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The leader of the Catholic world, Leo XIV, has sent Islam a heartwarming message for Ramadan. In it he makes no mention whatsoever of the God Who became Man and died to give us eternal life, Jesus Christ, Who is Head of the Church Leo pretends to govern.
Once upon a time the Catholic Church defended the entire Christian world from the godless, evil ideology of Islam. She sent priests out, to evangelise Muslims and convert them to the Kingship of Christ, who were murdered. Martyred. Now the Conciliar Church chums up to Islam, burbling that “Christians and Muslims can live together and be friends ... we are truly ‘all in the same boat.’”
One might wish, really, that Leo would literally get into the same boat as a bunch of Muslims and see what happens. He prompts us to blame 'structures' and 'the system' and to fight against them, instead of blaming ourselves for our sins and repenting of them as Christ commanded. So Catholics will keep getting homilies that anaesthetise, instead of being urged to carry the cross given to each and every one of us, to make us saints.
And part of that cross consists in loving our enemies; in doing good to those who persecute you,- like the Muslims who slaughter Christians and the false shepherds who hypnotise us with lavender, lace and honeyed words. Pray for them.
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| Pope Leo says: "Christians and Muslims can live together and be friends." |
The Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue opens its 2026 Ramadan message with a warm, familiar tone: “Dear Muslim brothers and sisters,” “great joy,” “closeness, solidarity and respect.”
Then, almost immediately, it supplies the theological engine driving the entire modern project: the line from Nostra Aetate about believers in a God “who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty… who has also spoken to humanity.”
The message should present Islam as an object of evangelization, a mission field, and a people to be won to the Kingship of Christ. Instead it presents Muslims as fellow “believers in God” whose fasting is placed beside Lent as if the two seasons are parallel lanes on the same highway.
“This year,” the message says, “Christians observe this period of fasting and devotion alongside you during the holy season of Lent.” The centerpiece is the shared experience of “trial,” “fragility,” “discernment,” and the temptation toward “despair or violence.” And by the end, the Vatican is quoting Fratelli Tutti and announcing, without embarrassment, that “we are truly ‘all in the same boat.’”
You could search for the Cross there, and you would find it mainly as an inspirational symbol. The message should confront false worship and insist on conversion. Instead it offers “dialogue,” and the now-standard slogan from Leo XIV’s World Day of Peace message: “disarmament of heart, mind and life.”
A Church that once sent missionaries now sends greeting cards.
The Ash Wednesday shift: from repentance to “structures”
Now place that Ramadan message beside Leo XIV’s Ash Wednesday homily at Santa Sabina.
The honily begins well enough. Joel’s command to “gather the people” becomes a summons out of isolation. Lent is framed as a communal return to God. There is even a line that sounds like it could have come from an older Catholic world: a people is formed that “recognizes its sins,” and we must “courageously accept responsibility.”
Then the sermon slides into the now-inevitable framework: “Naturally, sin is personal,” Leo says, “but it takes shape… often within real economic, cultural, political and even religious ‘structures of sin.’”
From a Catholic standpoint, sin is a moral act of a rational creature. It belongs to persons, because moral guilt belongs to persons. A corporation does not undergo the particular judgment. “Structures” do not confess, do penance, or receive absolution. They do not have souls. Structures have paper, procedures, slogans, money, and power. Those things can amplify sin, reward sin, normalize sin, and punish virtue. They can become machines that train people to do evil. But the sin still lives in human acts and choices.
The “structures” language is often used as if it relocates guilt into the atmosphere, into a fog bank hovering above the city. It can be preached as an excuse: you are a victim of the system, so your primary moral task is to fight the system. Repentance then becomes political engagement.
On Ash Wednesday, of all days, that change is spiritually poisonous.
The sermon keeps signaling “community,” “public” conversion, “missionary significance,” restless “people of good will.” It praises young people for seeking “accountability for wrongdoings in the Church and in the world.” It then widens the focus from the soul to the planet.
Paul VI is invoked, and Leo turns the ashes into a symbol of global collapse: “a world that is ablaze,” “cities destroyed by war,” “the ashes of international law,” “the ashes of entire ecosystems,” “the ashes of critical thinking,” “ancient local wisdom.”
Yes, these are real tragedies. Yes, war and injustice are evils. But listen to what happens when Lent is narrated this way. The interior drama of the Christian life gets crowded out. The urgent question becomes less “Have I offended God?” and more “How do we rebuild the world?”
The old discipline begins with dust on the forehead and ends with a crucifix, a confessional, and a change of life. The new discipline begins with dust on the forehead and ends with a program.
You can feel the hand of the Vatican II era here: the Church’s speech increasingly resembles the language of global governance, international NGOs, and the modern moral imagination. The homily’s “world that is in flames” may stir emotions. Yet the danger is obvious. If sin is explained primarily as something embedded in “economic, cultural, political… structures,” then the cure will be described primarily in economic, cultural, and political terms.
The cross becomes a backdrop for a campaign.
The Vatican II catechesis: the Church as “sacrament of the unity of the human race”
On the same day, Leo’s General Audience doubles down with a catechesis explicitly dedicated to Vatican II documents, beginning with Lumen Gentium.
This is where the doctrinal stakes surface. Leo describes the Church as “mystery,” then quickly moves to the Council’s favored vocabulary: the Church “like a sacrament,” a “sign and instrument… of the unity of the whole human race.” Differences are “relativized,” what counts is “being together,” the Church is an “effective sign of unity and reconciliation among peoples,” and the horizon widens beyond mankind to “the cosmos.”
This is classic postconciliar ecclesiology: less precision about the Church’s visible boundaries, more emphasis on the Church as an event, an assembly, or a process of gathering. The Church is primarily defined by a universal unifying mission in history rather than by her identity as the one true Church founded by Christ, with a determinate faith, determinate sacraments, and determinate authority.
If you define the Church as the “sacrament of the unity of the whole human race,” you will inevitably preach the Gospel as a unity project and address Ramadan as a parallel “shared journey.” You will speak endlessly of “dialogue,” “reconciliation,” and “disarmament.”
The Catholic faith is not a human unity program. The unity Christ wills is unity in truth, faith, and in submission to divinely instituted authority. When unity is treated as the primary goal, conversion becomes “proselytism,” and evangelization becomes “encounter.”
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| Italian diocese urges Catholics to join Muslims for meals and prayers |
Ostia Lido:
Gaudium et spes as the new homiletic instinct
Three days earlier, at the parish of “Mary Queen of Peace” in Ostia Lido, Leo’s homily on the “new law” of Christ again pivots into Vatican II as the interpretive key. He quotes the opening line of Gaudium et Spes and calls it “one of the most beautiful expressions” of the Council, where we can “almost [hear] the beating of God’s heart through the heart of the Church.”
Then the sermon turns toward social diagnosis: violence among youth, substance abuse, criminal organizations, exploitation, “unjust interests,” education, harmony, “disarming of language,” investing “energy and resources.” The pastoral prescriptions are decent in the natural order. A mayor could give a similar speech. A school superintendent could sign it.
But this is exactly the point. The postconciliar instinct is to preach like a moral reformer of society rather than a herald of divine judgment and mercy.
Even when when Leo speaks of the heart’s coldness and murderous contempt, he quickly widens back out to social patterns. The sermon never settles into the sharp, terrifying medicine of the saints: death, judgment, hell, grace, confession, penance, the narrow way. Instead it becomes a gentle appeal to build better neighborhoods and overcome hostility with “meekness.”
It is the same word again, in different costumes. "Disarm." "Dialogue." "Unite."
The Church becomes a peace workshop.
The unifying thread: the Synodal Church as a permanent “season”
Put the pieces together and the pattern emerges.
A Ramadan message that frames Muslims and Catholics as co-pilgrims in shared fasting, united in a project of peace and justice, backed by Nostra Aetate and Fratelli Tutti.
An Ash Wednesday homily that relocates Lent’s urgency into a communal program to confront “structures of sin” and rebuild a “world that is ablaze,” with ashes symbolizing ecosystems, international law, and global collapse.
The liturgical seasons become primarily a platform for global moral messaging.
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