Leo XIV is not afraid to completely abrogate the measures adopted by his predecessor when he deems them unnecessary -- in this case, the reduction of stipends in the Holy See, including to Cardinals, and of pay increases, determined by this previous motu proprio.
Motu Proprio of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV
Vatican, September 1, 2026, the second year of the Pontificate
The Despair of Our Time
In recent days, news has surfaced of the approval in Veneto of a regional law regulating assisted suicide. Veneto is the fourth region to pass such legislation, but the first governed by a center-right administration. The fact therefore carries a political and cultural significance that extends well beyond regional borders: it shows how the principle of absolute self-determination has now penetrated coalitions that, at least nominally, are supposed to be committed to the defense of life, the family, and the natural order.
The final program of the "Summorum Pontificum" Peregrinatio ad Petri Sedem (Rome) was made public today.
What is noteworthy is that, unlike last year, there will not be a Pontifical Mass at the Vatican Basilica; after the pilgrimage and prayers there, the Saturday Mass will be at Saint Mary Major. Also, both pontifical Masses will be celebrated by Bishop Schneider, and not a cardinal, as in the past years.
Sign of the times?...
Schedule of the Pilgrimage
Ad Petri Sedem
which will take place in Rome from october 23 to 25, 2026
(registration is not necessary to participate in the pilgrimage)
Friday October 23, 2026
Heiligenkreuz: Theologians Welcome the Exclusion of Father Waldstein
[Note: Kathpress is the official news agency of the Austrian Bishops’ Conference, dominated by extreme liberals, so their characterization of Father Waldstein should be read accordingly.]
Austrian theologians have expressed relief at the suspension of Father Edmund Waldstein from his teaching position at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Benedikt XVI in Heiligenkreuz.
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By François Savy, for Le Salon Beige
In his article À quand la paix liturgique ? (When will there be liturgical peace?), in the July-August 2025 issue (no. 382) of La Nef, Christophe Geffroy raised a question to which the consecrations recently conferred within the Society of Saint Pius X give particular prominence. In it, he championed the equality in "value and holiness" of the two forms of the Roman rite, and reproached the "priests who refuse any celebration of the new ordo" for contesting this value and holiness "because they judge this liturgy to be 'deficient'." However, it turns out that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith specifically mentioned the "legitimacy of the Novus Ordo Missae" in the preamble to the procedure allowing clerics of the Society of Saint Pius X to return to full communion after the consecrations.
This past fortnight, at least two additional diocesan bishops were involved in Traditional Mass activities.
In the new FSSP mission in San Jacinto church, in Guale, the local archbishop, Abp. Eduardo Castillo Pino, celebrated the Traditional Mass:
by Father Richard Cipolla
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body.”
By Mark Lambert via Twitter
This is genuinely encouraging news from the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston. Bishop Evelio Menjívar has appointed Fr Timothy J. Grassi as Episcopal Delegate for Matters Concerning the Usus Antiquior explicitly “to foster greater unity among the Catholic faithful and provide for their various spiritual needs.”
The Church Will Not Be Saved by Bureaucrats Who Think Everything Must Change
There is a peculiar mistake common among modern people: when they discover that the Church is full of sinners, they conclude that Christianity has failed. This is rather like discovering that a hospital is full of sick people and concluding that medicine does not work.
Cardinal Sarah: "For Priests, the Ancient Mass Is the One That Helps Them Celebrate Better"
The denunciation of liturgical abuses is one of the signature themes of Cardinal Robert Sarah, former Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship. The cardinal has returned to the subject in his latest book, Il Cantico dell'Agnello: Musica sacra e liturgia celeste (The Song of the Lamb: Sacred Music and the Heavenly Liturgy), co-authored with Peter Cater and published by Cantagalli.
Your Eminence, in your view, does an aversion to Latin and Gregorian chant exist in certain sectors of the Church?
'In this final version I have been forced to level the charge of atheism against the Council'.
A guest article by Joseph Bevan, author of Two Families and Traddy Daddy.
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| School children in 1947 (source) |
Rorate Caeli is delighted
to report that “Vatican II and the Eclipse of God” ‘A Critique of the Council’ by Don Pietro Leone has finally been published.
Readers will recall that Rorate had the honour of posting
instalments of this very important work over a period of two years. (See note)* Since then, the author has added further analysis to the original texts.
Below is the link to Loreto Publications and a short presentation of the book. Readers can look forward to an interview with Don Pietro Leone in which he discusses
his new book and which will be posted in
the following days.
(N.B. Please note this book is not to be confused by the release of a book with a
similar title:’The Eclipse of God’ by Dr. Erwin Lutzer in 2024).
https://loretopubs.org/eclipse-of-god-paperback.html
It is long past the time when faithful Catholics must
cease any pretense that anything good has come from Vatican II. The revolution
has done its work and has failed to produce anything but chaos and destruction,
and those of us still attentive to God’s will and not our own must begin to
pick up the pieces of a shattered civilization and endeavour to rebuild. To
that end, we at Loreto Publications offer this magnificent analysis of the
Council and its moral, theological, and philosophical failings, so that Holy
Mother Church and Our Lady’s faithful children may rise up with knowledge and
courage to build up once again, under the banner of the Immaculata, the wounded
Mystical Body of Christ in today’s world, where even the most rudimentary
knowledge of the Truth seems to be in eclipse.
The Editor
Let us listen to his words:
Dear brothers and sisters,
A Pontifical Commissioner and a Bishop Deposit Coca Leaves in an "Earth Offering": Jordi Bertomeu as Offerer at a Pachamama Ceremony
Infovaticana
August 18, 2026
The Southern Macroregional Encounter "Interweaving Voices for Dignity" — presented by Vatican News as part of the preparation for Pope Leo XIV's upcoming visit to Peru — opened without any Catholic prayer whatsoever. In its place, a ritual invoking Mother Earth was performed, with the distribution of coca leaves, guided breathing exercises, and food offerings placed on the ground.
Father Richard Cipolla
This is the specific part of the interview dedicated to it (our transcript):
We have often published the great texts of Bishop Rob Mutsaerts (Auxiliary of s-Hertogenbosch /Bois-le-Duc), Netherlands. He has just published (in English and Dutch) an open letter to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on the need for concern for the salvation of souls amidst the confusion of synodality and other trends.
Holy Father,
With reverence for the office entrusted to you as successor of Saint Peter, and in communion with the Church which Christ built upon the apostles, I address you with this open letter. I don't do so lightly. What leads me to speak these words publicly is a concern that ultimately transcends every other ecclesial consideration: the salvation of souls. Salus animarum suprema lex — the salvation of souls is the supreme law. My question is a simple and earnest one: does the synodal process actually help bring souls closer to Christ and to eternal salvation? That is the decisive question for me.
Recorded for Father John Zuhlsdorf and his readers, it is a message of hope:
The recent attempt of tens of thousands of migrants to illegally enter Spanish territory via the sea at Ceuta has caused both political upheaval and sensational commentary. It led to immense criticism of Spanish Socialist prime minister Sanchez, not just by the domestic right-wing opposition but across the EU as a whole. Even the Trump administration joined in on the attacks. Even the fact that over 50 people died while attempting this illegal mass crossing has not resulted in overly sympathetic portrayals or criticisms of strict border policy.
August 7, 2026
Italian journalist D. Murgia recently published results of the 2016 deliberations within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), that shed important new light on the Vatican’s handling of the alleged apparitions at Medjugorje.
For, indeed, the reform of the Mass was accompanied by a profound overhaul of all the other sacraments—baptism, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, penance, and extreme unction (the last two renamed reconciliation and the anointing of the sick). And the changes to these were no less profound, no less meaningful, no less consequential.
More than two-thirds of the members of the College of Cardinals are said to possess little or no working knowledge of Latin. At first glance, this may appear to be little more than a curiosity for classical scholars. In reality, however, it may reveal one of the deepest crises confronting the Catholic Church today. For when the Church loses the language in which her faith, her liturgy, and her canon law have been articulated for centuries, she inevitably begins to lose direct access to her own tradition.
A truly monumental chapter in Sydney's religious history unfolded recently at St Michael's Parish in Belfield. On Wednesday, July 1, 2026, hundreds of faithful gathered to witness and partake in Sydney’s first-ever Solemn High Mass in the Traditional Croatian Glagolitic Rite.* Held on the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord, the atmosphere was charged with deep reverence as the community united to revive a centuries-old liturgical tradition on Australian soil. (Full video below:)
But What Is the "State of Necessity"?
I wish to dwell on a concept that is frequently invoked in an ambiguous and contradictory manner — above all to justify the episcopal consecrations that took place at Écône on July 1, 2026: the "state of necessity."
[As always, guest pieces do not necessarily represent Rorate's position.]
Fr. Barré and the Roman policy towards the SSPX
by John Lamont
Fr. Clément Barré, of the Archdiocese of Toulouse, has criticized the ecclesiology of the SSPX in an article whose translation has been published by Rorate Caeli (The SSPX's Ecclesiology of Substitution: Part of the Whole, or a new Whole? — And the Problem with a Crisis that Never Ends).
And They Know It.
One of the most historically significant events of the last century was the fall of communism. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. And yet the ideology sustaining Soviet communism had already collapsed under Brezhnev in the 1970s and had consolidated that collapse under Andropov beginning in 1982. By those years, no one believed in the Soviet paradise any longer — not even the apparatchiks. The machinery nonetheless kept running until 1991, operated by a committee of gerontocrats who resisted the inevitable. There were twenty years of lag between the death of legitimacy and the death of the machinery. This is a historical regularity: systems survive fifteen to twenty years beyond their own legitimacy. They advance like the light of a dead star.
The following essay by Wolfram Schrems (M.A. in Theology, M.A. in Philosophy), a catechist and pro-life advocate in Vienna, takes issue with the suppression of the Old Mass and the discrimination against traditional believers by the Vatican and bishops, with reference to Peter Kwasniewski’s work The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile (TAN Books, 2022) of which he is reviewing the German edition, Der alte und künftige Römische Ritus—Die Rückkehr der traditionellen lateinischen Messe nach 70 Jahren des Exils (St. Stephani Verlags, 2023). The original German of the review may be found here.
“At that time, when Jesus entered into the boat, His disciples followed Him: and behold a great tempest arose in the sea, so that the boat was covered with waves.” (Matt. 8:23-27)
To reach the eternal shores of Heaven we have to cross the sea of this world. His Majesty taught us that the world will be against us. That is why the Gospel indicates that the disciples followed Him into the barque of St. Peter, which symbolizes the Church, after which a storm arose. Our journey to Heaven is very much like a sea voyage, meaning there will be moments of up and down on the high seas… times of calm and times of storm… times of hot and times of cold… enemies lurking about (even inside the barque itself) trying to sink or corrupt the ship… sharks circling in the waters… and so on.
Introduction
On 29 July 2026, Rorate Cæli published a lengthy guest piece on the canonical status of the Society of Saint Pius X, written under the pen name “Brother Linus Pio” and presented as the fruit of several years of research. It is offered as a monograph. It concludes that the Society is schismatic, that its sacraments are criminal and sacrilegious, that its Masses do not satisfy the Sunday precept, and that Archbishop Lefebvre taught heresy.
Fundamental Law of Vatican City State
31 July 2026
LEO XIV
The need to take into account new requirements of governance and certain important normative modifications that have occurred over the course of recent years prompts the issuance of a new Fundamental Law.
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| Archbishop Cordileone Celebrating the Traditional Mass |
