From Chris Jackson at Hiraeth in Exile:
Outside Villa Barberini in Castel Gandolfo on June 16, Leo XIV addressed the Society of Saint Pius X and its plan to consecrate four new bishops at Écône on July 1.
His warning was brief and revealing. He said he was considering another appeal to the SSPX: “Do not do this.” He then framed the matter around communion, choice, division, and Vatican II. The most important line came near the end. The SSPX, he said, refuses to accept fundamental elements of the Church, beginning with several points of the Second Vatican Council.
That sentence carries the weight of the entire crisis.
The immediate dispute concerns episcopal consecrations without a papal mandate. The deeper dispute concerns the status of Vatican II as the border of approved Catholic existence. Leo did not say the SSPX denies the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, the Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection, or the sacrificial nature of the Mass. He named Vatican II.
The Society has now named the four priests chosen for consecration: Father Pascal Schreiber of Switzerland, Father Michael Goldade of the United States, Father Michel Poinsinet de Sivry of France, and Father Marc Hanappier of France.
Its communiqué insists that the consecrations claim no parallel jurisdiction and no rival authority over the Church. The stated purpose is the continuation of Holy Orders, Confirmation, and episcopal sacramentals in the traditional Roman rite amid what the Society calls an unprecedented crisis of faith.
A Catholic can question the prudence of the act. A Catholic can worry about consequences for souls, canonical penalties, and the hardening of lines. Those questions deserve serious treatment.
Leo’s formulation moves beyond prudence. It makes the council itself the central test.
That is the scandal beneath the canonical headline. In the present Roman order, Vatican II has become the oath of belonging. A Catholic may speak endlessly about wounds, accompaniment, fraternity, synodality, dialogue, migration, climate, inclusion, and interreligious respect. A Catholic may blur the meaning of blessing, sacralize false worship, and flirt with doctrines already foreclosed by apostolic tradition. The machinery remains patient. The mood remains pastoral.
Resistance to the council that made this new language possible brings out the iron.
That is why Leo’s line matters. “We must move forward” is the voice of a regime. It speaks as though Vatican II is settled, as though the postconciliar revolution has acquired the status of providential inevitability, as though the task of Rome is to manage dissent until the dissenter submits, fades, or is cut off.
The traditional Catholic instinct begins precisely here. The issue is the nature of authority. Catholic authority exists to guard the deposit of faith. When the practical criterion of communion becomes loyalty to a council whose fruits are visible everywhere in collapse, the Catholic mind starts asking whether the institution invoking authority still possesses the authority it claims.
St. Gallen Puts a Female Papacy on a Billboard
In Switzerland, the Diocese of St. Gallen has placed the logic of the new church into advertising form.
Its “Ich bin dabei” campaign presents smiling clergy, employees, and volunteers beside questions about the Church’s social role. The campaign page includes the slogan, “Gemeinsam den Weg zur Wahl der ersten Päpstin ebnen?” In English: “Together pave the way to the election of the first female pope?”
The official equality page speaks of developing the Church together, promoting the equality of women and men, placing women in leadership, supporting non ordained theologians who preach, and building a church community where gender plays no role and everyone has the same rights and duties.
Leo XIV appointed Beat Grögli as Bishop of St. Gallen in May 2025. The campaign now runs under the diocesan structure he governs.
The question on the billboard attacks the apostolic constitution of the Church in the form of a cheerful reputation campaign.
A female pope would require a female Bishop of Rome. A female Bishop of Rome would require female episcopal ordination. Female episcopal ordination would require female priestly ordination. John Paul II, a man considered a saint by Leo XIV and Bishop Grogli, declared in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment must be definitively held by all the faithful.
Even inside the postconciliar framework, the St. Gallen campaign collides with a teaching presented as belonging to the Church’s divine constitution.
The deeper problem is the campaign’s anthropology. It treats apostolic office as a question of access, representation, and equal rights. It speaks the language of secular institutional reform and baptizes it with ecclesial branding. The priesthood becomes a leadership structure. The papacy becomes the highest job. The male character of apostolic ministry becomes an inequality waiting to be corrected.
This is the revolutionary reduction. Sacrament becomes function. Order becomes power. Divine institution becomes social structure. The Mystical Body becomes an organization with a gender equity problem.
The campaign also reveals how the new church markets itself to a post-Christian public. It does not lead with sin, grace, sacrifice, repentance, judgment, the Cross, the Mass, or the necessity of the Catholic faith. It leads with social usefulness. It says, in effect, look at our services, our openness, our counseling, our social engagement, our equality efforts, our value to the community.
That kind of church can survive as a subsidized NGO. It cannot convert nations.
The St. Gallen billboard is more than a stupid slogan. It is a confession. The diocese is telling the world what it thinks the Church is. It is an institution to be updated by the moral assumptions of late liberal Europe. Once the old sacramental structure blocks the update, the structure itself becomes the target.
Rome will warn Écône about Vatican II. Rome will tell the SSPX to stop. Rome will call unauthorized consecrations a schismatic act.
St. Gallen can put a female papacy into public imagination under a bishop appointed by Leo XIV.
That contrast is the catechism of the moment.
Detroit’s Archbishop Feels the Divine Presence at a Mosque
In Dearborn Heights, Michigan, Archbishop Edward Weisenburger attended the grand opening of the Imam Al Hasanain Mosque, part of the new Islamic Institute of America campus. Arab American News reported that the 16 million dollar project includes a mosque, educational and youth facilities, community spaces, a commercial kitchen, and parking for more than 500 vehicles. The mosque can accommodate more than 1,100 worshippers.
Weisenburger’s remarks went far beyond civic courtesy.
He told the gathering that he felt respect, fraternity, and kindness there. He said that from the moment he entered the site, he felt a profound divine presence. He described the mosque as a sacred place that would deepen people’s connection to God.
Those words should make every Catholic stop.
Islam as a religion denies the Trinity, the Incarnation, the divine Sonship of Jesus Christ and the Crucifixion in the sense required by the Gospel. Its worship does not offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Its prayer does not adore the Eucharistic Lord present in the tabernacle.
A Catholic archbishop entered a mosque and used language of sacredness and divine presence without making any public distinction between the true worship of God and religious error.
This is the pastoral fruit of Vatican II’s interreligious language. Nostra Aetate says the Church regards Muslims with esteem and says they adore the one God. Lumen Gentium speaks of Muslims as professing the faith of Abraham and adoring with Christians the one merciful God. The postconciliar mind then moves from that premise to public gestures of religious affirmation. The Detroit ceremony is the natural end of that trajectory.
The old Roman warning in Mortalium Animos now reads like a direct rebuke to the entire interfaith culture. Pius XI condemned the opinion that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy because they manifest a native sense leading men to God. He saw where that road leads: the distortion of true religion, the rejection of revealed religion, and the slide into naturalism.
Weisenburger’s language could have been spoken by a Unitarian, a Freemason, a civic interfaith chaplain, or a liberal Protestant. Nothing in his reported remarks required the Catholic faith, announced Christ as God, or warned that a religious space ordered around denial of the Incarnate Son lacks the sacred character of a Catholic church.
That absence is the message.
The divine presence in a Catholic church is the Eucharistic presence of Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. The sacredness of a consecrated Catholic altar comes from the sacrifice of Calvary made present. The holiness of Catholic worship comes from the true religion revealed by God and entrusted to the Church.
When an archbishop uses the same vocabulary for a mosque, the Catholic words lose their shape. Sacred becomes atmosphere and religious feeling.
Dearborn Heights shows the religious end of the conciliar project with painful clarity. The bishop arrives as a Catholic prelate. The Islamic community receives his praise. The public sees fraternity. The old faith disappears behind warmth.
Weisenburger Knows How to Police Reverence When Catholics Are the Target
Weisenburger’s mosque praise becomes more obscene when placed beside his treatment of Catholics who desire traditional worship and doctrinal seriousness.
In Detroit, he did not confine himself to the minimum controversy over the Traditional Latin Mass. His June 2025 norms pushed the old Mass into a narrow set of approved locations, ended permission elsewhere, required priests seeking permission to affirm the postconciliar liturgical order, and placed the faithful who attend the old Mass under a regime of reminders, delegation, expiration dates, and episcopal surveillance.
The faithful attached to the Roman rite of their fathers received bureaucracy.
A mosque received poetry.
That same archbishop received the pallium from Leo XIV at St. Peter’s Basilica on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 2025. The symbolism is almost too perfect. The woolen band placed on Weisenburger’s shoulders marked his office as metropolitan, his pastoral charge over Detroit, and his visible communion with the Roman claimant.
Within a year, that same pallium rested on a man who speaks of a mosque as sacred, feels divine presence on Islamic property, restricts the old Roman Mass, prohibits ad orientem worship in the Novus Ordo, and purges conservative Catholic faculty from the seminary. Rome did not merely tolerate this shepherd. Rome clothed him with the sign of its confidence.
Weisenburger’s decree reached into the ordinary form of the Mass. It prohibited the priest from offering the Novus Ordo ad orientem and required Mass to be celebrated on a freestanding altar. The document itself admitted that this was unrelated to Traditionis Custodes.
That detail matters. The archbishop was not merely obeying Rome’s restrictions on the 1962 Missal. He used the moment to suppress signs of reverence inside the new rite itself.
The decree did not need to name altar rails to reveal its instinct. Ad orientem worship, traditional sanctuary arrangement, and the priest visibly leading the people toward God all belong to a Catholic imagination Weisenburger clearly wants disciplined. The problem, for men like him, is not only the old Missal. The problem is any liturgical posture that suggests sacrifice, hierarchy, transcendence, and continuity with the Church before the council.
That is why his mosque remarks deserve to be read with his liturgical decrees on the desk.
Inside an Islamic complex, he could speak of sacredness, divine presence, human fraternity, and feeling at home. Inside his own archdiocese, he could restrict Catholics who kneel before the Eucharistic Lord, love the old Mass, want the priest facing God, and desire worship that does not resemble a committee meeting.
This is the postconciliar double standard in its purest form.
False worship is handled with reverent vocabulary.
Catholic reverence is handled with administrative control.
The pattern continued at Sacred Heart Major Seminary. Weisenburger removed Ralph Martin, Eduardo Echeverria, and Edward Peters from longstanding faculty roles. These were not wild sedevacantist agitators hiding in a basement chapel. Martin is a major figure in Catholic evangelization. Echeverria is a serious theologian and philosopher. Peters is one of the best known lay canonists in the English speaking Catholic world.
Their offense, so far as the public record suggests, was not moral scandal or denial of Catholic doctrine. They were conservative Catholic intellectuals who had publicly criticized Francis or raised concerns about doctrinal confusion.
A Catholic archbishop who can feel at home in a mosque apparently cannot tolerate too much doctrinal seriousness in his seminary.
That is the real story. Weisenburger’s governance shows selectivity. The border he enforces is not between truth and error. The border he enforces is between the conciliar project and those Catholics who still carry too much of the old religion in their bones.
This is an ecclesiastical immune system attacking the wrong body. The antibodies turn against Catholic memory, Catholic reverence, Catholic doctrine, and Catholic continuity, while the vocabulary of holiness gets exported to a mosque.
Weisenburger has shown Catholics what he thinks belongs in the future. The old Mass must be quarantined. The reverent Novus Ordo must be flattened. Conservative faculty must be removed. A mosque may be praised as sacred.
That is the religion of Vatican II when it stops pretending.
Vatican II Protects the Revolution and Exposes the Resisters
These three scenes belong together.
Leo XIV tells the SSPX that its refusal concerns fundamental elements of the Church, beginning with Vatican II.
St. Gallen advertises the idea of a female pope under a bishop Leo XIV appointed.
Detroit’s archbishop praises a mosque as sacred and speaks of divine presence inside Islamic worship.
The pattern is now unavoidable. The postconciliar establishment has broad tolerance for theological innovation, interreligious sacralization, feminist ecclesiology, and public language that dissolves Catholic specificity. Its disciplinary severity awakens when traditional Catholics reject Vatican II’s new order.
That asymmetry has defined the crisis for decades. Traditionalists are told that obedience is the supreme test. Progressives are treated as conversation partners. Traditionalists are warned about schism. Bishops who undermine sacramental order are handled with patience. Traditionalists are pressured to accept the council. Dioceses that promote impossible ecclesiologies receive no comparable ultimatum.
The decisive issue is no longer tone. Leo XIV’s words were mild. St. Gallen’s campaign is cheerful. Weisenburger’s mosque remarks were friendly. The new religion rarely sounds like rebellion. It sounds like kindness, openness, dignity, welcome, dialogue, equality, and shared spiritual aspiration.
That is what makes it so dangerous.
Modernism learned how to speak in soft words. It rarely announces itself as apostasy. It reframes the faith until denial feels generous and fidelity feels harsh. It keeps the Catholic labels and replaces the Catholic instincts. It praises sacredness where Christ is denied.
It imagines female papal office while invoking equality. It treats Vatican II as untouchable while the older papal condemnations become museum pieces.
The SSPX controversy brings the hidden standard into view. Rome can tolerate almost anything except a public refusal to accept the council that normalized the revolution.
That exposes the real argument. The crisis is not merely unauthorized bishops. The crisis is the claim that Catholic survival now requires submission to the very council whose spirit keeps producing scenes like St. Gallen and Dearborn Heights.
The old Catholic question remains simple.
Does the Church exist to guard what Christ revealed, or to manage religious humanity under the symbols of Catholic office?If Vatican II is the answer, then St. Gallen and Detroit are not aberrations. They are fruits.
If St. Gallen and Detroit are fruits, then the SSPX is not imagining the crisis.
And if Rome answers that crisis by punishing the men preserving the old rites while smiling at the men sacralizing false religion and advertising impossible papacies, then Catholics must finally face the question beneath all the others: what kind of authority asks the faithful to accept rupture in the name of communion? Leo issues ultimatum to SSPX: Accept Vatican II or face excommunication - Integrity Magazine
For the first time publicly, Leo has weighed in on the upcoming July 1 consecrations of the Society of St. Pius X.
While speaking in Italian with reporters outside Castel Gandolfo Tuesday, Leo threatened to “move on” from the situation if they do not accept certain aspects of the Second Vatican Council.
“We have invited them, and I am still considering making another appeal, to say: ‘Do not do this. Let us try to live communion of the Church.’ But it is their choice,” he said, per EWTN News. “They must understand what it means for them and for the Church.”
Leo also said that “division among Christians is always a painful matter,” while adding that the SSPX “refuse(s) to accept certain fundamental elements of the Church, beginning with various points of the Second Vatican Council. And if they make those choices, I am sorry. But we must move forward.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/2066993646189293914
Discussions between the SSPX and the Vatican took place under Francis with Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who was serving as the Prefect of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF). Talks collapsed in June 2017 when Müller imposed requirements that the Society said were impossible to accept.
Pagliarani met with current DDF head, Tucho “Kissy” Fernandez, on February 12 to discuss the “minimum requirements for full communion with the Catholic Church.” In a letter published less than a week later, Pagliarani — who has repeatedly sought an audience with Leo — told Fernandez, “we both know in advance that we cannot agree doctrinally, particularly regarding the fundamental orientations adopted since the Second Vatican Council.”
Leo’s remarks do not bode well for those such as Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who has urged Leo to meet with the group and to give his “blessing” for the consecrations. They also suggest that he will issue an excommunication should the Society proceed without his imprimatur.
This story is developing…
Leo issues ultimatum to SSPX: Accept Vatican II or face excommunication - Integrity Magazine
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Leo XIV has indicated
yesterday that he is considering making a fresh public appeal to the Society of
Saint Pius X (SSPX) ahead of the group’s planned priestly ordinations on July
1, but has ruled out any suggestion of formal negotiations or meetings.
Speaking informally in
Castel Gandolfo on Tuesday, the Pope said he may once again urge the
traditionalist society to remain in full communion with the Catholic Church.
“I’m considering making
another appeal and saying, ‘Don’t do this, let’s try to live in communion with
the Church,’” Leo XIV said. “But it’s their choice. We must realize what it
means for them and for the Church.”
The Pope stressed that the
decision ultimately rests with the SSPX and suggested that the “Church” would
continue its course regardless of the society’s actions.
“Certainly, division among
Christians is a painful issue,” he said. “However, they refuse to accept some
fundamental elements of the Church, starting with several points from the
Second Vatican Council. If they make that decision, I’m sorry. But we must move
forward.”
His remarks indicate that
any intervention from the Vatican would likely be limited to a public appeal
rather than a formal dialogue with SSPX leaders. The society has reportedly
sought a papal audience on several occasions without success.
Leo XIV of course only
reiterated apostate Rome’s longstanding concerns regarding the SSPX,
particularly its rejection of aspects of the Second Vatican Council.
And this is exactly where I
would briefly like to stand still. I need to ask some questions about the
phrase “However, they refuse to accept some fundamental elements of the Church,
starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council. If they make that
decision, I’m sorry. But we must move forward.”
Please explain to us, Leo
XIV, exactly what “fundamental elements of the Church” and what “points from
the Second Vatican Council” do we need to agree with to be included in your
little false religion charade that you try to pass off as Catholicism?
Do we need to embrace the
sodomite agenda you and your colleagues so gaily and enthusiastically pushes on
us?
Do we need to betray Christ
by grovelling in front of “God’s Chosen People” or the “Religion of Peace”,
like you and the other traitors do?
Do we need to worship pagan
idols as you yourself apparently did way back in South America?
Or maybe we need to lie to
the youth and tell them all religions lead to God, like your heretical
predecessor did?
Maybe we must follow your
hierarchy’s example and worship Man and his “human dignity” and put Jesus
Christ and the unchangeable truths of the Catholic Faith aside?
Or should we become
card-carrying Communists?
Or do you want us to
imitate you and your wicked Cardinals and Bishops, by persecuting faithful
Catholics and forcing them to commit sacrilege against our Lord in the
Eucharist?
Or is it any of the other
blasphemous, sacrilegious, and apostate practices and believes that
characterizes the Synodal religion?
Please tell us, Pope from
Chicago, exactly how do we need to sell our souls in order to make it into your
little Hellfire Club known as the Synodal Church?
I can’t speak on behalf of
the SSPX, but I know I am speaking on behalf or many faithful Catholics like me
who want to say:
Thank you, but no thank
you. I am a Catholic and want no part of the abomination you are falsely
claiming is the Catholic Church.
Our Lady, Co-redemptrix, pray for us…
Our Lady, Mediatrix of all Graces,
pray for us…
Viva Christo Rey!
(2) Radical Fidelity | Substack
