because it was never merely a papal privilege to withdraw.1 What happened instead was something subtler. The ancient Rite ceased to appear on the official map. Diocesan directories did not list it. Seminary curricula did not teach it. Chancery correspondence did not reference it. The neighborhood existed; the map simply stopped showing it.

This is not the method of argument. It is the method of erasure. And erasure is considerably more efficient than argument, because erasure produces no martyrs. The rack creates martyrs, and martyrs recruit. The map merely stops listing you. You vanish not into blood but into irrelevance; and irrelevance, unlike persecution, leaves no heroic narrative for the next generation to find.

Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson saw this coming in 1907.2 Lord of the World is not a novel about a demonic conspiracy in the sensational sense. It is a novel about a humanitarian program with institutional momentum, genuine believers at every level, and one consistent directional consequence: the Faith becomes invisible. Benson’s Felsenburgh does not refute the Mass; he makes the Mass seem like a neighborhood the modern city has simply grown past. No suppression required. The map is redrawn, and the ancient quarter is not on it.

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Leo XIII Named the Method

Leo XIII in Libertas Praestantissimum identified the Liberal program with a precision that reads, one hundred and thirty-eight years later, as prophecy. The aim, he wrote, was not the formal suppression of the Church but her exclusion from the direction of public affairs; her removal from the map of consequence. You do not ban the Church. You simply decline to list her among the institutions whose voice is consulted when the arrangements of public life are made. Over time, absence from the map of consequence functions as prohibition, without the legal liability of prohibition.3

The Synodal Church operates by exactly this principle. It listens. It consults. It publishes preparatory documents with thematic panels on families, young people, and “complex situations.” The preparatory document for October’s meeting on Amoris Laetitia asks participating bishops what “forms of resistance continue to emerge.”4 The resistance being catalogued is anyone who holds what the Church held before 1965. The consultation is exhaustive. The exclusion is total.

Cardinal Cupich, writing this month for Vatican News, described synodality as a Croatian folk dance called kolo; a circle of linked hands, moving together. The circle is drawn. The steps are set. The only question the preparatory document asks is what forms of resistance prevent everyone from joining. The Old Faith is not a voice in that conversation. It is a problem the conversation is designed to solve.

The Saints Who Would Not Recognize the Circle

St. Vincent Ferrer preached fidelity during the Great Schism, when three men simultaneously claimed the papacy and the canonical question of legitimate succession remained genuinely unresolved. He backed the wrong Avignon claimant. History still canonized him, because his fidelity to the Faith itself was unimpeachable. The question that mattered was not which man the cardinals preferred; it was what the Church actually taught.

St. Joan of Arc was condemned by a legitimate ecclesiastical court, presided over by a validly ordained bishop, operating under canonical procedure. The verdict was formally correct by every procedural standard available to her accusers. She was burned. Twenty-five years later the verdict was annulled. The Church canonized her. The argument that canonical authority must be obeyed because it is canonical authority, applied without remainder, would have required her to go quietly.

St. Athanasius. Contra mundum. The whole world groaned and found itself Arian; not some bishops, most bishops. He held. He was right. The Church eventually said so. He also, as a matter of historical record, consecrated bishops without papal approval. That detail tends to disappear from certain tellings of the story.

None of these three saints would recognize the institution that held Islamic prayer ceremonies in its precincts, produced Fiducia Supplicans, constructed the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, and enthroned the Pachamama in Santa Maria in Trastevere, as continuous with what they served. That is not a polemical claim. It is a straightforward historical observation. A navigator who has held this course for sixty years is not lost; he knows his destination.

The Incongruence No One Will Name

A priest posted a screenshot this week quoting Blessed Pius IX’s Quartus Supra against the SSPX: “Whoever the Roman Pontiff judges to be a schismatic for not expressly admitting and reverencing his power must stop calling himself Catholic.”

Blessed Pius IX also wrote the Syllabus of Errors in 1864. Condemned proposition eighty: that the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.

Anathema sit.

The same Pontiff whose authority is brandished against the traditionalists would have placed the current pastoral program of the Roman See under formal condemnation. You cannot quote Pius IX as a weapon against people who hold what Pius IX held, while defending an institution that has canonized in practice what Pius IX anathematized in print. The selective pre-1960 citation is not a theological argument. It is a debating posture wearing borrowed vestments.

The incongruence runs deeper still. The post-conciliar settlement has consistently elevated the role of the informed personal conscience in moral discernment. This is not the pre-1960 teaching; St. Alphonsus Liguori, the Church’s own Doctor of moral theology, holds that conscience must be formed by and submitted to objective moral truth as taught by the perennial Magisterium.5 But sixty years of pastoral implementation have given individual conscience a weight it did not previously carry.

Apply that principle without favoritism.

The SSPX bishops acted in conscience, formed by fifteen centuries of Catholic doctrine, in the genuine belief that the Faith was in grave danger. The See of Caer-Glow exists because consciences formed by the Old Faith concluded that Utrecht succession and the twenty Doctrinal Councils provided a legitimate home for that Faith outside the administrative structures that had effectively deleted it from their map. If the post-conciliar principle of conscience is valid, we are its most rigorous practitioners. If the pre-1960 principle of obedience is valid, it indicts the institution currently being defended as surely as it indicts us.

The accommodationists cannot have it both ways.

Good People, an Honest Reckoning, and a Word About Myself

Let me say something personal before I go further, I am a juridically irregular bishop. I have more clergy friends in the Novus Ordo than not. We agree to disagree on theology, and most support my path personally while admitting they would not have taken it themselves. That is fair enough, and I respect it. Our relationship with God and His Church must be built on radical honesty; we must be who we present ourselves to be, and I have no interest in pretending my position is tidy when it is not.

From that position, I want to speak about two people I genuinely respect.

Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God and Dr. Taylor Marshall are not enemies of the Faith. Their instinct is the Gamaliel instinct of Acts 5: stay with the visible structure, trust Providence, let God sort the crisis through legitimate channels. I understand that instinct. I do not think a man who stays is evil, or a lesser Christian. He is making an adult decision with the best information he has, and that deserves respect, not suspicion.

But there is something neither of them has yet reckoned with honestly. There is a very real risk that it is they who have made the un-Catholic decision.

That sentence is not an insult. It is a theological observation with a precise historical precedent. The bishops who sided with Liberius against St. Athanasius were not malicious men. They were institutional men making what seemed like the prudent, structurally orthodox choice. History named them Arians anyway; not because they intended heresy, but because the destination of their accommodation was heresy. Intention does not determine destination.

Mother Miriam said something unusually honest. She listened to Fr. Altman, agreed with every word of the diagnosis, found her heart in complete agreement; and then concluded she must obey anyway. That is the accommodationist position in its most transparent form. It does not pretend the evidence is ambiguous. It asserts that submission to the visible structure supersedes the evidence about what that structure is currently doing.

The question obedience cannot answer for itself is this: obedience to what end? When the command is ordered not to sanctification but to erasure, the virtue of obedience does not sanctify the command.

The Trad civil war; the denunciations, the tribal gatekeeping, the factions fracturing over which claimant has valid orders; is not of God. It is the fruit of a community made homeless by erasure, fighting over the ruins of a map that no longer shows its neighborhood.

A Pastoral Word for the Priest in the Middle

The SSPX excommunication, and specifically the document on conditions for reversion to Roman communion, has made Rome’s actual terms public in a way that 1988 did not. Signing that document requires affirming Vatican II according to the interpretation given by the current Magisterium, and undertaking never to criticize the pope’s teachings publicly. Those are the actual terms. They are now on record.

If you hold the Faith I hold but want to remain canonically regular, here is my honest counsel:

Write your bishop directly. Tell him you are loyal to him, and that in conscience you cannot affirm that every post-1960s innovation was of God. Ask him plainly for permission to hold those convictions in conscience while you remain under his authority and submit to the Church’s judgment. If he grants it, the matter is settled, and it is his to answer for before God, not yours.

But if your conscience cannot assent to Rome’s actual published terms, you are facing a real and difficult choice; not a comfortable one, and not one I can make for you. I would rather see a man wrestle honestly with that choice, even arrive somewhere I would not, than smile at his bishop while quietly living otherwise.

Subjection to one’s bishop has to mean something, or it means nothing at all.

The SSPX and the Hunger for Recognition

The Society’s canonical appeal, filed July 11th under Canon 1734, is actually quite strong. Honest canonists who disagree with the consecrations have acknowledged that Cardinal Fernández’s decree has serious canonical problems. Dom Pagliarani’s conduct toward Rome over the preceding years follows, with notable precision, the procedure Our Lord prescribes in Matt. 18:15-17; private correspondence first, then formal petition, then public action when both were ignored.6 He asked for bread. He received a stone.

But here is what the canonical argument cannot address:

The Society is asking Cardinal Fernández to adjudicate whether their act of preserving the Faith was licit. They are asking the mayor who deleted the neighborhood from the map to please consider putting it back. This is the posture of the barely tolerated guest watching the host’s face for signs of renewed displeasure; a posture the Society has held, to varying degrees, since 1988. Every act of provisional Roman tolerance has been experienced not as a right grounded in apostolic continuity but as a reprieve. And every reprieve creates the anxious orientation toward the institution that granted it.

There is a word for that dynamic. It is codependency. And codependency, even in its ecclesial form, is not a foundation for the Restoration.

The Italian-American Civil Rights League did not petition Mayor Mamdani to internally review his cartographic process. They organized publicly, named the erasure as erasure, and made the omission politically unsustainable. The neighborhood went back on the map; not because the administration had a change of heart, but because the community refused to accept invisibility as their condition.

Go Where You Are Welcome

Here is the pastoral word I want to leave with you, addressed to the baptized person who has been watching all of this and wondering what to do.

You are not an orphan petitioning a hostile bureaucracy. You are a member of a Church whose apostolic succession runs through lines that pre-date the controversies of the 1960s, whose twenty Doctrinal Councils are intact, whose pre-1960 discipline is not a managed concession or a canonical workaround but the ordinary, unremarkable expression of what the Western Church has always been.

When a community’s primary psychological orientation is toward recognition from the institution that wants its erasure, that community will always be structurally vulnerable. The canonical status will always be uncertain. The reprieve will always be provisional. There is another way. Go where you are welcome; not merely tolerated, not included as a managed concession, but genuinely welcome.

Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum was precise: unity with the visible Church is achieved not by administrative registration but by communion in Faith, sacrament, and governance under legitimate apostolic authority.7 That communion is available. The address has not changed, even if it may mean meeting at the Mass rocks once again.

Benson ended Lord of the World with a final Mass offered in the Alban Hills as the airships of the new world order circled overhead. It is not a scene of despair. It is the image of a neighborhood that refused to become invisible even after every official map had dropped its address. The priest was there. The altar was there. The Sacrifice was offered. And heaven received it.

The neighborhood still exists. Come home. Reject the innovations and return to Tradition.

May God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes.

If you want to see my livestream on the topic, it can be found here.

The Church put a criminal in the pulpit this Sunday1, and she meant to.

Not literally, of course; Our Lord is telling a parable, not canonizing an embezzler. But the choice is deliberate and it is uncomfortable, because the man Our Lord holds up as an example of prudence is a steward caught red-handed squandering his master’s goods, and the trait Our Lord Jesus commends in him is not remorse. It is speed. Faced with ruin, he moves. He does not spend the afternoon composing an apology to the master; he goes straight to the debtors and starts cutting bills, buying himself a future with a currency he no longer has any right to spend. “And the master commended the unjust steward, in that he had acted prudently.”2 Our Lord Jesus never endorses theft; the theft was not virtuous, but the urgency was correct.

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Sonship Is Not a Waiting Room

In the Epistle3, St. Paul tells us, “You have not received a spirit of bondage so as to be again in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry, Abba! Father!” This is not devotional language, but a legal and filial fact, sealed at the font of baptism, and “heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with Christ.” You did not merely receive God’s favor; you received adoption. You received His house and its associated duties.

This is where McReligion goes quiet, because it prefers sonship as a warm conclusion rather than a standing assignment. Tell a man he is beloved and stop there, and he will happily stop there with you; he will treat the inheritance the way a distracted heir treats a family farm he has never once walked, adoption papers in a drawer somewhere and the fields going to weed. The steward in today’s parable had been living exactly that way, right up until the notice of dismissal forced him to remember whose house he was standing in. Our Lord’s verdict on him is not “well done, thief.” It is closer to: finally, you administrator, you act like the reckoning is real.

Leo XIII: Ownership That Is Also an Office

Long before McReligion had a name, Leo XIII gave the Church her clearest modern statement on exactly this tension, in Rerum Novarum of 1891. Leo defends private property against the socialists of his day, forcefully and without apology; but he refuses to let the defense collapse into the opposite error, the idea that what a man owns is simply his to burn as he pleases. Man holds his goods, Leo insists, not as an absolute lord answerable to no one, but as one who administers them under the eye of Providence, bound to use the surplus for the good of others.4 Ownership, on this account, is closer to an office than a possession. You do not merely have money. You hold it, on terms, from a Master who is still very much alive and still very much watching the books.

The steward’s crime was never that he handled money. It was that he handled it as though the house had no owner.5

St. Alphonsus on the Rope Around a Rich Man’s Neck

St. Alphonsus Liguori, writing on the deadly sin of avarice, makes a point that should unsettle anyone tempted to read this parable as a lesson for other people. Avarice, he warns, is among the most disguised of vices, because it rarely announces itself as sin; it dresses as prudence, as responsibility, as simply being careful with what one has earned.6 The rich man in another of Our Lord’s parables7 did not think of himself as wicked. He thought of himself as sensible, building bigger barns. Liguori’s counsel is not detachment from money as though money itself were the poison. It is detachment from the illusion that money is finally yours to hoard rather than the Master’s to be administered, which is precisely the illusion the steward in today’s Gospel was cured of only by the shock of losing his position.

What This Asks of You Today

Here is where the mission of the Restoration actually touches your bank statement, and I say this as bluntly as the Gospel does. You are already the heir; nothing in your ledger revokes that, and nothing in it earns it either. The only question the parable leaves you with is whether you are running the estate like a man who knows whose it is, or drifting through it the way the steward drifted before the notice came. Make friends for yourselves with the mammon of wickedness, so that when you fail they may receive you into the everlasting dwellings. Redirected mercy, urgent almsgiving, debts forgiven and kindnesses extended while there is still time to extend them; this is Mammon put back to the use a son would put it to, rather than the use a sleepwalking owner drifts into by default.

The steward was not thrown out for being crooked. He kept his welcome, such as it was, because he finally acted like a son of the house rather than a stranger passing through it. Go and do likewise, while the books are still open.

May God bless and protect you this day.

Our Lord asks a question in the Sermon on the Mount that sounds at first like a rhetorical flourish. “Do men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?”1 Of course not. Everyone knows the answer. The question seems almost too simple for the occasion.

It is not simple. It is a precise diagnostic instrument of the Gospel, and in the summer of 2026 it has acquired a specificity that should stop every serious Catholic in their tracks.

The faithful are being told to gather grapes. The question before us is whether we are looking at a vine.

Benedict Named the Wound

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued Summorum Pontificum. The document was celebrated in traditionalist circles as a vindication, and in a narrow sense it was; the ancient Mass was declared never to have been abrogated, and priests were given broad freedom to celebrate it without special permission.

But read it again more carefully, and something else emerges. Summorum Pontificum was not a triumphant declaration. It was an admission. The very existence of two forms of one Roman Rite, existing simultaneously in the same Church, was not presented as a sign of liturgical abundance. It was a pastoral response to a wound. The hermeneutic of continuity that Benedict labored to construct was, by its nature, a concession that continuity had become invisible enough to require argument. You do not write a hermeneutic of continuity for something that is obviously continuous.

What Benedict gave the faithful, whether he intended to or not, was a theological framework for what many of them already knew from lived experience: that there were, in effect, two churches operating under the same institutional roof. Not two denominations, not a formal schism; but two orientations so fundamentally different in their understanding of what the liturgy is, what the Faith requires, and what the Church exists to do, that coexistence required constant negotiation and produced constant friction.

Call it the tale of two churches. The Church of God, oriented toward the transcendent, anchored in the continuous tradition, offering the Holy Sacrifice as the center of its life. And the Church of man, oriented toward the assembly, reading the Council as a rupture rather than a development, understanding the liturgy as a communal meal and the Faith as a conversation in permanent revision.2

Benedict held these two in tension. The tension was uncomfortable but also honest. A man standing at a crossroads, unable to choose, is at least standing at the right crossroads. He knows a choice exists.

The Synodalists Resolved the Tension

What has happened since Summorum Pontificum was effectively abrogated by Traditionis Custodes in 2021, and what has been made unmistakably clear by the canonical action against the Society of St. Pius X in 2026, is that the synodalist project has resolved the tension by eliminating one of its terms.

The Old Faith is not in tension with the new direction. The Old Faith is “schism.”3

This is the move that changes everything, the synodalists have not successfully argued that the traditional Mass is liturgically inferior, or that the pre-conciliar theology was inadequate, or even that the Council represents a genuine development that supersedes what came before. They have not made the argument, because making the argument would require engaging the evidence; the unbroken liturgical tradition of the Latin West, the continuous magisterial teaching from the Apostles through Pius XII, the witness of the martyrs and saints formed by exactly the rites now being suppressed.

Instead, they have declared the Old Faith is outside the Church. The men who hold it are excommunicated. The question of continuity is settled not by theological argument but by canonical decree.4

The serpent has been called an egg.5 The thistle has been presented as a vine. And the faithful are expected to gather fruit from it.

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What the Vine Has Produced

Our Lord says the test is fruit. Not intention, not credential. The vine that produced Traditionis Custodes and the SSPX excommunications also produced Amoris Laetitia, with its footnoted suggestion that the divorced and remarried might in some circumstances receive Holy Communion without a firm purpose of amendment.6 It produced Fiducia Supplicans, which extended blessings to same-sex unions in terms that required a subsequent clarification, then a clarification of the clarification, then a studied silence while various bishops’ conferences announced they would not implement it.7 It produced Pachamama in the Vatican Gardens and in the nave of Santa Maria in Traspontina, carried on the shoulders of men in clerical dress, in the year of the Amazon Synod.8 It produced the Synodality process, which spent years and considerable resources consulting the baptized about the direction of the Faith, as though the Faith were a policy proposal subject to amendment by committee.9

These are not peripheral incidents. They are the fruit of a particular tree; produced not despite the tree’s nature but because of it. A vine oriented toward the assembly rather than the altar, toward dialogue rather than definition, toward the spirit of the age rather than the Spirit of God, will produce what this vine has produced. The fruit is the declaration of what the tree is.

Now apply the same test to the other tree. The vine that produced the traditional Mass also produced the martyrs of England, dying under Henry and Elizabeth for the reality of the Holy Sacrifice those very rites enact. It produced the Cristeros of Mexico, dying with ¡Viva Cristo Rey! on their lips for the right to attend the Mass their grandmothers had attended. It produced the confessors of the twentieth century, the priests who kept the Faith alive under Soviet occupation and Nazi persecution, who said the old words in secret because the old words were the Faith and the Faith was worth dying for.10

“A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” 11

The Romans 6 Question

“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free as regards justice. But what fruit had you then from those things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of these things is death.” 12

Paul is not speaking to pagans. He is speaking to baptized Romans who know the difference between the two slaveries and are being asked to choose, consciously and finally, which master they serve. The question is not abstract, it is about fruit and about ends. What does this service produce? Where does this road terminate? Quod Vadis?

The accommodationist answer; the answer of the Catholic media figures who have spent the last several years finding sophisticated reasons for why the situation is more complex than it appears, why prudence requires a measured tone, why the canonical situation of the SSPX is genuinely ambiguous and reasonable men can disagree; that answer has a fruit of its own. It produces the paralysis of men who know which tree they are looking at and cannot bring themselves to say so, because saying so has institutional and personal costs.

St. Paul’s word for the end of that service is “death,” not as a metaphor, but as a wage.

The alternative is not rebellion for its own sake. It is what St. Paul describes in verse 22: “set free from sin and become slaves to God, you have your fruit unto sanctification, and as your end, life everlasting.” The fruit of service to God is sanctification. The end is life everlasting. These are not difficult to distinguish from the alternative, if you are willing to look at what the trees are actually producing.

A Word to the Bewildered

I want to speak directly to the person reading this who is not angry but bewildered.

You were told, by people with credentials and reputations and long records of apparently serious Catholic commentary, that the situation was navigable. That the tension Benedict had named could be held. That prudent Catholics could remain in full communion with the institutional direction of the Church without compromising the Faith they had received. That the two churches could coexist indefinitely under a hermeneutic of continuity, and that those who doubted this were being uncharitable or alarmist or insufficiently nuanced.

The canonical action against the SSPX has made that position untenable. You cannot hold a nuanced view of an excommunication decree. You must decide whether the authority issuing it has the standing to issue it, and that question takes you somewhere definite. The men who advised you that the situation was navigable are now discovering that it is not, and some of them are finding sophisticated reasons for why their previous advice was correct and the present situation represents an unfortunate but explicable development rather than a confirmation of what the alarmists had been saying.

This is what Laodicea13 looks like from the inside. The comfortable position between the Faith and the world is no longer available, not because it was destroyed by an enemy, but because the moment of clarity arrived and the disguise could not hold.

The bewilderment you feel is not a spiritual failure. It is the beginning of the discernment Our Lord describes in Matthew 7. You are being asked, for perhaps the first time with this degree of urgency, to look at two trees and name what you see.

You already know how to do this. Our Lord said so. By their fruits you will know them. You do not need a canonical degree to apply this test. You do not need institutional permission. You need the willingness to say plainly what the fruit is, and to draw the obvious conclusion about the tree.

The See of Caer-Glow and the Question of Continuity

Some of you wonder who I am to say these things. I lead a portion of the baptized in a prelature called the See of Caer-Glow.

We hold the Utrecht apostolic succession, which flows from the ancient See of Utrecht through the Old Catholic bishops of the early eighteenth century, before the Old Catholic movement took the directions we do not follow.14 We hold the twenty ecumenical councils. We hold the pre-1960 Faith and discipline without apology or qualification. We are not in communion with 21stC Rome15, and we do not pretend otherwise.

What we are is a vessel that was built precisely for the moment when the institutional structure cannot carry the Faith without deforming it. We do not claim to be the whole Church. We claim to hold the whole Faith. There is a difference, and it matters because we stand in full solidarity with every traditionalist and restoration movement, of whatever canonical stripe, that works toward the renewal of the ecclesial and secular orders in a direction pleasing to God; and we regard as brothers in the Restoration all who hold the Old Faith without apology, transmit it without compromise16, and refuse the accommodation that this moment is pressing upon every serious Catholic.17

The vine of the Old Faith is still producing fruit. It is producing the sanctification Paul describes in Romans 6; the slow, costly, unglamorous work of formation in the ancient Tradition; the Mass offered without apology; the sacraments administered according to the rites that formed the martyrs; and the teaching handed down without the footnotes that reverse it.

That is the vine. Those are the grapes.

Closing Thought

“Do men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?”

The question has an answer. Our Lord did not ask it because He was uncertain; He asked it because He wanted His disciples to be willing to say the answer plainly.

The answer in 2026 is the same as it was in the first century. No. Men do not gather grapes from thorns. The fruit declares the tree. The tree declares the master. The master pays what He has always paid.

Choose the vine that produces sanctification. Hold it without apology. Transmit it without compromise.

That is the work, and it always has been. Thank you for being part of it. God sees what you do for Him and His Church.

May God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes.

In 2023 a woman in Illinois bought a small bottle from a gas station cooler. It wore the same fire-orange label as the whiskey she remembered, sat where the whiskey always sat, cost what a cheap shot of whiskey costs. It was not whiskey. It was a malt beverage dressed to resemble one, and when she and others like her sued, the complaint against the manufacturer made a point worth keeping in your pocket: the label read “with natural whisky flavors and other flavors,” arranged so that a hurried reader would see “natural whisky” and miss the word “flavors” trailing behind it.1Nobody lied outright. Someone simply arranged the Truth so that only the diligent would find it.

I want you to hold that bottle in your mind for the rest of this substack, because two Princes of the Church have recently done, in their own words, the theological version of the same thing.

What Cardinal Koch Actually Said, and What He Did Not

On July 1st, four priests of the Society of St. Pius X were consecrated bishops at Ecône without a pontifical mandate. Under the 1983 Code this is a schismatic act carrying automatic excommunication, and the Holy See treats it as exactly that.2 The interesting material is not the consecrations themselves; it is what came after, when Cardinal Kurt Koch, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, sat for an interview with the Communicatio podcast that Rorate Cæli translated in full.3

One could certainly read this interview and conclude the “Cardinal admits SSPX is right,” though what Cardinal Koch actually did was subtler and, I think, more damaging to his own case than outright agreement would have been: he conceded the Society’s diagnosis while defending the novus ordo synodalist‘s prescription. Something changed, he agrees. He simply insists the change was development rather than rupture, and the word he reaches for to describe it (reform) is worth remembering.

Asked whether Pope Benedict’s 2005 formula, a hermeneutic of continuity set against a hermeneutic of rupture, still holds, Cardinal Koch did not answer with the word continuity. He answered with a different word entirely: a hermeneutic of reform.4 Continuity means the substance did not change. Reform, in the sense he intends it, means the substance changed on purpose, and he wants credit for saying so plainly. He is not defending Benedict’s actual formula. He is filing the label off a bottle you already trust and pouring something else into it.

Pressed further on the Society’s own language, Cardinal Koch was asked about John Paul II’s 1988 description of Lefebvre’s view of tradition as “incomplete and contradictory.” His answer:

“Incomplete probably because they do not keep the entirety of tradition in view. They essentially declare that 2,000 years of tradition, up to the Second Vatican Council, was broken off.”5

A Roman cardinal has just described the Society’s actual complaint accurately, without disputing that a break is what the Society perceives, and rested his entire rebuttal on the claim that the Council “looks back” at the Fathers more than it repudiates them. That is true as far as it goes; Sacrosanctum Concilium and Lumen Gentium do cite the Fathers extensively. Citation is not identity. A man can quote another man at length while reversing his conclusion.6

The Second Witness

One cardinal choosing an unfortunate word is an anecdote. It becomes testimony when a second cardinal, from a different dicastery, on a different continent, three years earlier, says something that confirms it independently. It represents not a burp but a telos.

Cardinal Arthur Roche is Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the office that produced the restrictions on the Old Mass. On March 19th, 2023, he sat for an interview on BBC Radio 4. Put to him was the objection that the difficulty with the Old Mass was never the Latin, but the theology it embodies. He did not deny it. He confirmed it:

“You know the theology of the Church has changed. Whereas before the priest represented, at a distance, all the people. They were channelled as it were through this person who alone celebrated the Mass. It is not only the Priest who celebrates the liturgy, but also those who are baptised with him. And that is an enormous statement to make.”7

Set the two admissions beside each other. Cardinal Koch, prefect for unity, concedes the Council represents a break with 2,000 years of Tradition and calls the break a reform. Cardinal Roche, prefect for worship, concedes the theology of who offers the Sacrifice changed, and calls the change enormous. Two men, two dicasteries, three years apart, describing the same rupture from two different rooms of the same house.

Naming the Thing Without Overreaching It

Neither cardinal states a new Christology outright, but smoke this thick, in this many rooms, is no longer just smoke.

Cardinal Roche speaks only of priesthood and offering. He calls the Old Mass incompatible with the conciliar reform and its ecclesiology out of step with a magisterium he says has changed. Cardinal Koch speaks only of tradition and covenant. Neither man confesses a new Christology in so many words, and I will not claim he did. But one plume of smoke proves nothing; smoke in every room of the house proves the fire is already lit somewhere inside it. I hold, and have held for some time, that Pope Francis’s understanding of the Incarnation8 differs from that of St. Athanasius and from my own.

But the Christian religion is not only defined by its formal Christological statements. It is also who may stand at the altar and how, what becomes of the covenant God made with His people, who governs the Church and by what authority, and which of her own saints she still defends. Move all four, quietly, one dicastery at a time, and you have not adjusted a religion; you have built a different one and left the old name above the door. This was St. Athanasius’s whole complaint against the Arian bishops of his century: they kept the title Catholic while emptying out who Christ actually is. I am not accusing either cardinal of Arianism. I am telling you the pattern of relabeling while the substance moves is the same pattern, and it deserves the same wariness.

The God of Athanasius does not develop. Idem heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula, the same yesterday and today, and forever.9 His Truth does not require the twentieth century’s permission to remain True. The god of Teilhard de Chardin, by contrast, is a god still becoming, folded into cosmic process, converging toward some future point rather than standing, unchanging, as history’s Author. I am not claiming either cardinal cited Teilhard. I am pointing out which of these two gods their admissions and synodal telos actually serve, because a god who develops needs a Church that develops with Him, and a God who does not change needs a Church that hands down rather than reforms.

The Covenant, According to Whom

Return to Cardinal Koch, pressed on the Society’s position regarding the Jews and the claim that the Old Covenant was terminated at Christ’s coming:

“We have the fundamental conviction in Holy Scripture and also in tradition that God wills the salvation of all people, and that He also finds other ways for people to attain salvation who have never come into alignment with the gospel of Jesus Christ.”10

This relocates the means of salvation outside explicit faith in Christ, for a specific people, on grounds he states himself: the weight of “those horrific events” of the twentieth century.11 I understand the flinch. I do not accept it as a magisterial method. Our Lord issued the Great Commission after the Resurrection, with full knowledge of every century still to come. Euntes ergo docete omnes gentes, going therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them.12

To his credit, Cardinal Koch admits the cost of his own position: he cannot fully reconcile it with the New Testament’s language of a covenant new and eternal, since, in his words, that qualification would be unnecessary “if the old was still in power.”13 A Roman cardinal has told an interviewer, on the record, that his own account does not close its own loop. The right response is not triumphalism. It is heartbreak and grief, because a shepherd should not have to concede publicly that his theology cannot fully explain his Founder’s words.

Two Further Instances, Held to the Same Fairness

On June 30th, Leo XIV named Sister Alessandra Smerilli Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, with Cardinal Fabio Baggio as her pro-prefect, her deputy.14 I want to grant the relevant fact fully before drawing any conclusion from it: this dicastery carries no governance tied to holy orders or the sacraments, and The Pillar rightly noted this is precisely why the appointment is canonically uncontroversial.15

A cardinal of the Roman Church now serves, by structure and by title, beneath a religious sister in the day-to-day governance of a major Vatican office. Whatever the canonical fine print, the visible shape of authority in the Church has shifted, quietly, appointment by appointment, and it has shifted in one direction only. This is the same novus ordo synodal church that will tell you, correctly, that priestly ordination is reserved to men, and that is building, one dicastery at a time, a governing class in which ordination is no longer the precondition for ruling clergy. The label still says, “no women priests.” The structure underneath denies the Truth of the Three Munera, the offices of teaching, sanctifying, and governing granted to the ordained alone, which may never be surrendered to lay governance.

We either believe in the priesthood or we do not. So which is it, novus ordo? As usual, the books say one thing and the deeds say another. The “bottle” now contains a structure where priesthood is decreasingly the thing that confers authority in the first place.

And on the actual feast of St. Maria Goretti, three Regensburg theologians, Philippa Haase, Judith König, and Ute Leimgruber, published a guest essay on katholisch.de titled “Maria Goretti as Martyr of Purity? Time for an Intervention.”16 Their claim is that the veneration of an eleven-year-old murdered defending her purity constitutes what “contemporary violence research” calls victim-blaming, because it centers her virtue and her forgiveness of her killer rather than his crime alone.17 They do not dispute the facts of her death. They dispute the Church’s right to still call it what Pius XII called it in 1950: heroic virtue, freely chosen, worthy of canonization.18 The label on the bottle stays, but the contents have been asked to leave.

What This Asks of You

I will not tell you to distrust every bottle on every shelf. Sazerac still sells real whiskey; you read past the first line to find it, and the same discipline serves you in your parish. Ask what is actually inside. Does the priest before you believe extra ecclesiam nulla salus as the Church has always taught it? Does your bishop’s talk of reform mean development in continuity with what was handed down, or permission to keep the label while emptying the bottle? These are not paranoid questions.

Judge, then, the way Our Lord told you to judge: by their fruits you shall know them, and the fruit in question is not rhetoric but this, the same Faith and the same moral practice held intact for two thousand years, without addition and without subtraction.19 Applied honestly, that standard asks two things of you, not one. Pray for Cardinal Koch, Cardinal Roche, and the Regensburg theologians, that they be given the Grace to see what their own words have already conceded. And pray as much, if not more, for those who hold the Faith intact under real pressure to trade it for something more comfortable; perseverance in a hostile age is itself a fruit, and it is rarer than outrage and costs more than a comment left under a video or on a Twitter feed.

Do not let either prayer stay a feeling. Make your morning offering before the day takes you; make your evening examen before sleep takes you, so the day is actually judged rather than merely lived through. And frequent the sacraments only where they are valid and where the Faith behind them has not been quietly refashioned into something Pius XII would not recognize.

May God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes.

If this topic interested you, join me on a Youtube livestream tonight at 9pm Eastern.

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America deserves your thanks today. It does not deserve your worship. Two hundred and fifty years is a long run for a republic, and on a day built for parades and fireworks it would be a small, mean thing to deny the country its due gratitude.1 But the readings the Church gives us today2 will not let the gratitude stop where a nation’s flattery would like it to stop. Read together, they describe one authority working in two movements: keeping a hungry crowd from fainting on the road, then raising the baptized to a life the road itself never leads to. The distinction the Restoration needs to recover badly is not between two fonts. It is between the two powers St. Gelasius named eleven centuries ago, the sacred authority and the one he called merely royal, the latter keeping the road passable and nothing more.3

Two Powers, Sacred and Royal

St. Leo XIII said in Immortale Dei that there are two powers ordained by God for man’s good: the sacerdotium and the imperium, the ecclesial and the civil.4 They are distinct in origin, distinct in competence, and distinct in end. The civil power orders bodies, property, and commerce so that men might live in enough peace to seek God freely. The ecclesial power, the sacred authority, does something the civil power cannot touch at any price: it baptizes a man into Christ’s death and raises him to a life the world did not give and cannot take away.

America’s peculiar genius, whatever its founders actually believed or did not, was building a civil power unusually content to be, in Constantine’s own old phrase, a bishop of things without: competent over roads and markets and courts, and wise enough, more often than not, to leave the Church’s own house to the Church.5 No established religion to strangle her from without, no confiscated benefices, no exiled bishops. That restraint is a real mercy, worth today’s thanksgiving. It is not the same thing as Grace, and confusing the two is the oldest trick McReligion has.6

A Multitude Fed in the Wilderness

St. Mark tells us plainly what happened in that desert place. “And if I shall send them away fasting to their home, they will faint in the way: for some of them came from afar off “7 Note carefully who does what, Our Lord has compassion on hungry bodies and feeds them Himself, seven loaves and a few little fishes, until four thousand eat and are filled and seven baskets are gathered up besides. Nobody else in that desert multiplies anything. The road, the distance travelled, the danger of fainting along the way; that much belongs to the natural order, and it is exactly there, and nowhere further, that a civil power can do Real Good.

This is the full extent of what the regalis potestas can rightly claim. A nation can keep the road passable: clearing the wilderness of its worst dangers, ordering commerce so that bodies are fed, and shielding its people from violence. That is no small thing; a people that faints on the road never arrives at all. Yet keeping the road open is not the same as multiplying the loaves. For over a century, the enemy has exploited precisely this confusion to dismantle civilization.

Newness of Life Is Not a Civic Achievement

“Know you not that all we, who are baptized in Christ Jesus, are baptized in his death? For we are buried together with him by baptism into death: that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.” 8 No constitution wrote that. No bill of rights conferred it. St. Paul is describing a death and a rising that happen to a man at the font, not a policy that happens to a nation in a congress.

This is the whole distinction in one sentence: the civil power can keep the road open; only the priesthood, Christ ministered through His Church, puts a man to death with Christ and raises him walking. Confuse the two, even out of patriotic affection, even on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of a genuinely remarkable country, and you have quietly rebuilt the golden calf with better marketing.9

Gratitude Without the Golden Calf

So here is the pastoral task for the Fourth of July weekend, and it is not complicated. Thank God plainly for the road kept open. Thank Him for a country that let the Church breathe, that fed bodies past all reasonable expectation, that gave baptized men and women two and a half centuries of relative peace to seek the Divine Will without a soldier or sheriff at the church door.10 Then refuse, just as plainly, to let the gratitude curdle into worship of the road instead of the One who waits at its end.

Our hope for this nation, at two hundred and fifty, is not that it govern well, though we thank God when it does; it is that from this soil, hospitable as it has been, will grow a renewed love of the True God and that the baptized, once the Church’s mission is properly assumed rather than merely tolerated, will themselves come to seek nothing less than the Social Kingship of Christ the King.

This is not a call to cynicism about the country, and it is not the property of any one house within the Restoration; it belongs to every baptized man and woman who has ever been tempted, on a patriotic weekend, to let the flag do the work only the sacred authority can do. We give thanks together for the road. We do not stop there together either. That is the whole of it, and it is enough.

May God bless and protect you this Independence Weekend, and may He raise you, not just feed you, in newness of life.

On July 1st, the Society of Saint Pius X intends to consecrate four bishops at Écône without a papal mandate. Fifteen thousand faithful are expected. The Vatican has warned that doing so constitutes a schismatic act carrying automatic excommunication. The SSPX intends to proceed anyway, citing the suprema lex principle: the salvation of souls is the highest law, and two aging bishops cannot sustain the sacramental needs of 700 priests, 264 seminarians, and a faithful presence in more than fifty countries.

In this same week, an archbishop in Cincinnati declined to support men offering a reparation rosary on his own cathedral steps during a pride parade. And the Franciscan University of Steubenville, that flagship of American conservative Catholicism, published an open letter signed by more than twenty professors and administrators, addressed to Father Pagliarani, asking the SSPX to reconsider.

The letter did not ask Leo XIV to reconsider why a papal mandate could not be granted to men who hold the Faith of all twenty councils and offer the sacraments in the rites that formed the saints. No comparable letter went to Rome. The appeal ran in one direction only. That asymmetry is the subject of this essay.

The schism that was already there

Consider, that the schism does not happen on July 1st, 2026. It did not happen in 1988 when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops against the explicit will of John Paul II, after he witnessed a buddha upon an altar at Assisi ‘86. The rupture is older than either event, and its cause is not canonical. It is metaphysical.

Two religions now operate under the name Catholic:

The first is the Faith of St. Athanasius; the Faith of the twenty councils, of Leo XIII, of the martyrs. It holds an immutable God as its source and its end. It measures every earthly arrangement against eternity. Its worship is sacrifice. Its morality is revealed, not negotiated. Its unity is ordered charity, Truth first, then reconciliation on the basis of that Truth.

The second is the faith of Teilhard de Chardin. God as the terminus of an evolutionary process. The Church as the vanguard of humanity’s self-transcendence. Doctrine is a synodal living tradition that develops in ways functionally indistinguishable from reversal. Worship as a communal gathering over a commemorative meal of inclusion. Morality as discernment; accompanied, synodal, pastoral, and perpetually subject to revision in light of the signs of the times.

These are not two emphases within one Faith. They have different gods, different accounts of man, different accounts of what the Church is for. You cannot reconcile them by dialogue, because dialogue presupposes a shared referent. There is no shared referent. One of these religions is Catholicism. The other is wearing its vestments.

Msgr Robert Hugh Benson saw this coming in 1907. In Lord of the World he described a future in which two institutions called themselves the Church; one adapted to the spirit of the age until it was indistinguishable from it; the other refused and was accordingly small, persecuted, and unmistakable. He did not know the specific forms the adaptation would take. He knew the logic. Archbishop Fulton Sheen named the same phenomenon in his own generation as the “ape of the Church”: a counterfeit retaining the external form while inverting the substance. Neither man was predicting a date. Both men were naming a tendency that had not yet reached its conclusion. It has now reached it.1

What the Steubenville letter actually says

The Franciscan University letter opens with John 6:67: “Do you also want to leave?” It cites Vatican I on the Roman primacy. It speaks of the unity Christ prayed for in John 17. It expresses genuine fraternal concern. I take all of that at face value.

Here is the answer it did not anticipate: the text of John 6 is a remarkable choice. Our Lord asked “Do you also want to leave?” of the Twelve, after many disciples had already departed because they could not receive His teaching on the Eucharist. He did not ask it of those who had left. He asked it of those who remained; those who stayed precisely because, as Peter answered, “Thou hast the words of eternal life.”

The SSPX has not left. It has remained, stubbornly, expensively, at considerable personal cost to its priests and faithful, in possession of precisely the Eucharistic Faith and practice the rest of the Church has spent sixty years quietly dismantling. The question “Do you also want to leave?” might more aptly have been directed elsewhere.

The letter also invokes Vatican I’s definition of the Roman primacy. This is theologically correct and canonically relevant. It is also incomplete, because Vatican I defined the charism of the papacy with precision, and that definition has limits. Papal infallibility does not extend to synodal working documents, curial press releases, or the personal theological sympathies of a pope whose formation runs closer to Teilhard than to Trent.2 The SSPX does not reject the papacy. It rejects the revision of the papacy into something Vatican I would not recognize.

That is a distinction the Steubenville letter does not address.

The Cincinnati question

This same week, the Archbishop of Cincinnati declined through his rector to support men praying a reparation rosary on his cathedral steps during a pride parade. The parade celebrates publicly what the Church has always numbered among the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. The archbishop’s position is one of neutrality; he cannot support the prayer group, the rector relayed, because he does not wish to take sides.

A bishop cannot be neutral between a rosary offered in reparation for the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a public celebration of grave sin. Neutrality between those two things is not a position above the argument; it is a position within it. What episcopal neutrality teaches in that situation is that the two things are morally equivalent claims on his pastoral attention, which is precisely what Catholic moral theology has never taught and cannot teach without ceasing to be Catholic moral theology.

St. Gregory the Great called bishops who chose silence out of fear “dumb dogs that cannot bark.”3

The logic in Cincinnati and the logic in the Steubenville letter are structurally identical. In Cincinnati, the pressure fell on the men with the rosaries, not on the parade. At Steubenville, the open letter went to Father Pagliarani, not to the dicastery that offered dialogue only on condition of prior surrender. In both cases, the ones holding the Old Faith are asked to yield, to be quiet, to reconsider; the ones departing from it are accompanied, dialogued with, and left undisturbed. The pressure is not neutral. It has a telos, and that telos is always in the same direction. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

What we actually share

Let me say something that may surprise readers who have followed the traditionalist internecine arguments of recent decades.

The SSPX, the sedevacantists, the independent jurisdictions holding the Old Faith, including my own of the See of Caer-Glow, approach this crisis differently. We do not agree on everything. The canonical questions are genuinely difficult, and any honest man will acknowledge it.

But we share at least three things:

We share the desire to do what God wills, not what is institutionally convenient. We share the refusal of complicity with anything contra fide, regardless of what authority is invoked to demand that complicity. And we share the desire for genuine union with a universally recognized successor of Peter as the Vicar of Christ on earth; not as a Dalai Lama figure whose authority is spiritual theater and whose pronouncements are selectively optional, not as a geopolitical spokesman who addresses the United Nations on climate migration while the Deposit of Faith is quietly renegotiated in synodal working groups, but as the true Vicar of Him who said to Peter: thou art rock, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.4

We want a pope. We want the papacy to be what Vatican I defined it as. What we cannot accept is a papacy functionally redefined as a global spiritual NGO chairmanship, presiding over a process whose conclusions are predetermined and whose orthodox dissenters face excommunication while its heterodox enthusiasts are accompanied.

What it profits no one

What does it profit any of us if the unity demanded requires silence before Marxist social theory dressed as Catholic social teaching? Silence before Masonic syncretism dressed as ecumenism? Silence before hedonism dressed as human dignity? Silence before the slow replacement of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the impersonal Omega Point of a Jesuit palaeontologist whose works were placed under a formal monitum by the Holy Office on the very eve of the Council he is said to have inspired?5

The peace St. Peter commands us to seek and pursue is not that silence. It is the peace of ordered love6; Truth first, charity on that foundation. Any other peace is the peace of a man who has stopped caring what is True because caring is costly, and he has decided the earthly cost is too high.

The cost of the Old Faith has always been high. It was high for St. Athanasius, exiled five times for refusing to call the Arian heresy orthodox. It is high for the men preparing to stand at Écône on Tuesday, who accept excommunication rather than allow the salus animarum to go unserved. It was high for the men standing in a Cincinnati parking lot this past Saturday, praying a rosary into a bullhorn because the archbishop would not let them onto his steps and a police sergeant told them to be quiet while the parade was loud enough to rattle windows.

The Old Faith has never been free. It has always cost exactly everything.

A word about unity

The See of Caer-Glow does not claim to be the last remnant. We consider ourselves brothers of every group and individual working toward the Restoration. There are many who hold the Faith of all the ages, including those trapped in synodal structures. They are in the SSPX chapels. They are in the independent oratories. They are in novus ordo parishes still waiting for someone to tell them the Truth. They are sitting at home on Sunday morning, done with what is on offer, not yet sure where to go.

To all of them: no True unity can be built on the erasure of what we hold in common with the Church of all ages. The unity being offered to us at this moment requires that we accept the Teilhardian account of the Faith as the legitimate successor of the Athanasian one, and be silent about the substitution. No true Catholic can accept that offer; not because we prefer division, not because we are rigid, but because accepting it would require us to stop being Catholic. And that is the one thing the offer has never been authorized to demand.

When a pope governs as the Vicar of Christ, teaching what the Church has always taught, guarding what the Church has always guarded, we will owe him the obedience Vatican I defines, and we will give it gladly. We pray that day comes soon, and we pray for the man who will rise to meet it.

Until then, hallow the Lord Christ in your hearts. Seek after peace and pursue it. Know the difference between the peace that comes from Truth and the peace that comes from surrender.

They do not feel the same. They do not lead to the same place.

God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes it needs it.

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When Leo XIV stood before the United Nations World Food Program headquarters in Rome and declared that the Catholic Church’s mission is to uphold human dignity and foster fraternity, most observers treated it as a news item. It is not a news item but the completion of a sentence that was begun sixty years ago, in a single gesture, on an altar in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Catholics understand symbol. We have always understood it. The placement of a hand, the direction of a genuflection, who stands above whom and who kneels; these are not decorative choices. They are theological claims made in the language of the body. The Faith was carried for centuries by people who could not read Latin, precisely because the rites communicated Truth through form as much as through word. When we encounter a significant symbolic act, we are obliged to read it. Paul VI gave us one of the most significant in the twentieth century, and the Church has been living inside its logic ever since.

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Before the Dates: What the Church Is Actually For

It is worth stating the baseline, because the contrast that follows only bites if you know what the contrast is against.

The First Commandment is not a warm suggestion. I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.1 The entire structure of Christian life flows from this: God is owed the worship, the honor, and the obedience that are His due by right of creation and redemption. Every sacrament, every fast, every act of charity, every homily, every corporal work of mercy are all ordered to this. Not to human flourishing in the abstract. Not to the improvement of social conditions, however genuinely good that work may be. To the glory of God and the salvation of immortal souls.

Our Lord Himself told us the path. Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat. How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it.2

The tradition has never softened this text. St. Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church and perhaps the most practically pastoral mind the Church has produced in the modern era, built his entire apostolate on the seriousness of that word few. He wrote that the two Graces most necessary for eternal salvation are perseverance and divine love, and that we must beg for them without ceasing.3

He pictured a traveler on the road to his true homeland who stops midway, spends everything building a palace in a land he is only passing through, and arrives at his permanent home with nothing prepared. St. Alphonsus did not call this ambition; he called it madness.

The Christian who pours his whole life into the comfort and improvement of this world, while giving no serious thought to the world where he must live as long as God is God, is that traveler; and the Church’s single most urgent task is to tell him so before he runs out of road. The Church’s task is to tell men they are on the road, not at the destination; that the palace they are building is temporary; and that the narrow gate requires them to travel light.4

This is the mission. Salvation of souls. Preaching of repentance. The proclamation that Christ is Lord, that sin is real, that judgment is certain, and that the mercy available through His Cross is the only mercy that reaches to the root of the human problem. Every other work the Church undertakes, the corporal works of mercy such as feeding the hungry, educating the poor, tending the sick, are ordered to this mission as means to an end. The end is souls in Heaven. The corporal works of mercy matter because it is hard to contemplate eternity on an empty stomach; not because feeding the hungry is itself the Church’s reason for existence.5

With that baseline established, we can read three dates:

The First Date: November 13, 1964

The Third Session of the Second Vatican Council was still in progress. Paul VI descended from the papal throne in St. Peter’s, ascended to the altar, and placed his tiara upon it. The official explanation was charity; the tiara would be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. The crowds applauded. Viva il papa povero. Long live the poor Pope.

But the tiara was not merely a hat. Every pope who had received it heard, at his coronation, the same formula: Receive the tiara adorned with three crowns and know that you are the father of all princes and kings, the ruler of the world and the representative of our Lord Jesus Christ on earth. The three crowns of the triregnum expressed the triple pontifical authority: teaching office, priesthood, and pastoral governance. More precisely, they expressed the claim that this office stood above every earthly throne, not in rivalry with kings, but as the voice of the King to whom all kings owe account.6

Paul VI put that crown down. He described the act as renouncing human glory and power in keeping with the renewed spirit of the council. In doing so, he visually abdicated the very claim that Pius XI had spent his pontificate defending. In Quas Primas (1925), Pius XI had written without apology that not only private individuals but rulers and princes are bound to give public honour and obedience to Christ, and that the Church, founded by Christ as a perfect society, cannot be subject to any external power.7 The tiara was the symbol of that claim. The altar received it on November 13, 1964, and no pope has picked it up since.

I am not making an argument about the validity of the gesture as an act of charity. I am reading what it said. Symbol is not allegory; it does not require a hidden meaning. The meaning is in the act itself. One who puts down the crown of authority is telling the watching world what he thinks of that authority, whatever words accompany the gesture.

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The Second Date: October 4, 1965

Less than a year later, Paul VI addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He was the first pope to do so. The symbolism of the occasion was not incidental; he arrived as a petitioner, not as a sovereign. He introduced himself by noting that he possessed only a tiny and practically symbolic temporal sovereignty, the minimum needed in order to be free to exercise his spiritual mission. He said explicitly: he had no temporal power, no ambition to compete with the assembled nations. We have nothing to ask, no question to raise; at most a desire to formulate, a permission to seek: that of being allowed to serve you.(⁷)

He asked the permission of the UN to serve it.

Read that sentence again. The Vicar of Christ, in his first address to the General Assembly of nations, introduced his office by disclaiming authority and requesting permission to be useful. This is not humility in the classical sense; humility does not require the surrender of legitimate office. This is something different: the redefinition of the papal role from sovereign witness to collaborative servant.

The speech then made the move that concerns us most. Paul VI called the United Nations the obligatory8 path of modern civilization and world peace.9 He went further: he declared himself present as an expert on humanity, offering the Church’s support to the Assembly’s purposes. The Great Commission, given to the Apostles in Matthew 28, reads: Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.10 All nations. The mandate is to bring all nations under the authority of Christ the King. Paul VI, standing before the body that claimed to represent all nations, said instead: we are here to serve you.11

Now set that beside the baseline from the section above. The Church exists to preach the First Commandment, to call souls to repentance and salvation through the narrow gate, to give God the honor He is owed. What Paul VI offered the General Assembly was none of those things. He offered the Church as a humanitarian partner. He named the UN the world’s greatest hope and the reflection of the loving design of God for the progress of the human family.12 He offered them the applause of a Church that had, twelve months earlier, tossed its crown on ground.

The Social Kingship of Christ the King is the doctrine that Christ’s authority encompasses families, societies, and states, not merely the interior life of the individual believer. Leo XIII built the entire structure of modern Catholic social teaching on this foundation. Pius XI formalized it in Quas Primas, writing that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of Our Saviour, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.13 Pius was not speaking of a theocratic state; he was insisting that the peace the world seeks is only possible through the recognition of the one source of peace. No earthly institution, however well-intentioned, can substitute for that acknowledgment.

Paul VI, standing before the UN, said the opposite.14

The theological weight of this address has never been adequately reckoned with. It is customarily presented as a bold and hopeful gesture; the first pope to address the world’s nations, calling for peace. On the surface, so it was. Beneath the surface, the Church had repositioned itself: no longer above the world’s institutions as their judge and their prophetic call to repentance, but alongside them as a collaborating partner in a shared humanitarian project. Not calling the nations through the narrow gate. Praising the wide road for being well-maintained.

Interlude: What Quas Primas Said Would Happen

Pius XI was specific about what the rejection of Christ’s Kingship produces. He wrote in 1925 that the rebellion of individuals and states against the authority of Christ produces deplorable consequences: seeds of discord sown far and wide; bitter enmities and rivalries between nations; that insatiable greed hidden under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism; a blind and immoderate selfishness; no peace in the home; the unity and stability of the family undermined; society shaken to its foundations and on the way to ruin.15

He was describing the world of 1925. He was, with considerably more accuracy than he perhaps imagined, also describing 2026. The United Nations, which Paul VI called the obligatory path and the world’s greatest hope, was founded in 1945 and has spent eighty years proving Pius XI’s point. It has not produced peace. It has produced committee reports on peace. The distinction matters. Pius did not say the nations of the world could not organize themselves; he said that their organization, however sincere, produces only the problems it then struggles to correct, precisely because it refuses to acknowledge the King whose authority alone can order human society toward genuine good.

Leo XIV, this week, said the same thing Paul VI said in 1965: that the system constantly produces the very problems it is then forced to correct, and that the Church is present to help the UN address this. He named it a structural question. It is a structural question. Pius XI named the structure sixty years before Leo XIV noticed the symptom.

The difference is that Pius named Christ as the answer. Leo XIV named fraternity.16

Fraternity divorced from the Fatherhood of God is sentiment. It may be warm sentiment; it is not salvation. St. Alphonsus was direct about this kind of comfortable half-religion: those who pray will be saved; those who do not pray will be condemned.17 Not those who achieve fraternal cooperation with international humanitarian bodies. Those who pray. The difference between the Church’s mission and the UN’s mission is precisely the difference between those two sentences.

The Third Date: June 2026

Leo XIV visited the UN World Food Program headquarters in Rome and said the Catholic Church’s mission resonates profoundly with the WFP’s commitment to human dignity and fraternity. He said the Church shares with the UN the urgent task of confronting hunger and malnutrition and tackling underlying structural causes.

He also said, on a separate occasion, that he has inherited and carried forward the magisterium of Francis.18

These two statements, taken together, are a full confession of the trajectory. The line from the tiara on the altar in 1964, to the address before the General Assembly in 1965, to the pontificate of Francis, to Leo XIV’s statement at the WFP headquarters, is not a line of rupture and surprise. It is the completion of a single movement. The Church that put down the crown of universal authority in 1964 has, by 2026, fully reoriented its self-understanding: it is a humanitarian partner to the international order, not the prophetic voice that stands above and judges that order in the name of Christ the King; not the institution that calls the nations through the narrow gate; not the body whose single, irreplaceable task is to give God the honor He is due and to bring souls safely to judgment.

What Leo XIV described to the WFP is not the mission in the baseline section above. It is a different mission. It is a mission that any sufficiently well-funded NGO could carry out, and several do. What no NGO can carry out is the absolution of sins, the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, the administration of the sacraments to dying men and women19, and the proclamation that Christ is risen and that His judgment is coming. The Church alone holds those things. The question is whether the men currently holding them know what they are for.

Those who see the current situation clearly, the repeated elevation of the United Nations and humanistic notions of fraternity over the Social Kingship of Christ, often feel a deep and understandable sorrow. For some, this clarity easily slips into temptation toward despair. Yet despair is not the response Christ asks of us. While we must speak truthfully about these troubling developments, we do so without losing hope.

The Church does not defect. The indefectibility of the Church is a de fide doctrine: the Church, as the mystical Body of Christ, cannot cease to exist, cannot lose the Faith entirely, cannot fail in its essential mission.20 What can happen, and what history shows us has happened before, is that particular men who occupy offices within the Church can fail catastrophically and lead enormous numbers of souls astray for long periods of time. Arianism held three-quarters of the episcopate for a generation. St. Athanasius stood nearly alone. He was right, and they were wrong, and the Church survived, because the Church’s survival does not depend on the faithfulness of any given pope.

What the Trajectory Tells Us

In 1964, the papacy visually abdicated its claim to stand above the kings of the earth as the voice of the King of kings. In 1965, it requested permission to serve the institution that had replaced that claim in the secular imagination. In 2026, a pope who explicitly inherited and continued the programme of his predecessor stood before that institution and described the Church’s mission in terms borrowed entirely from the institution’s own self-description.

The trajectory is not conspiracy. It does not require hidden motives or bad faith in every individual involved. It requires only that a wrong idea, consistently applied, produces consistent results. The wrong idea is this: that the Church’s relationship to the world should be defined by service to the world’s own stated purposes rather than by the proclamation of the one purpose that the world, left to itself, cannot state. The world cannot say repent and believe the Gospel because the world does not know it needs the Gospel. The Church’s whole reason for existing is to say the thing the world cannot say to itself.

When the Church stops saying it, and starts instead saying we share your urgent task, it has not become more relevant. It has become redundant. The UN can find humanitarian partners who are considerably better funded and considerably less burdened by two millennia of doctrine. What it cannot find, anywhere else in the world, is the Barque of Peter. There is only one of those. And the question being asked in every corner of the disillusioned West is whether the men currently sailing it know what it is.

The First Commandment has not been updated. The narrow gate has not been widened. St. Alphonsus is still right about prayer, about perseverance, and about the traveler who wastes his journey building a palace on a road he is only passing through. Pius XI saw the consequences of rejecting Christ’s Kingship coming in 1925 and named them precisely. He instituted a feast to make the recognition of that Kingship liturgically real, once a year, for the whole Church.

After the Second Vatican Council, the social dimension of that feast was quietly removed from the revised liturgical books. The feast itself survived; its content did not.21

A crown without its content is only a hat. That is what went on the altar in 1964. That is what has been missing ever since.

May God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes. And pray for the men who lead the Church; they will answer for what they have done with what was entrusted to them, and that judgment will most likely be severe.

Nicolas Castelli writes with genuine charity.1 I want to acknowledge that plainly before I tell him, with equal charity, that his closing argument is built on a premise he never examines.

“Stay in the Barque of Peter,” he says, citing St. Jerome. I have no quarrel with Jerome. I have a quarrel with the assumption that the vessel currently docked at Rome is the ship Jerome had in mind.

That assumption is doing enormous theological work in Castelli's essay, and I do not think he knows it is there. A man formed entirely within the post-conciliar world does not experience institutional continuity as a claim requiring evidence; he experiences it as the ground beneath his feet. This essay is an attempt to show him, and others like him, that the ground deserves a closer look.

Pascendi Is the Measuring Rod Few Want to Pick Up

St. Pius X issued Pascendi Dominici Gregis in 1907. It is one of the most precise diagnostic documents in the history of the Catholic magisterium, naming, cataloguing, and condemning a system of thought he called the synthesis of all heresies. Modernism. He was not describing a tendency or a mood; he was describing a coherent theological programme that relocates religious authority from Revelation to human experience, that dissolves dogma into symbol, that makes the Church an organism evolving toward whatever the age requires.2

Ask yourself a straightforward question: does the institutional programme of the Church since the 1960s, and with accelerating clarity since 2013, correspond more closely to the Faith described in Pascendi, or to the system Pascendi condemned?

Take your time. I will wait.

Fiducia Supplicans blesses unions that St. Pius X’s Church would have called gravely disordered, and it does so by a sleight of hand so thin that Cardinal Sarah saw through it immediately. Communion in the hand, opposed by every bishop polled before its introduction and admitted by its own architects to be a pastoral experiment, is now the universal norm. Cardinal Cupich publicly teaches that conscience may override magisterial teaching on sexual ethics; Cardinal McElroy advances the same position with greater sophistication and identical conclusions. These are not peripheral figures. They hold major sees and shape curial direction.

Castelli concedes the crisis himself. He writes that there is “clearly a double standard in how canonical penalties are applied.” He acknowledges “confusion and scandal” at the highest levels. He grants that Rome’s emphasis has drifted toward “the grandeur of humanity” over “the necessity of sanctifying grace.” He is not naive. He simply reaches a different conclusion than the evidence supports.

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The Man Who Grabbed My Arm

Let me give you a story from my own experience, because this debate can become so abstract that people forget what is actually at stake for the baptized Catholic trying to find a spiritual home.

In the 1990s, every town of sixty thousand or so had two Catholic parishes, and almost always one felt traditional and one had felt banners and ukuleles. I was living in a liberal diocese and found what looked, from the outside, to be a traditionally inclined conservative novus ordo. The architecture was right, the signage was right, and I walked in with genuine hope.

There were no kneelers.

I knelt anyway, on the bare floor, because kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament is not a preference; it is the body’s acknowledgment of what is actually present. A man came over, grabbed me by the forearm, and said: “We don’t do that here.”

I want to be fair to him. He was not being cruel; he was enforcing a community norm with the conviction of a man who believed the norm was correct. That is precisely what made it clarifying. This was not a parish that had drifted from Catholic practice through neglect or indifference. It had made a decision, consciously, that the posture of adoration was unwelcome. Whatever was in that tabernacle, the community had collectively agreed it did not require you to be on your knees.

That was the moment I understood I had no spiritual home among the Teilhardians; not because they were unkind, but because they had already answered, in architecture and in gesture and in the grip of a stranger’s hand on my arm, the question the whole debate turns on: what, exactly, is present at the Mass, and what does that Presence demand of you?

Castelli tells the confused Catholic to stay in that building. He means well. I am telling you the building has already decided the answer to that question, and the answer it has decided upon is not the one the Faith gives.

Hell Is the Doctrine That Explains Everything Else

If you have already decided that kneeling is optional, the next decision follows with a terrible logic. If the posture of adoration is merely a cultural preference, then what is being adored is merely a symbol; and if it is merely a symbol, then the Mass is a memorial, not a Sacrifice; and if it is a memorial, then the stakes of attending or not attending, of receiving worthily or unworthily, collapse from the eternal to the merely sentimental.

This is where Castelli’s framework fails most completely, because it is where the current Roman programme most directly contradicts the Faith it claims to transmit.

The Church has always taught, from the Athanasian Creed3 forward, that those who die in unrepented mortal sin go to hell, and that hell is eternal. This is not a discipline; it is a revealed fact. St. Alphonsus Liguori spent his life as a moral theologian precisely because the stakes were that high, because the road is narrow, as Our Lord says (Matt. 7:13-14), and because a confessor who minimizes the gravity of sin cooperates in the penitent’s damnation.

Since Francis, Rome has, on multiple recorded occasions4, raised serious doubt about whether hell is populated at all. The Catholic press always steps in to clarify, but the clarifications are themselves ambiguous, and the pattern is now too consistent to dismiss as misquotation. Meanwhile, Amoris Laetitia introduces sacramental access for those in ongoing objective grave sin through a footnote so deliberately obscure that two years of dubia5 were required simply to establish what it meant, and those dubia were never formally answered.

If you genuinely believe in hell, its eternal nature, and the real possibility of dying in a state that leads there, every pastoral and liturgical decision looks different. The gravity of the Mass changes. The gravity of absolution changes. The gravity of what you tell a confused Catholic about where to worship changes entirely.

A religion that has soft-pedalled eternal damnation while replacing the propitiatory Sacrifice with a memorial meal, that has introduced deliberate ambiguity at the point of sacramental absolution of grave sin, is not offering the baptized less comfort than the Old Faith. It is offering something categorically different: a quiet, institutional assurance that the stakes are not actually eternal, that God is too pastoral to damn anyone, and that you are too modern to be held to pre-conciliar categories.

St. Pius X named that system in 1907. He called it the synthesis of all heresies, and he was right.

The Talent Was Also Buried Sincerely

Our Lord tells the story of three servants entrusted with their master’s goods while he travelled (Matt. 25:14-30). Two invested. One buried his talent in the earth and, when asked why, offered a perfectly coherent account of his reasoning: the master was a hard man, the risk was real, preservation seemed the wisest course. He did not lose the talent. He returned it intact.

The master called him wicked and slothful and cast him into the outer darkness.

Castelli’s argument, charitably read, amounts to this: stay where you are, preserve what you have, endure the flood at the highest levels, because the alternative involves canonical irregularity and that is a graver risk. It is the logic of the third servant. It is sincere and coherent but mistakes institutional safety for fidelity to the Master’s actual instruction.

The question is not whether the barque is preferable to the water. Of course it is. The question is whether the vessel you are boarding is actually carrying you toward port.

The St. Jerome Citation Cuts the Other Way

Castelli quotes St. Jerome to Pope Damasus: “As I follow no leader save Christ, so I communicate with none but your blessedness, that is with the chair of Peter. For this, I know, is the rock on which the church is built.”6

Read what St. Jerome actually anchors himself to: the Chair, the apostolic office as the guarantor of the apostolic Deposit. St. Jerome clung to Rome because Rome then meant continuity with what the Apostles handed down. The Chair was the servant of the Deposit; the institution existed to carry the Faith, not to replace it.

Castelli’s argument inverts this. He asks us to cling to the institution on the grounds that it is the institution, regardless of whether the institution is presently serving the Deposit or quietly revising it.7 St. Jerome would not recognize that argument. Damasus would have been baffled by it. The rock is the Faith; the Chair was always the guardian of the Faith, not its replacement.

I hold that the question of the current pontificate is genuinely above my authority to determine with finality. I share the doubts of many serious theologians; I do not presume to resolve them. But I can say this with confidence: “stay in communion with the visible institution” is a prudential argument, not a doctrinal one, and prudential arguments require examining where the institution is currently taking you.

“Unity before Truth” seems to be the mode of the day. The Teilhardian response to this will be swift: institutional communion is not prudential but de fide, the one teaching that cannot be relativized. Let’s address that.

Vatican I is real. The necessity of communion with the See of Peter is real. I do not dispute either. What I dispute is the slide from “communion with the Chair is necessary” to “therefore whatever currently occupies the Chair must be followed without examination of content.” Bellarmine himself, whose orthodoxy nobody questions, held that a pope teaching formal heresy presents a case the ordinary framework cannot simply absorb.8 The de fide obligation runs to the Chair and to what the Chair exists to protect; it does not run to the protection of error from the consequences of being error. Conflating the two is not fidelity to Vatican I; it is a novel addition to it.

As for the charge that this is Protestantism: the Protestant move is to make the individual conscience the originating source of doctrine. What is being argued here is precisely the opposite; the Deposit of Faith, transmitted across twenty councils, is the standard by which any particular pontificate must be measured. Holding the institution to its own prior teaching is not private judgment. It is what every reforming council in history did. Nicaea did it to Arius. Trent did it to the innovators. St. Athanasius did it at the cost of five exiles, and the Church eventually called him a saint rather than a schismatic.

The fragmentation objection proves too much. If the risk of division means the faithful must follow wherever the institution leads, then Nicaea itself was reckless. The answer to fragmentation is not unconditional submission; it is apostolic succession, conciliar continuity, and fidelity to the received Deposit as an objective and public standard. That standard is verifiable, and it is not a feeling.

What Genuine Pastoral Charity Requires

Castelli is troubled by the SSPX’s “separatist spirit.” I understand the concern. A community that cultivates contempt for everyone outside its own walls, that mistakes liturgical preference for sanctity, that uses traditional practice as a weapon of social distinction rather than a means of Grace, is doing real damage to real souls. I have seen it. It is a genuine pastoral problem.

But the answer to a community that is too rigid is not a community that has abandoned the content of the Faith. You do not treat a fasting disorder by prescribing gluttony.

The baptized Catholic sitting in a novus ordo parish in 2026, hearing a homily about synodality and encounter and the peripheries, receiving communion in the hand from an extraordinary minister while the tabernacle sits in a side room, having been taught by implication that hell is probably empty and conscience is sovereign, is being starved. Gradually. The way all serious malnourishment works, without the person necessarily knowing what they are missing, because they have never tasted the real thing.

Telling that person to stay where they are because canonical regularity is the supreme consideration is not pastoral charity. It is, with the best intentions in the world, an instruction to keep drinking from the broken cistern and call the experience of thirst a personal failing.

Salus animarum suprema lex. The salvation of souls is the supreme law, as Castelli himself quotes from Canon 1752. St. Pius X believed that. Leo XIII believed it. St. Alphonsus Liguori built his entire moral theology upon it. The question every baptized Catholic must eventually answer is whether the institution currently deploying that phrase is actually ordered toward the thing the phrase names.

The Barque of Peter carries the Deposit of Faith. Follow the Deposit. Wherever it is being faithfully transmitted by bishops in valid apostolic succession who hold all twenty doctrinal councils, who offer the propitiatory Sacrifice as the Church has always offered it, who will tell you plainly that hell is real and your soul is at stake; that is where you belong. The building’s address is secondary; the Faith is not.

May God bless and protect you; and may He give us all, including the good-faith writers at Crisis Magazine, the clarity to see the difference between the ship and what it is supposed to be carrying.

Our Lord did not conjure a pulpit from nothing. He saw two boats moored at the edge of Lake Genesareth, climbed into the one that belonged to a fisherman named Simon, and asked the man to put out a little from the land.1 That is the whole of the staging. No voice from the clouds, no fire on the water, no angel standing at the prow. A boat that already existed, a man who already owned it, and a request that cost Simon almost nothing to grant. Ordinary things.

This is how God generally operates, and the baptized man who has spent a decade waiting for a burning bush or a lightning bolt from the sky would do well to notice it. On one hand this age tends to de-emphasize the supernatural; on the other hand it misses God’s extraordinary uses of ordinary things and ordinary people.

The Boat Was Already His

Simon had been fishing all night and had caught nothing.2 He was not idle when Our Lord found him; he was exhausted, his nets washed and folded, his catch a failure by every ordinary measure of the trade. And it was precisely this boat, this competence, this profession that Our Lord Jesus requisitioned for the teaching of the crowds and, moments later, for the miracle that would reorder the man’s entire life.

Note what Our Lord did not do. He did not tell Simon to abandon the fishing trade and acquire a new skill suited to ministry. He did not hand him a script. He used the boat Simon already owned and the expertise Simon already possessed, and only after using both did He say the words that mattered: Do not be afraid; henceforth you shall catch men.3

The pattern holds because it is not really a pattern about fishing. It is a pattern about how Grace meets a man where his actual competence lies, not where a more spiritualized version of him might wish it lay. In my earlier life I spent nine years in the navy and I did not find that the years were wasted once ordination came; I found that the years were the boat. The training, the challenges, the successes, and the failures were put to use, the way Simon’s boat was put to use and the way your gifts and background can be put to use in His service.

Put Out into the Deep

Simon’s protest is the protest of every honest tradesman asked to do something that contradicts his professional judgment. Master, the whole night through we have toiled and have taken nothing.4 He knew the lake. He knew the hour was wrong, the conditions unfavorable, the nets already dried and stowed. Every fact he possessed argued against the command.

And then the sentence that should be carved over the door of every man discerning whether the Faith has any actual claim on his Monday morning: but at Your word I will lower the net.5

This is not blind fideism, the abandonment of competence in favor of pious feeling. Simon does not pretend the night’s failure did not happen, and he does not pretend his expertise is irrelevant. He simply places his competence under obedience rather than over it. The fisherman remains a fisherman; he does not become a different man to receive the command. He becomes, instead, a fisherman who has now subordinated his trade to the word of Christ, and the net that broke under the weight of the catch broke precisely because the obedience was total and the trade was real.6

This is the move McReligion cannot make, because McReligion has already convinced the baptized man that his working life and his spiritual life occupy separate rooms in the same house, doors closed, lights different. The consumerized parish asks for an hour on Sunday and otherwise leaves the boat alone. The Old Faith asks for the boat.

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They Left All

The catch was so large that the net began to break, and Simon’s partners had to bring a second boat to bear the weight of it.7 This is the part of the story the prosperity preacher stops at, and it is precisely the part of the story that is not the point. The point arrives one verse later: and when they had brought their boats to land, they left all and followed Him.8

Our Lord’s first recorded gift to Simon Peter was an overwhelming material abundance, two boats nearly sinking under the weight of the catch, and Peter’s first recorded response to abundance was to walk away from it. Not because the abundance was evil. Because the abundance had done its work, which was to reveal who was speaking, and once that was revealed, the boats themselves became secondary to the One who had filled them.

A baptized man who has built something real, a business, a career, a reputation earned the hard way, should sit with that gospel sequence rather than skip past it. The Faith does not generally ask a man to despise his competence or to treat his success as an embarrassment. It asks him to hold both loosely enough that when the actual word of Our Lord Jesus arrives, the boat does not become the reason he stays on shore.

The Groaning and the Catch

St. Paul’s words to the Romans, read alongside this Gospel9, supply the reason any of this matters beyond a single morning on a Galilean lake. Creation itself also will be delivered from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God. For we know that all creation groans and travails in pain until now.10 The empty net after a night of honest toil is a small instance of exactly this groaning; labor expended, nothing to show for it, the ordinary ache of a fallen world pressing in on a man who did everything correctly and still came up empty.

St. Paul does not promise the groaning will stop. He promises it is travail, not futility, the pain that precedes a birth rather than the pain that precedes nothing. Simon’s empty net was not the end of the story; it was the condition that made the catch legible as a gift rather than as competence finally rewarded. A man who has known real failure in his trade, who has stood in the wheelhouse or the boardroom or the seminary table and come up with nothing despite doing the work correctly, is closer to understanding this Gospel than a man who has never failed at anything.

What This Asks of You

Our Lord is not interested in unmaking the navy officer, the homemaker, the doctor, the tradesman. He is interested in the boat. Whatever you have actually built, the years of competence, the hard-won professional instinct, the trade you know better than almost anyone in the room, that is the vessel He intends to use, and He will use it from the water, sitting down, teaching the crowd from the very thing you thought was just how you made your living.

The question this Sunday’s readings actually put to the baptized man is not whether he is willing to abandon his competence for the Faith. It is whether he is willing to put that competence under obedience long enough to hear the Word that turns an empty net into a catch too large for one boat to hold.

Lower the net. Lower YOUR net.

God bless and protect you this day, and all who labor alongside you toward the Restoration.

The readings1 for the Third Sunday after Pentecost feature two hunters who are not after the same thing.

One goes about as a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. He walks about; he is patient, deliberate, circling.2 The other leaves ninety-nine sheep in the desert and goes after the one that is lost, not stopping until he finds it. Both are seeking. Both are relentless. The difference between them is what they intend to do when they arrive.

Holy Mother Church sets these readings before us because we need to understand clearly what kind of world we actually inhabit.

The One Who Seeks to Destroy

Peter is blunt. He says: your adversary goes about seeking someone to devour. The word devour is not metaphorical. It means consumption, annihilation, the reduction of what was there to nothing.

The command that follows is equally direct. Be sober. Be watchful. These are not suggestions for the spiritually advanced; they are basic operational requirements for anyone who intends to survive the field.3 Sobriety here is not merely the absence of drunkenness. It is clarity of perception, the refusal to be lulled into a false reading of the environment. The man who does not know he is being hunted is already at a disadvantage.

And yet Peter does not leave us in fear. He adds something crucial: your brethren all over the world suffer the same things. You are not uniquely targeted. You are not uniquely weak. The adversary’s strategy depends in part on your believing that you are alone in the field, that your particular loss or confusion or distance from God is somehow more disqualifying than what anyone else has experienced.4 It is not. The whole Church has walked this ground. Most of the saints fell down on it before they stood up on it.

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The One Who Seeks to Rejoice

Against this stands the parable; and it is worth considering how strange a scene it is.

A man has a hundred sheep. One goes missing. He leaves the ninety-nine in the desert and goes after the lost one.5 By any ordinary pastoral calculus, this is not rational. You do not risk ninety-nine to recover one. But Our Lord is not offering a lesson in flock management. He is describing the arithmetic of heaven, which does not operate the way ours does.

When he finds it, he does not sigh with relief and note the inefficiency of the whole episode. He lays it on his shoulders rejoicing. He goes home and calls his friends and neighbors together and says: rejoice with me. Then the woman with the lost coin does the same thing: searches the whole house, finds it, and immediately calls her community to celebrate. Both parables end in the same place. Not with a quiet satisfaction, but with a party.

The Pharisees who were murmuring in the background of this scene had constructed a religious world in which this made no sense. For them, proximity to sinners was contamination. The sinner had to earn his way back to the edge of respectability before God’s attention was warranted. Our Lord’s table fellowship with publicans was not merely socially awkward; it demolished the architecture of their entire project.

He is not waiting for the sheep to find its way home. He goes.

What Heaven Cannot Tolerate

Here is what connects the two readings most directly: the thing the adversary cannot produce and, by the evidence of his nature, cannot tolerate is precisely the joy that fills heaven when one sinner repents.

Let us consider this, it’s not the maintenance of the ninety-nine, not the careful management of those who never wandered; the angels of God rejoice over the one who was lost and is found! The roaring lion walks about because he wants to prevent exactly this. Every soul he devours is a celebration that does not happen, a party heaven does not throw, a name that does not appear in the book in the way it was always meant to.

This is why Peter pairs sobriety and resistance with something that might initially seem out of place: the reminder that God will Himself, after we have suffered a little while, perfect, strengthen and establish us. The suffering is real. The adversary is real. But the outcome is not in doubt, provided we resist steadfast in the faith. The verb is antistete: stand against, hold the ground. Not advance alone into the field without armor; hold the ground.

The Faith that enables us to hold the ground is the same faith that tells us what the shepherd does with the sheep He finds. He does not lecture it. He does not make it prove it has learned from the experience. He lays it on his shoulders.6

For Those Who Have Wandered

If you are reading this and you have wandered; if you were baptized into the Faith and somewhere between then and now you got lost in the desert, which is most of the people I am writing for, then the parable is speaking directly to you, not as a metaphor and not as an encouragement to try harder.

The shepherd is already looking. He left before you turned around.

The adversary wants you to believe that your distance has become permanent, that the wandering has accumulated into something disqualifying. He is counting on the silence and the shame to do his work for him. But St. Peter names him plainly: your adversary, the devil. Not a vague spiritual force, not a psychological construct; the adversary, named and bounded. And the command is not despair; it is resist, which implies that resistance is possible, which implies that you have not already lost.

The Pharisees murmured because the shepherd went to find the sheep. What they did not understand, and what we must not forget, is that the joy at the end of the finding is not just the shepherd’s. It is heaven’s. The angels of God throw the party. The whole community is called to rejoice.

Two hunters. One seeking to devour. One seeking to rejoice. The only question today’s readings put to us is which one we are going to let find us.

May God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes.

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Corpus Christi is not a feast that permits vagueness. Every other feast in the liturgical calendar can, with sufficient theological dexterity, be softened into general sentiment: Christmas becomes the season of generosity, Easter becomes hope, Pentecost becomes community. Corpus Christi refuses that escape. It asks one question, and it waits for your answer. Do you believe that Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is truly, really, and substantially present, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, in the Most Holy Eucharist? The answer you give, in word and in practice, tells you everything about what kind of Christianity you actually hold.

The Pew Research data shows that a majority of self-identified Catholics believe the Eucharist is a symbol.1 Not a fringe minority, not the poorly catechized on the periphery, but the majority. Which means the most distinctive claim of Catholic Christianity, the one claim that separates her from every Protestant communion, has been quietly abandoned by the people in the pews while the institution charged with their formation was busy with other things.

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The Arian Parallel

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria spent most of his episcopal life in exile. The charge against him was, at bottom, that he refused to manage Christ downward. The Arian position was not atheism; it was accommodation. It proposed a Christ who was like the Father, perhaps very like the Father, elevated above all creatures, worthy of great reverence; but not homoousios, not of one substance, not God in the full and unqualified sense. This was a Christ the empire could work with. A Christ who did not make absolute claims. A Christ who could be discussed at Nicomedia without anyone losing their political position.

Athanasius said no. The Council of Nicaea said no. And the Faith said no, through three centuries of subsequent confirmation.

The Real Presence is the same argument, placed at the altar. Either He is there, fully and truly, or He has been managed downward into a pious memory, a symbol of community, a token of shared aspiration. The managed-down Eucharist is the Arian heresy in sacramental form: it preserves the vocabulary, retains the ceremony, keeps the vestments, and empties the substance. You can have Corpus Christi processions with a symbol. You can ring bells at the elevation of a symbol. What you cannot do is eat and drink judgment upon yourself by receiving a symbol unworthily; and that, as we shall see, is precisely the point.

What McReligion Needs the Eucharist to Be

The therapeutic, consumerist Christianity I have called McReligion throughout this work requires the Eucharist to be a symbol. This is not incidental; it is structural. McReligion is built on the premise that faith should cost the communicant as little as possible in terms of intellectual submission, moral accountability, or genuine supernatural belief. It offers belonging, emotional warmth, a sense of transcendence on demand, and the comfort of community, without the inconvenience of binding doctrine or moral praxis.

A symbolic Eucharist fits this framework perfectly. You feel the moment. You participate in a shared ritual. You receive something that represents Christ’s love without requiring you to believe anything that your secular neighbours would find embarrassing. A truly present Christ, Body and Blood and Soul and Divinity, makes demands that a symbol does not. He requires you to examine your conscience before approaching. He requires you to be in a state of grace. He requires you to believe something that is, by the standards of the age, frankly incredible.

McReligion cannot afford that demand. So the demand disappears. And when the demand disappears from practice long enough, it disappears from the lectionary.

The Excision That Tells the Story

In the traditional Mass, the Epistle for Corpus Christi and for Holy Thursday draws on the eleventh chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians at length. St. Paul, having described the institution of the Eucharist, continues without pause into the following warning, which the Douay-Rheims renders thus: “Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord. But let a man prove himself: and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord.”2

How much clearer can this be? The man who receives unworthily eats and drinks his own condemnation. The reason Paul gives for this severity is precise: he fails to discern the body of the Lord. That is, he treats what is truly present as if it were merely bread. The severity of the warning is, in itself, the strongest possible argument for the Real Presence. You do not warn people about the spiritual consequences of receiving a symbol unworthily. You warn them because what they are receiving is not a symbol.

The novus ordo lectionary reads 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 for Holy Thursday. Verses 27 through 29, the warning, are gone. This omission holds even on the Feast of Corpus Christi itself.3 Cardinal Stickler noted publicly in 1997 that pastorally unpopular passages of fundamental theological and moral significance were simply eliminated in the new lectionary, and named these very verses as the clearest example.4 The reformers took the most solemn Pauline text on the Eucharist, kept the warm part about the Last Supper, and cut the part that imposed moral gravity on the communicant. Why?

The Rossetti Case

Last Tuesday, June 3rd, Cardinal Robert McElroy removed Msgr. Stephen Rossetti from his post as exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington. Msgr. Rossetti is not some internet eccentric; he is a psychologist with nineteen years of service as an archdiocesan exorcist, a man whose entire professional formation has been oriented toward the reality of demonic activity in human life. His offense was to suggest, in a social media video, that some UFO phenomena might be demonic in origin. He was careful to note this was his personal view, not de fide teaching.5

Cardinal McElroy declared that these statements “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”6

Set aside for a moment whether Msgr. Rossetti is right about UFOs.7 The question that matters for our purposes is this: the Archdiocese of Washington moved with speed and administrative decisiveness against a priest for thinking too supernaturally about a contemporary phenomenon. The same institution, and others like it across the Western Church, has produced, through decades of formation and preaching, a flock the majority of whom do not believe Christ is present in the Eucharist. One of those positions is a personal theological opinion about unidentified aerial phenomena. The other is a formal departure from defined dogma.

The priorities reveal the programme.

There is something additionally telling in the specific charge. The Church maintains an exorcism rite because she believes demons exist and act in the world. Rossetti was not contradicting that belief; he was applying it to a new context. The embarrassment is not that he mentioned demons. The embarrassment is that he mentioned them in public, in terms that contemporary secular culture finds primitive. McReligion is, above all things, embarrassed by the primitive; and the Real Presence, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the demonic, are all, by the standards of a therapeutic secular age, primitive claims. The pattern of managed-down Christianity, from the Arian courts of the fourth century to the chanceries of the twenty-first, is always the same: preserve the institution, reduce the offense, and excise whatever the age finds most difficult to swallow.

Who Speaks for the Supernatural?

The late Francis has, on more than one occasion, described the miracle of the loaves and fishes in terms that obscure its miraculous character, framing it as a story about sharing rather than an act of divine power.8 Whatever one makes of the specific exegetical question, the pattern is consistent. The tendency of the present institutional Church is to translate supernatural events into social lessons. The feeding of five thousand becomes a parable about redistribution. The Eucharist becomes a symbol of community. The demonic becomes a metaphor for structural evil. Each translation removes exactly the element that requires Faith, and leaves behind a residue that requires only goodwill.

The Catholic Church is not the only institution in the world that cares about the environment, migration, and economic justice. The United Nations cares about these things. The World Economic Forum cares about these things. A hundred well-funded NGOs, staffed by intelligent and earnest people, are working on these things with resources the Church cannot match. If the Church’s distinctive contribution is to add a theological flavor to the same agenda, she brings nothing that could not be equally supplied by a secular humanitarian organization with better data and cleaner supply chains.9

What the Church alone can say, what no other institution on earth has both the mandate and the doctrinal resources to say, is this: Christ is King. His Kingship over persons, families, economies, and nations is not a metaphor; it is the Social Kingship of Christ the King, defined and developed through the great social encyclicals from Leo XIII onward, grounded in the order of creation and the demands of the Redemption. The erasure of Christians from their own cultures and homelands, the economic conditions that make the formation of young families practically impossible for the working class, the collapse of the Christian Social Order across the West; these are not merely policy problems. They are theological crises, and they require a voice that speaks not from a policy brief or a synodal working group, but from the Kingship of the One who is truly present on every altar where a valid Mass is offered.

The Feast That Remains

Corpus Christi persists. The processions go forward. The Tantum Ergo is sung, the monstrance is raised, and for those with eyes to see, the question is posed again as it has been posed since Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote the Office for this feast at the command of Urban IV: do you believe He is there?

The Old Faith answers without hesitation. He is there. He is there in the full and unmanaged sense, Body and Blood and Soul and Divinity, the same Christ who fed five thousand with five loaves and would not let His disciples soften the discourse in John’s sixth chapter when the crowd began to leave. He let them go. He did not chase them down to explain He was only speaking figuratively. “Will you also go away?”10 Peter’s answer was the right one then and it is the right one now.

Examine your conscience. Receive worthily. Believe what the Church has always believed. This is not a harsh demand; it is the invitation of a God who means what He says and is present where He promised to be.

May God bless and protect you this Corpus Christi. Bear His light into a world that has largely forgotten He is there.

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Someone is always trying to build the world religion.1 The project has had different names in different centuries, but the structure is always the same: take the spiritual longings common to humanity, strip out the parts that divide, keep the parts that unite, and construct a faith of universal fraternity2 that no reasonable person could object to.

It is, on the surface, an appealing proposal. And the Trinity is what kills it every time.

You can absorb Our Lord Jesus into this project, provided you agree he was a teacher, a sage, an exemplar of human potential. You can absorb the Christian moral tradition, the parts about love and justice and the dignity of persons; these are useful, and the project is glad to have them. What you cannot absorb, what will not bend, what sits in the throat of every syncretic system like a bone, is the specific claim the Church has made since Nicaea: that God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, three Persons, and that He revealed this about Himself, and that outside this confession something important has gone wrong.

That is not a universal, but a particular. Particulars are the enemy of world religions.

Athanasius Understood This Better Than Anyone

St. Athanasius of Alexandria spent the better part of his episcopal career in exile. The Arian party had the emperors, the councils, and at one extraordinary moment, something close to the majority of the visible Church. Their proposal was, at its heart, a reasonable one: the Son is like the Father, similar to the Father, perhaps even very much like the Father; but the homoousion, the insistence that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, that word same rather than similar, that was a provocation too far. Could the Church not find a formula that satisfied both parties?

St. Athanasius would not move. Not because he was constitutionally stubborn, though he may have been, but because he understood that the nature of God is not a negotiating position. God’s nature is what it is. Your formula either corresponds to it or it doesn’t, and a formula that doesn’t correspond to it is not a compromise; it is a different religion wearing the same vestments.

He wrote to Serapion with a precision that has never been improved upon: “Upon this Faith the Church is built, and if anyone were to lapse from it, he would no longer be a Christian either in fact or in name.”3 The man who gave us that sentence had been exiled five times. He was not writing from a position of institutional comfort. He was writing contra mundum, against the world, and he was right, and the Arians eventually withered, and the homoousion stands.

The reason I find St. Athanasius so bracing on Trinity Sunday is that his situation rhymes with our own. The pressure in his day was to find a Trinity compatible with imperial politics. The pressure in ours is to find a Trinity compatible with the project of global spiritual unity. The answer in both cases is the same: there isn’t one. The Trinity as the Church confesses it is incompatible with any system that requires God’s nature to be left productively vague.

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What Paul Heard When He Reached the End of His Argument

Romans 11 is dense, complex, and it follows ten chapters of theological argument that even St. Peter admitted were hard to understand.4 But at the end of it, Paul stops arguing and breaks into prayer.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are His judgments and how unsearchable His ways!”5

This is the Apostle to the Gentiles, the most formidable theological mind in the New Testament, and he has reasoned himself all the way to the foothills of the mystery and then looked up. The summit cannot be taken by argument. He doesn’t apologize for this; he exults in it. “For from Him and through Him and unto Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever.”6

The syncretists want a God whose judgments are comprehensible and whose ways are searchable, because a God you can search is a God you can manage and change. Paul’s God will not cooperate. This is not a defect in Paul’s theology; it is the point of it. A God who fits your prior commitments is not a revelation; he is a projection.

The mystery of the Trinity is not the Church’s embarrassing failure to produce a clear account of the Divine Nature. It is the Church’s honest report of what happens when you actually follow the evidence to where it leads.

The Name That Closes the Door

Our Lord’s final instruction in St. Matthew’s Gospel is embarrassing to the postmodern. “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”7

Baptism is administered in a Name, not in a sentiment. The baptized person is not initiated into a tradition of spiritual seeking; he is inserted, by water and the Holy Ghost, into the life of a specific God who has revealed His inner nature as a communion of three Persons. St. Paul tells us elsewhere what this insertion means: we have received “the spirit of adoption of sons, whereby we cry: Abba, Father.”8 The baptized person has been adopted into the family of the Trinity. You cannot be adopted into a metaphor.

This is what the Commission actually says. It says go, baptize into this Name, and then teach everything Christ commanded. The specificity of the Name is the whole argument. A world religion of human fraternity can offer brotherhood with each other.9 The Trinity offers adoptive sonship with God. These are not equivalent proposals, and no amount of ecumenical goodwill closes the gap between them.

The irreducibility of the Trinity to any universal synthesis is not a license for contempt toward those outside the Faith. Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum and elsewhere, is perfectly clear that the Natural Law binds all men, that the dignity of persons is not contingent on baptism, and that the Church’s engagement with the world is governed by charity.10 What the irreducibility of the Trinity means is this: we cannot help the world by pretending we are not who we are. The most charitable thing the baptized can do for their unbaptized neighbors is to remain comprehensibly Christian, which means Trinitarian, which means particular, which means unmergeable.

Why This Feast Is More Urgent Than It Looks

Trinity Sunday gets treated, in some quarters, as a feast for theologians; an occasion for elaborate explanation of a doctrine that the average Catholic in the pew will find beautiful, incomprehensible, and largely irrelevant to Monday morning.

The pressure to dissolve the Trinity into something more universally palatable is not an abstract theological pressure. It shows up in practical proposals: that the Church should refrain from missionary activity out of respect for other traditions; that baptism should be understood as one initiation among others; that the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is one culturally conditioned way of gesturing at the divine, valid for us but not binding on others. These proposals are not hypothetical, they are standard operating procedure for the postmodern churches. Some of them have found their way into official Vatican documents.

Each of them requires, at its root, that the Trinity be optional; that the specific Name Christ gave His Apostles be treated as a local custom rather than a revealed fact. St. Athanasius would recognize the move immediately. He spent his career watching it happen. What he would tell us, and what Trinity Sunday tells us, is that the appropriate response is not anxiety, and certainly not compromise; it is the clear, settled, unashamed confession of what God has revealed about Himself.

“To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”

That is St. Paul’s verdict and the only answer to every project that would absorb the Trinity into something more manageable. The glory belongs to Him, not to the synthesis or synodality. The Name belongs to the Commission, not to the consensus.

Confess it plainly. Baptize into it without apology. Teach everything He commanded.

The mission is ours to execute.

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Happy Trinity Sunday, friends. may God bless and protect you; bear His light to a world that no longer believes.

Thanks for being part of the Restoration.

There is a pattern to every revolution, and Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez has just illustrated it with unusual candour.1

Speaking at the Pontifical Urban University on May 12th,2 the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith criticized the 2006 notification against the Jesuit theologian Fr. Jon Sobrino, a notification issued under Benedict XVI that found Sobrino’s work guilty of “notable discrepancies with the Faith of the church.” +Fernandez lamented that the old approach “seems to indicate that the theology made in the context of the poor is inadequate and dangerous.” He defended what he calls contextual theology: the idea that a theologian “cannot completely ignore the painful situation in which the majority of the People of God endure in the place where they live,” and that this context “invites those who receive revelation to discover other aspects of its inexhaustible wealth.”

Consider that last sentence again carefully, it says Revelation acquires new aspects depending on the sociological context in which it is received. The Faith of the Church, in this framework, is not a Deposit handed down whole; it is a living document3 that local suffering helps to complete. As Chesterton observed, this kind of thinking never says the old answers are wrong; it merely says they are incomplete, and that only the revolutionaries now in power are qualified to finish them. The result is inevitable: the Deposit is never closed, Tradition is never final, and the men doing the completing are always the revolutionaries.4

St. Pius X condemned this approach by name in Pascendi Dominici Gregis in 1907. He called it immanentism, the reduction of revealed truth to the contents of human experience. “The theologian reflects on the life of the People of God” is not a new formulation; it is vital imminence in a cassock. The condemned proposition is that the impulse of Faith, including doctrinal development, arises from within human life rather than descending from Divine Revelation. +Fernandez has not invented a new error, he has reprinted an old one.5

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What Fr. Sobrino Actually Taught

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did not act hastily. The examination of Fr. Sobrino’s work began in 2001. His two principal books, Jesus the Liberator (1991) and Christ the Liberator (1999), were subjected to years of theological analysis before the notification was issued in 2006, and the findings were grave.

Fr. Sobrino overemphasised the “church of the poor” and its social context as the primary starting point for Christology, displacing the Apostolic Faith. He downplayed the normative value of Scripture and the early Councils, calling them “limited and dangerous.” He insufficiently affirmed the full divinity of Christ, treating it as a later ecclesial development rather than explicit from the beginning. He introduced a separation between the Son of God and the historical Jesus, risking a two-subject Christology incompatible with the Council of Chalcedon. And, perhaps most gravely, he proposed that Christ on the Cross did not know with certainty that he was the Son of God. He further reduced the redemptive death of Christ to a moral example of loyalty rather than an efficacious sacrificial cause of salvation.6

That is not heterodox emphasis; it is formal heresy on multiple counts. St. Thomas Aquinas, whose Tertia Pars remains the most precise Christological analysis in the Catholic tradition, would not have needed five minutes with the notification to identify what was at stake. The question of whether Christ possessed scientia beata, the beatific knowledge proper to the Son, was settled not by theological preference but by the nature of the hypostatic union itself. A Christ who did not know He was God is not the Christ of Nicaea, Ephesus, or Chalcedon. He is a Marxist icon in Palestinian robes.

Pray for Fr. Sobrino, who is nearly ninety. He will shortly face a judgment against which no contextual theology offers any defense.

Why Liberation Theology Is Not Concern for the Poor

Here one must be careful and alert, because the confusion is deliberate. +Fernandez constructs his defense on a false binary: either you accept liberation theology, or you do not care about the poor. This is a very old rhetorical maneuver. Leo XIII disposed of it in Rerum Novarum in 1891 by demonstrating that the Church’s teaching on the poor is prior to, more rigorous than, and utterly incompatible with socialist categories.7 The error of socialism is not that it mentions the poor; the error is that it replaces charity with class warfare and the supernatural with the political.8

Hilaire Belloc understood this better than most. The social problem, he wrote in The Servile State, is not solved by transferring ownership from the few to the state; it is solved only when property is widely distributed among families.9 Concentration is the disease; whether the concentration sits with private oligarchs or a revolutionary vanguard is a secondary question. Liberation theology, whatever its rhetoric about the poor, produced no Distributism.10 It produced communist insurgencies, leftist armed clergy, and mass apostasy in the very continent it claimed to serve. The fruit identifies the tree.

Dr. Thomas Sowell adds a dimension the theologians prefer not to examine. In A Conflict of Visions he identifies the unconstrained vision: the belief that human suffering is the product of defective social arrangements that reason can redesign. Liberation theology is the unconstrained vision in eucharistic language. It assumes that the Kingdom of God is a social order achievable by political means, that sin is primarily structural rather than personal, and that salvation is primarily historical rather than supernatural. Every one of these propositions inverts the Catholic doctrine it claims to refine. Sin is personal before it is structural; St. Thomas Aquinas demonstrates this in Prima Secundae at length.11 Salvation is first supernatural and then social; Leo XIII, Pius XI, and the whole tradition of Catholic social teaching demonstrate the order of priority. Reverse the sequence and you get liberation theology. Reverse it further and you get the French Revolution.

The Confession Fernandez Did Not Mean to Make

What makes this episode significant is not merely that a cardinal has defended a condemned theologian but also the argument +Fernandez used.

He said that his 2007 article defending Fr. Sobrino almost prevented his appointment as Rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. He said the Dicastery required him to publish a retraction. He published something that looked like a retraction while actually restating his original position.12 And he used that retraction to advance his career13 until Francis appointed him the Church’s chief doctrinal officer.

Sadly it is a typical situation in this age, to have the man now responsible for guarding the Deposit of Faith have publicly described deceiving his doctrinal superiors as a professional strategy. He did not recant; he performed a recantation while restating the condemned position. This is not a minor admission; in any functioning institution, it would be disqualifying. In the Synodal Church, it is apparently a credential.14

Belloc observed that the enemies of the Faith rarely announce themselves honestly. They work by gradual substitution15, replacing terms with similar-sounding alternatives until the structure has changed entirely while the vocabulary remains superficially familiar. “Theology made in the context of the poor” sounds like Catholic social teaching. It is not Catholic social teaching. It is the sociological determination of doctrine, which is precisely what the Church has condemned from Pascendi to the CDF instructions of 1984 and 1986. The language remains; the referent has been replaced.

This is what Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira called the “revolution within the revolution”16: the process by which each stage of doctrinal erosion creates the conditions for the next stage, each step small enough to seem defensible, the cumulative effect catastrophic. +Fernandez is not an innovator; he is a technician serving a revolution that was already underway when he first picked up his pen. But he is serving it from the highest doctrinal office in the Church, with the full confidence of the current pontificate. Leo XIV has not removed him.

What the Tradition Actually Says

The question at the center of all this is simple: does Catholic doctrine come from Divine Revelation, or does it come from social and political experience?

There is no third option, Cardinal Fernandez is defending the second answer while claiming to serve the first.17 The magisterium prior to 1960 is unanimous on this point; Tradition is not generated from below. The teaching authority of the Church is receptive before it is active; it receives the Deposit from Christ through the Apostles, guards it, and transmits it. The task of theology is to understand what has been received, not to quarry new doctrine from human suffering, however real that suffering is.

This is why nine consecutive popes condemned Marxism with a consistency that admits no honest misreading. It is not that they did not care about the poor. Leo XIII, who gave us Rerum Novarum, cared about the poor with the love and wisdom of a man who understood that false solutions produce genuine catastrophe. His argument was not that indifference to poverty is acceptable; it was that the Marxist analysis of poverty is wrong, the Marxist remedy is tyranny, and the Marxist framework reduces the human person to an economic category, which is an anthropological error with doctrinal consequences.

Aquinas, in Summa Theologica II-II, Q. 66, treats the obligation of the wealthy toward those in need with the full force of Natural Law. The obligation is real. The mechanism, however, is charity and justice between persons, not class struggle and structural liberation. The moment you replace the personal with the structural, you have left the Catholic framework and entered the Marxist one, whatever words you use to describe the journey.

After every revolution the victorious faction splits. The conservative wing attempts to consolidate the gains while preserving some continuity with what came before; +Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, was this wing, working to synthesize the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church into a hermeneutic of continuity. The progressive wing regards consolidation as betrayal; it demands that the spirit of revolution be perpetuated indefinitely, that the next boundary always be crossed, that no stopping point ever be declared final. Cardinal Fernandez is not the chief doctrinal officer of the Catholic Church. He is the chief theologian of the Synodal Church, which is a different institution making use of the same buildings.

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I hope you found this essay informative and interesting. May God bless and protect you and thank you for your part in the Restoration.

Friends, the question in the title is not rhetorical; it deserves a straight answer, and in spite of my trademark rabbit-holes, this piece will give one. But to get there, we have to look honestly at what is being said in Rome at this moment: what is being said, what is being omitted, and what the gap between the two costs the baptized.

Read Part 1 here.

In yesterday’s article we established what Pentecost actually made: A constituted society with an ontological character no merely human institution can claim or replicate. The filiatio adoptiva1 of John 1:12. The theosis of St. Athanasius.2 The kingly priesthood of 1 Peter 2:9.3 These are not devotional flourishes; they are the doctrinal claim that something happened to human nature at Pentecost that is categorically and permanently superior to anything available through natural birth, moral effort, or civic membership. The society that resulted is the corporate Temple of the Holy Ghost, transmitted through apostolic succession faithful to the Deposit, and identified by fidelity to what was transmitted rather than merely by administrative continuity with Rome. Contrast that with what was said at a recent General Audience in Vatican City.

What Leo Actually Said

Leo XIV, continuing his catechesis4 on Lumen Gentium, addressed the human and Divine dimensions of the Church. Much of what he said was genuinely beautiful. The Church as a community of sinners who manifest Christ through their journey; the paradox of a society that is simultaneously earthly and heavenly; the echo of Benedict XVI on the Gospel and the institution; these are real and valuable observations, and the pastoral warmth with which they were delivered is not in question here.

But one formulation requires examination that warmth cannot substitute for:

The Divine dimension of the Church, Leo XIV stated, “does not consist in an ideal perfection or spiritual superiority of its members, but in the fact that the Church is generated by God’s plan for humanity, realized in Christ.”

Consider that carefully, the Divine dimension of the Church is located in her origin, God’s plan; the fact of her generation. What is conspicuously absent is any reference to what was *transmitted* through that originating act; the Deposit of Faith, the defined doctrine, the sacramental economy that confers theosis, the apostolic succession that carries the fullness of Pentecost’s gift through history.

The Church is Divine, on this account, because God started her. What she does with what she received, whether she guards the Deposit or adulterates it, whether her successors remain faithful to what the apostles transmitted or quietly redefine the terms; none of that, on this account, touches her Divine character.

This is the load-bearing jenga5 brick of the entire post-conciliar programme.

If a man’s baptismal character consists only in the historical fact that he was baptized, then nothing he subsequently does can place that character in question. He may live as though the Temple were a storage unit rather than a consecrated space; the consecration, on that account, remains untouched. Apply the same logic to the institution: if the Church’s Divine dimension consists only in the fact that God originated her, then everything that follows, every reform, every accommodation, every studied silence on defined doctrine, is simply the human dimension doing what the human dimension does, inside a Divine container that nothing can compromise.6

If the Divine dimension consists solely in origin rather than transmitted content, then every reform of the last sixty years can be absorbed into the ongoing human-Divine harmony without crisis. The liturgy can be reconstructed, the moral theology can be softened, altar girls can prance, Holy Communion can be offered with the reverence of a pez dispenser, the defined doctrine can be surrounded by studied ambiguity, and the institution remains Divine because God started it and it persists. The fragility of her members becomes, on this account, not a wound to be healed but almost a charism to be celebrated; proof that God works through human weakness.

Weakness is Real and God does work through it; but fragility is not a charism, it is a condition. And an account of the Church’s Divine dimension that locates that dimension entirely in her origin, while remaining silent on her fidelity to what was transmitted at Pentecost, has redefined the Church in ways that the tradition cannot support.

The Silence That Speaks

What Leo XIV did not say is, in its own way, as significant as what he did say. There is no mention of indefectibility; the Church’s guaranteed preservation from error in defined doctrine, which is precisely what distinguishes her Divine constitution from that of any merely human society. There is no mention of the necessity of the Church for salvation, which is what gives the Great Commission its urgency and what made the martyrs’ deaths rational rather than merely heroic. There is no mention of apostolic fidelity to the Deposit as the criterion by which genuine succession is distinguished from administrative inheritance.

And there is no answer to the question that every serious inquirer eventually asks: if the Church’s Divine character consists simply in the fact that God originated her and that she persists through human fragility, what precisely does she offer that a well-run humanitarian organization does not?7

St. Vincent of Lérins, writing in the fifth century, identified by which this kind of erosion operates. In his Commonitorium he observed that the most dangerous corruptions of the Faith do not arrive as open assault; they arrive dressed in the language of development, progress, accompanied by pastoral warmth, advanced by men who are not obviously wicked and who may not experience themselves as being unfaithful at all.8 The framework error becomes so embedded that its proponents can no longer see it as error. They have redefined faithfulness, and within the redefined terms, they are being faithful.9

This is more heartbreaking than dishonesty, and it is more dangerous, because it is harder to name and harder to resist. This is not an accusation of malice against Leo XIV. It is something more sobering; a description of what happens to an institution when a framework error becomes the water it swims in.10

When the Temple Forgets Its Consecration

In yesterday’s Pentecost article, we drew the parallel between the individual baptized person as Temple of the Holy Ghost and the Church as the corporate Temple moving through history.

What Leo XIV’s address describes, however gently and however warmly, is a Temple that has forgotten what its consecration actually confers. An institution that locates its Divine character solely in its origin rather than its transmitted content has done to the corporate Temple what a man does who acknowledges his baptism as a historical fact while living as though it confers no present obligation and no present dignity. The consecration happened, the character remains, but the operative reality of what was given has been quietly evacuated.

The consequences of this framework error are not abstract; it is the synodal path! We see its vile and visible fruits in real documents, published under declared binding authority, in our own time.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, interviewed at Diane Montagna’s Substack, has issued a formal and carefully argued critique of Study Group 9’s final report, published May 5th by the Holy See’s General Secretariat of the Synod.11 Bishop Schneider, whose willingness to name what others have preferred to leave unnamed has made him one of the few genuinely navigating bishops of this moment, deserves both acknowledgment and prayer; he is attempting, at real personal cost, to hold open a path toward the doctrinal and moral unity that the whole Church needs and that no merely administrative settlement can provide.

His observes that the report advances what he calls an “exegesis of doubt” regarding the enduring validity of scriptural testimony on questions of sexual morality; calling into question whether the relevant biblical passages mean what the Church has always understood them to mean, in order to create space for conclusions the Deposit of Faith forecloses. Bishop Schneider names it plainly: this is what the serpent did in the Garden of Eden. The exegesis of doubt is the oldest move in the record.

This is not peripheral synodal process, but an organ of the Holy See publishing a document that explicitly undermines the Church’s capacity to make the moral claim that the martyrs died rather than abandon. Leo XIV, who could have suspended the process or declined to authorize publication, allowed it to stand. That is a decision, not an oversight.

Consider what this means in light of the framework established at the General Audience. If the Church’s Divine dimension consists in her origin and her persistence through human fragility, then Study Group 9’s report is simply another instance of the human dimension doing what the human dimension does; struggling, erring, moving toward the light in its imperfect way. The corporate Temple’s consecration is not at stake because the corporate Temple’s consecration has been redefined as something that human failure cannot touch. The framework absorbs the scandal before the scandal can be named.

But if the corporate Temple’s consecration consists in fidelity to the transmitted Deposit, as Pentecost and the apostolic commission and the entire pre-conciliar tradition insist, then what Study Group 9 has done is precisely what mortal sin does to the individual Temple. The character remains. The consecration is not annihilated. But something has been done to the dwelling that was not done to it at Pentecost, and the remedy is not pastoral accompaniment of the defilement. The remedy is repentance, restoration, and return.

What We Do Not Need

Let us be blunt about what is at stake, if the Church offers no spiritual superiority; if membership in the Body of Christ, reception of valid sacraments, and fidelity to the transmitted Deposit confer no ontological advantage over what is available through natural virtue and civic goodwill; then the martyrs were fools. Not heroes. Not witnesses. Fools who died for an institution that, on honest examination, was offering them nothing they could not have found in a well-organized society of the sincere.12

We do not need another institution to tell us to recycle, to be kind, to accompany one another through the universal human experience of fragility and mortality. The world produces such institutions in abundance, and they do their work with varying degrees of competence and genuine goodwill. What the world cannot produce, what no merely human project has ever produced or can produce, is a society constituted by the Holy Ghost, elevated through theosis to participation in the Divine nature, commissioned13 to transmit a Deposit that was given once and cannot be reconstructed if it is lost.14

That is what the martyrs died for. Not for peace in the abstract, not for kindness as a social value, and not for a Church understood as a community of the fragile journeying together toward an unspecified horizon. They died because they had received something Real; something that made demands on them that no merely human loyalty could make, and offered them something that no merely human institution could offer. They died because the Faith is True, and because the Truth is worth dying for.

Our brothers and sisters in Nigeria know this with a clarity that the comfortable Western Church has largely lost. They are not dying for an NGO with sacraments. They are dying for the God who is; for the Deposit that names Him, for the society He constituted at Pentecost to carry His name through history. Their martyrdom is not a tragedy to be managed, but the most eloquent answer available to the question this piece began with.

The church that is being sung into being through the synodal process is a church whose mission runs contrary to what the Church was founded for, dressed in the language of accompaniment and the vestments of false virtue. It offers fraternity15 without theosis, community without the Deposit, pastoral warmth without the hard mercy of defined Truth. It is, in the most precise sense, a reduction; a Temple described as though the consecration were a historical footnote rather than an operative present reality.

Our Lord God deserves better, the baptized deserve better, and the martyrs, past and present, demand better.

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Why the Restoration Matters

This is not a counsel of despair. The corporate Temple’s consecration is not destroyed by the failures of her administrators, any more than the individual Temple’s baptismal character is destroyed by mortal sin. The character remains. The Deposit remains. The succession, where it has been faithfully transmitted and faithfully guarded, remains.

The Restoration is not a nostalgia project. It is the insistence that what was given at Pentecost is still available; that the society Pentecost built still exists wherever the Deposit is guarded and transmitted whole, wherever valid succession has been maintained in fidelity rather than mere form, wherever the baptized are told the truth about what they are and what they carry.

You are a Temple of the Holy Ghost. You are a member of a constituted society that is categorically superior to every merely human institution that history has produced or will produce. That superiority is not arrogance; it is vocation.16 It is the claim that makes the Great Commission rational, the martyrs coherent, and the Restoration necessary.

The question the martyrs answer with their lives is the same question every baptized person answers with their daily fidelity or their daily compromise: Do you believe what Pentecost made you, or do you not?


Thanks for being part of the Restoration. God bless and protect you; bear Our Lord’s light to a world that no longer believes.

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What, precisely, did the Holy Ghost make on that Sunday in Jerusalem?

Not what He inspired, or encouraged or accompanied or blessed. What did He make?

The answer the tradition gives is not a movement, not a community of the well-intentioned, not a support network for people navigating mortality together. The answer is a society; constituted, ontologically distinct, and called to a form of life that no merely human institution had ever achieved or could achieve. Pentecost was not the birthday of a religion. It was the inauguration of something that had no precedent in human history and has had no genuine successor.

Understanding what that means is not an exercise in institutional pride. It is the precondition for understanding why the Faith asks what it asks of you and I.

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What the Prologue of John Already Claimed

Before the upper room, before the tongues of fire, before Peter stood and addressed the crowd in a voice that was no longer quite his own, the claim had already been lodged in the opening verses of St. John’s Gospel.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”1 This is not devotional poetry but metaphysical assertion, and it carries consequences that run all the way down to the question of what the Church is and what she confers on those who enter her. If the Word is God, and the Word became flesh, and the flesh was given for the life of the world, then what is communicated through that flesh is not merely moral instruction or consolation. It is participation in the Divine Nature itself.

St. John makes the consequence explicit twelve verses later: “But as many as received Him, He gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in His name.”2 Power3 to be made the sons of God. This is the declaration that those who receive Christ receive a new mode of being; one that is categorically different from anything available through natural birth, moral effort, philosophical attainment, or civic membership.

The Fathers understood this with a clarity that later centuries have sometimes softened into abstraction. St. Athanasius, whose entire theological project was the defense of Christ’s full divinity, drew the soteriological conclusion: “He became man that we might be made God.”4 Theosis. Participation in the Divine Nature; not metaphorically, not merely morally, but in the precise sense that grace elevates human nature to a participation in what God is by nature. St. Irenaeus, writing a century before St. Athanasius, had already built his entire account of salvation on the same foundation: the recapitulation of humanity in Christ restores what Adam lost and confers what Adam never possessed. Fallen humanity is not merely forgiven in the economy of salvation; it is elevated.

This is the theological ground on which Pentecost stands. The Holy Ghost did not descend upon a gathering of pious Hebrews to make them more pious. He descended to complete in them, and through them in the Church, what the Incarnation had made possible: the actual communication of Divine life to human nature.

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The Society That Resulted

What Pentecost made, therefore, was not merely a community. It was a society with an ontological character that no merely human institution can claim or replicate.

This distinction matters enormously, and it has been obscured in ways that cost the baptized dearly. A community forms around shared interest, shared experience, shared suffering, or shared aspiration. Communities are valuable; they are part of what makes human life bearable and occasionally beautiful. But a community derives its character entirely from the qualities of its members. It is, in the most precise sense, the sum of its parts.

A society constituted by the Holy Ghost is something else. Its character derives not from the aggregate quality of its members but from the principle that animates it; the res that persists through every human failure, every institutional betrayal, every generation of mediocrities and worse sitting in its offices. St. Peter denied Our Lord three times and was made the rock on which the Church was built. The Divine constitution of the society does not depend on the personal virtue of those who hold office within it. It depends on what was transmitted at Pentecost and has been transmitted since through apostolic succession faithful to the Deposit of Faith.

1 Peter names the character of this society, “a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people.”5 This is the vocabulary of constituted dignity. These are not descriptions of how the members feel about themselves, or aspirational labels for what the community hopes someday to become. They are statements of what the society is by virtue of what was done to it and in it at Pentecost.

The transmission of that constitution through history is the work of the apostles and their successors.6 This is not merely an administrative or legal arrangement, the apostles received at Pentecost not only the Spirit’s gifts but the Deposit of Faith that the Spirit was sent to guard and animate; “the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you.”7 The succession is a succession in both orders and in content. A bishop in valid succession who departs from the Deposit does not thereby carry the fullness of what was transmitted in that upper room; he carries the form without the substance, the office without the commission. Leo XIII understood this with precision in Satis Cognitum: the unity of the Church is the unity of her Faith, and the marks of the Church attach to that unity.8 The society Pentecost built is identified by its fidelity to what Pentecost transmitted, not merely by its administrative continuity with Rome. Rome’s authority is genuine and carries real weight in history; it is also always exercised in trust, as stewardship of a Deposit Rome did not originate and cannot alter.

The Temple and What It Requires

Here is where the doctrine becomes personal, and where the reader who is genuinely progressing in the spiritual life will recognize something they may have already begun to notice without having the words for it.

St. Paul reminds us, “Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own?”9 The individual baptized person is not merely a member of a society that has a privileged relationship with God. The individual baptized person is a temple. A consecrated space; a dwelling of the living God.

There comes a point in the spiritual life when this ceases to be a pious phrase and becomes an operative reality; when the person begins to understand that sin is not merely a rule violation or a moral failure in the abstract. It is a defilement of something consecrated. The person who has begun to take their baptismal dignity seriously finds, almost without seeking it, that venial sin begins to feel different than it did before. Not because they have become scrupulous, which is a disorder; but because they have become awake to what they are carrying. The Temple is not a metaphor; the consecration was real. What is done in and to the body matters in a way that no merely natural anthropology can account for, because the body has been made a dwelling of the Holy Ghost.

This is not a counsel of perfectionism, and it is emphatically not a license for the self-righteousness that has driven so many people away from traditional communities. The saints were the first to confess their own insufficiency. The point is not that the Temple’s resident is shamed by every human failure; the point is that the dignity of the Temple changes the stakes of the interior life. You are not managing your behavior; you are tending a consecrated space.

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The Corporate Temple

What is true of the individual is true, analogously and in a manner appropriate to her corporate nature, of the Church herself.

The society Pentecost built is the corporate Temple of the Holy Ghost moving through history. She carries, in her liturgy, her sacraments, her defined doctrine, and her apostolic succession faithful to the Deposit, the same consecrated reality that St. Paul attributes to the individual body of the baptized. Her failures are real; the historical record is not in dispute, and no honest account of the Church’s human dimension can be written without acknowledging that her members have at times done to her what no enemy from outside could accomplish; but the failures of her members do not dissolve her constitution. They defile it; precisely as mortal sin defiles the individual Temple without annihilating the baptismal character.

An institution that adulterates the Faith she was constituted to guard does to the corporate Temple what mortal sin does to the individual soul. The consecration is not cancelled; the character remains. But something has been done to the dwelling that was not done to it at Pentecost, and the remedy is not to pretend the defilement has not occurred. The remedy is repentance, restoration, and return to the Deposit that was transmitted in that upper room when the Spirit descended and made something that history had never seen before.

The society Pentecost built is unique. It is historically unrepeatable. No merely human institution, however noble its aspirations, however sophisticated its organization, however genuinely it serves the common good, possesses what was given in that room. The filiatio adoptiva, the kingly priesthood, the ontological elevation of human nature through participation in the Divine; these are not available elsewhere. They cannot be reconstructed by good intentions or replicated by impressive programs. They were given once, in a specific act of Divine condescension, and they are transmitted through the society that act constituted.

This is what the baptized are members of and what is worth defending. This is what was worth dying for, and therefore worth living for.

Thanks for being part of the Restoration. God bless and protect you this Pentecost.

Part 2 of 2 is here.