A Bad Look for the Vatican
This year's ban on the traditionally minded "Ad Petri Sedem" pilgrims entering Saint Peter's Basilica on October 24, 2026 borders on hostility toward Catholics who are loyal to the Pope and orthodox in their faith. It has nothing to do with concern for unity in the Church or with operational difficulties in organizing liturgical celebrations in Saint Peter's.
The rites that exist in the Catholic Church, in their peaceful coexistence with the Novus Ordo, demonstrate that it can be done. The united Eastern Churches are even self-governing (sui iuris) particular Churches within the universal Catholic Church. No one regards them as a threat to the unity of the Church. No one would deny them an altar or refuse them entry to a Catholic church. No one, that is, except the Vatican, which refuses entry to conservative Catholics who are, moreover, loyal to the Pope. Synodal hypocrisy (inclusivity) has thereby revealed itself for what it is. The "Ad Petri Sedem" pilgrims are not the SSPX. But we have known for a long time that certain people are inclusive only as long as it serves their own goals. Any other way of thinking, any other approach in pastoral care and spirituality, they exclude ruthlessly and in cold blood. That has been my consistent experience. We recognize the same pattern in politics.
So-called synodality has thus shown its true face. It chooses whom and what it includes. "Todos, todos, todos" does not, in fact, mean everyone, but certain people.
We have known the efforts and demands of so-called reform Catholicism since the 1970s. Its protagonists have relieved one another in relays and have often changed their clothes without ever abandoning their unchanging goals. The result is the synodality of today, which is not the synodality of yesterday, that is, of Tradition. It is becoming apparent that, in the end, it is a belated, Protestantizing structural reform, together with the scrapping of Familiaris Consortio (1981) and Veritatis Splendor (1993). Converts from the Anglican Church will find it all very familiar.
I am a missionary Benedictine, and I have known "intercultural learning and listening" as key concepts since the early 1990s. They have paralyzed our missionary dynamism for decades. The declaration Dominus Iesus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued on August 6, 2000, was already a response to this, but it was not received, which is why we are now suffering the synodal overkill of words and processes. And yet the truth is so simple: DOMINUS JESUS!
The SPIRIT therefore called on us more than twenty-five years ago to present (once again) JESUS CHRIST to the nations as the exclusive, absolute truth, as the only door to the FATHER, as the universal and ever-valid teacher, and as the sole Redeemer of the world. Instead, we sit in circles and on chairs in order to listen. To whom? But nothing comes of it. I would say: nothing new, merely the step-by-step implementation of yesterday's demands of reform Catholicism (democracy and co-determination; control of power; laypeople in leadership positions; women in ecclesial offices; revision of sexual morality; normalization of divorce and remarriage; recognition of homosexual lifestyles and partnerships; transgenderism; preservation of creation, that is, the climate; socialist-inspired universalism: open migration and universal brotherhood; interreligious coexistence instead of mission). The elephant in the room, the correlation between abuse and homosexuality in the Catholic clergy (Dariusz Oko; Paul Sullins), continues to be ignored.
The roundtable discussions are steered. The commissions deliver heterodox proposals. From Rome come no valid answers to the problems in the Church triggered by liberal progressivism. An honest, objective evaluation of the liturgical renewal, without any wish to return to the time before 1965, fails to materialize. The turn of young people toward conservative attitudes, also within the Church, is not being objectively considered as a sign of the times.
Meanwhile, on the streets of Europe's cities we see Islamo-leftist, migrant, and chaotic forces at work, symptomatically showing what it looks like when the traditional Christian order disintegrates and the value-neutral secular state fails. Its leading politicians possess neither credibility nor values or virtues; in a post-Christian age, they simply have nothing to offer. It is incomprehensible that only recently a pope exhorted the young to stir up chaos. Chaos has never been a category of the SPIRIT, but rather of demonic, revolutionary forces. The SPIRIT is, as we know, the One who brought order to chaos in the beginning. Where chaos gains the upper hand, the devil reigns.
Signs of disintegration in the society and Church of our latitudes are unmistakable. In my opinion, the former (society) has no chance of surviving without Christianity; the latter (the Church) is indeed upheld by God, yet she neglects to proclaim the exclusivity (in the double sense!) of JESUS CHRIST (the Way, the Truth, and the Life). He serves only as a stepping stone for humanness, which is gladly paraphrased with the term "openness." The category of sin is replaced by that of fragility. It is all about closeness. Heresy and error are not named. Dialogue, on the other hand, flourishes. For years the Church has resembled an endless workshop of circles of chairs and roundtables, delivering no sustainable results except those that undermine her doctrine, her proclamation, and her hierarchical-sacramental structure, in deed and in truth, but also semantically.
In Closing, the Joyful Part
We are heading toward 2033. After 2000 years, it will be a special year. JESUS CHRIST is the same yesterday and today. HE remains the FATHER's answer to all our problems and the atonement for our sins. It is above all the latter that we must remember. Where HE enters a heart, everything becomes new! HE is the pearl that the Church has to offer to the nations. Whoever has recognized its value wants nothing else. Nor can he place JESUS CHRIST in a series alongside others. The joy of having found HIM outshines everything. The God who became man is, after all, a singular event without equal! And For all!
[Original in German, from www.marian-eleganti.ch]
