One can only wonder what apologists for Leo XIV think about when they lie awake at 3 a.m.
Last week, his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, was published. Other than its title, the document contains no Latin. Notably, while the phrase “Catholic Church” does not appear in it, the term “synodal church” is included.
That same encyclical blasphemously replaces Christ as the foundation of social life with “the poor, the sick, the migrants, and the least among us — [who] will become the cornerstone.”
After Magnifica Humanitas was released, Cardinal Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, praised it for being “profoundly synodal” instead of a “profoundly Catholic” document.
Are we to honestly believe that these men adhere to the same religion that St. Pope Pius X did?
Meeting with dissidents
Last month during an audience in Paul VI hall, Leo praised members of CHARIS, an organization that coordinates the so-called Charismatic Renewal movement.
Next, he spoke with the radical pro-abortion, pro-LGBT Democrat mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, before joining a “multi-faith” prayer meeting. All in a day’s work for the Vicar of the United Nations.
The only time Leo manages to employ something remotely Catholic, like a Rosary Crusade, its purpose is always some temporal aim like “world peace” instead of the salvation of souls, or the fight against the diabolical moral decay currently consuming the world.
Using Trinity Sunday to promote naturalism
Leo’s lack of Catholicity is most often on display in his prepared remarks.
On Trinity Sunday, Catholics of yesteryear would rightly have expected a sermon that lifted the soul toward adoration of the eternal God. But Leo’s address this past weekend offered only shallow language and clichéd references to “encounter,” “relationality,” and “inclusion.”
The Dispatch
Anyone with even the most elementary Catholic theological training knows that the Trinity is not principally important because it creates spaces of “encounter.”
Leo doubled down on his synodal ideology by speaking about being “at home” in God and on the attractiveness of divine life. Again, these are secondary ideas. Christianity is about much more than mere comfort: Christ called sinners to repentance, self-denial, sacrifice, and conversion. The Cross precedes glory.
This dichotomy was especially pronounced in Leo’s treatment of the Gospel of Saint John. While quoting John 3:16 and John 3:17, he emphasized that Christ came not to condemn the world but to save it. True enough, but he proceeded to “zip it” on the subjects of condemnation, unbelief, and judgment. In Leo’s Synodal gospel, salvation comes with heaps of mercy and horizontal language but nothing about sin, sanctification, sacrifice, grace, or eternal destiny.
Typical of Novus Ordo sermons
Further along in his address, Prevost made some alarming remarks concerning Nicodemus’ meeting with Our Lord. He suggested that Nicodemus received from Christ “the Spirit of communion, which opens the heart to new truth and true newness.”
In saying this, Leo is forcing the novus ordo religion into the meaning of this passage. Nowhere does Catholic doctrine teach that the Holy Ghost reveals new truths beyond the deposit of faith. This repeated celebration of “newness” has become a familiar feature of the modernist ideological machine.
Of course, Catholicism teaches that souls are drawn closer to God in faith, love, and truth. It is correct to say that God gave man the Holy Ghost to guide, strengthen, and sanctify him. But Leo twists all of this to fit his humanistic agenda.
At the end of the day, the mystery of the Trinity deserved more than the flowery empty treatment it received.
Distorting the Church’s social teachings
Leo’s address to the members of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation stands as another example of his unfamiliarity with the Catholic faith.
Yet again, he begins with themes of war, polarization, social division, and humanity’s search for meaning. It did not take long for him to descend into a modernist diatribe in which “shared humanity” became the central focus.
Leo further spoke of freedom but he framed it primarily in relational terms and as a self-gift instead of the Catholic understanding where freedom is ordered toward truth and ultimately toward obedience to God. If the Catholic Church’s mission is salvation, the Synodal Church’s counterfeit’s purpose is social cohesion.
Next came the fatal faux pas where he claimed civilizational crisis is anthropological rather than theological. Actually, the collapse of Christian civilization occurred not because humanity accidentally misplaced transcendence. Rather, it was due to deliberate revolutions against altar, throne, family, hierarchy, and divine authority.
Further on, Leo returns to one of his favorite subjects: “healthy pluralism” arising from diverse backgrounds and contributing toward peaceful coexistence. This obsession is heretical at worst and theologically erroneous at best, as it seeks to usher in an earthly paradise without God.
It is hard to believe that the conciliar hierarchy and the forces behind it are still trying to convince us that the Synodal religion is the Catholic religion. What is even harder to believe is that there are intelligent human beings out there who are still falling for it.
