Subscribe to continue reading
Subscribe to get access to the rest of this post and other subscriber-only content.
Can You Build a Future on Borrowed Faith? Civilisational Exhaustion and the Moral Credit of Britain
Category: Nuntiatoria
The Apostolate’s magazine offers doctrinal instruction, theological reflections, and mission updates, preserving sacred tradition while addressing contemporary issues. Past editions feature catechetical articles, ecclesiastical commentary, historical insights, Apostolate news, and devotional resources, serving as a vital tool for clergy and laity alike.
From Heaven’s Yes to Rome’s Caution: Mary Between Doctrine and Diplomacy
By the Titular Archbishop of Selsey
From Co-Redemptrix to Mater Populi Fidelis: Pius XII and the New DDF Note
When Pope Pius XII wrote Mediator Dei in 1947, his purpose was to safeguard the integrity of Christian worship by reaffirming that all liturgical and devotional life flows from Christ the one Redeemer. Yet in that same encyclical, and later in Mystici Corporis and Ad Caeli Reginam, he articulated a luminous vision of Mary’s participation in redemption. She is the New Eve who offers her Son to the Father, uniting her maternal compassion to His sacrifice, and who continues to distribute the graces of that sacrifice to humanity. The Church therefore honoured her under the titles Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix Omnium Gratiarum — not as rivals to Christ, but as signs of her unique cooperation with Him in the order of grace.⁶
The new doctrinal note of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Mater Populi Fidelis (4 November 2025), revisits these titles with a markedly different emphasis. It affirms Mary’s singular role in salvation history but declares the titles Corredentrice and Mediatrice di tutte le grazie “inopportune,” lest they “obscure the unique mediation of Christ.”⁷ Instead, it invites the faithful to contemplate her primarily as Mother of the Faithful People — a maternal symbol of accompaniment rather than a formal participant in redemption.
Doctrinal Continuity and the Change of Accent
Pius XII taught:
Ipsa cum Filio suo patienti doluit, ac pro nobis se obtulit, ac pro salute humani generis sua materna iura ac maternum amorem immolavit. — Mystici Corporis Christi, §106
“She suffered with her Son, offering Him for us and immolating her maternal rights and love for the salvation of mankind.”¹
In this conception, Mary’s cooperation is real, causal, and meritorious by divine association: she cooperates in the act of redemption, though wholly dependent on the Redeemer. Likewise, Mediator Dei insists that “Christ is the one and only Mediator between God and men,” yet acknowledges that “Mary’s mediation shares in His and draws all its efficacy from it.”²
By contrast, Mater Populi Fidelis states:
L’uso del titolo di Corredentrice è teologicamente improprio, poiché rischia di oscurare la singolare mediazione del Redentore.
“The use of the title Co-Redemptrix is theologically inappropriate, as it risks obscuring the unique mediation of the Redeemer.”³
The Note does not deny Mary’s cooperation but recasts it as discipleship and maternal empathy — a “participation of faith and love” rather than of redemptive causality. Its emphasis is relational, not metaphysical; experiential, not ontological.
From Participation to Accompaniment: A Disincarnate Shift
Here the issue runs deeper than terminology. The Incarnation itself is the divine charter of participation: Deus homo factus est ut homo fieret Deus — God became man that man might become God.⁸ By assuming our nature, the Son did not merely draw near to humanity; He redeemed through humanity. Every act of grace therefore presupposes human cooperation elevated by grace — not human passivity.
Mary’s role in the Incarnation reveals this mystery in its fullness. By freely giving her consent for God’s Son to take flesh in her womb, she became the living bridge between heaven and earth. Through her “yes,” the Word truly became man, and by sharing in His suffering and love, the human nature He took from her became the very instrument of our salvation.⁹ God chose not to save us apart from humanity, but through it — and Mary’s cooperation shows how human freedom, united with divine grace, becomes the means by which redemption enters the world.
Mary’s fiat and her suffering at Calvary embody this incarnational realism. Through her consent, the humanity the Word assumed is offered back to the Father. Pius XII’s vocabulary of Co-Redemptrix safeguarded that truth: God’s redemptive will operates through a human will perfectly conformed to His own.
Mater Populi Fidelis, by reducing cooperation to empathy, risks turning that mystery inside out. If Mary’s role is merely affective, then the human instrumentality of redemption is blurred. Grace becomes a gesture of divine proximity rather than a transformation of human nature. In place of metaphysical participation stands psychological association — Mary as companion, not co-operator. This subtle disincarnation endangers not only Mariology but Christology itself, for the whole meaning of the Incarnation is that the divine and human truly act together in one salvific economy.
St Leo the Great expressed the principle: Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est.⁴ “Each nature performs what is proper to it, in communion with the other.” The Incarnation therefore enshrines cooperation as the structure of salvation itself. To diminish Mary’s participation is to obscure how God’s work continues through His creatures — and how the Church herself is the prolongation of the Word made flesh.
Tradition and the Risk of Reduction
The Note rightly warns against confusion or exaggeration, yet it risks overcorrection. The faithful have long understood that Co-Redemptrix implies dependence, not equality — the cooperation of the New Eve with the New Adam. To silence that language is to weaken the incarnational principle: that divine grace truly employs human freedom as its instrument. The faithful cease to see that their sufferings and prayers can be united to Christ’s redemptive act; the Marian model becomes sentiment rather than sacrament.
The Church’s lex orandi has always proclaimed otherwise: Stabat Mater dolorosa, iuxta crucem lacrimosa, dum pendebat Filius. Devotion to Mary as Co-Redemptrix does not rival the Cross — it magnifies its fruit in the human heart.
Mary Between Doctrine and Diplomacy
The title Mater Populi Fidelis is pastorally tender but diplomatically safe. It mirrors the modern preference for inclusive imagery over metaphysical definition. Yet the Church cannot live by diplomacy alone. Doctrinal language is not a barrier to charity but its guardian. As Pius XII reminded the faithful, “The truths of faith are not obstacles to unity but its foundation.”⁵
To obscure Mary’s co-redemptive office is, indirectly, to weaken the Church’s understanding of her own share in Christ’s saving work. For as the Fathers taught, quod Maria cooperata est in carne, Ecclesia cooperatur in Spiritu — what Mary accomplished in the flesh, the Church continues in the Spirit.¹² The Dicastery’s caution is understandable; its pastoral intent is genuine. Yet beneath every pastoral formula lies a doctrinal reality. The Mother of the Faithful People remains, in the deeper order of grace, the Co-Redemptrix of mankind — not because she redeems with Christ as equal, but because she uniquely, surrendering her body and will – cooperated and allowed His redemption to materialise and be affected through her.
¹ Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, §106 (29 June 1943).
² Pius XII, Mediator Dei, §84 (20 November 1947).
³ Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Mater Populi Fidelis (4 Nov 2025), §15 (Ital.).
⁴ Leo I, Sermo 28 De Nativitate Domini, §3.
⁵ Pius XII, Address to the Ecumenical Congress of Assisi (1955).
⁶ Pius XII, Ad Caeli Reginam, §§34–39 (11 October 1954).
⁷ Vatican Press Office, “Nota Dottrinale Mater Populi Fidelis,” (4 November 2025), press.vatican.va.
⁸ Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, §54.
⁹ Luke 1:38; cf. Lumen Gentium, §§56–57.
¹⁰ Pius XII, Allocution to the Marian Congress of Buenos Aires (1954).
¹¹ Sequence Stabat Mater, Missale Romanum (1570).
¹² Augustine, Sermo 25 de Sanctis, PL 46, 937.
The Forgotten Confessor: Bishop Jia Zhiguo and the Silence of Rome over China’s Underground Church
Fidelitas in Tenebris — Faithfulness in the Darkness
When a confessor of the Faith departs this life, the Church traditionally lifts her voice in gratitude. The names of those who suffered for Christ were once read aloud in the sacred liturgy, placed in the diptychs of memory, and inscribed in stone. But now, as Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo of Zhengding is laid to rest, the silence of Rome falls heavier than any bell.
This man, who bore imprisonment, torture, and solitude for loyalty to the See of Peter, died on 29 October 2025 at the age of ninety-one. Yet the Vatican has offered no tribute, no acknowledgment, not even a prayer of public record. The world barely noticed, but Heaven has already received a saintly soul. The question remains: why does the Church on earth act as if such faithfulness were an embarrassment?
The confessor of Zhengding
Bishop Jia was born in 1934 in Hebei, a region where Catholic faith has endured wave upon wave of persecution. From his youth he learned that the Cross was not an ornament but a destiny. He entered seminary amid the tightening coils of Maoist repression, and in 1963 he was arrested for refusing to break communion with Rome. Fifteen years he spent in prison, enduring brutal interrogations and isolation. His cell was once deliberately flooded, leaving him crippled with pain — yet he would not deny the Pope.¹
Released in 1978, he was ordained a priest two years later, and clandestinely consecrated a bishop in 1981 by the heroic Bishop Joseph Fan Xueyan of Baoding — who would himself die under house arrest.² For more than four decades, Bishop Jia shepherded the faithful of Zhengding without recognition, without protection, and often without even freedom of movement. His people, numbering more than a million and a half, looked to him as a father who shared their chains.³
He founded an orphanage for abandoned children — one of many quiet works of mercy performed by underground clergy. When the authorities demolished it in 2020 for lacking state approval, he answered with prayer, not protest. He knew that persecution, borne with patience, preaches more eloquently than speeches. His flock loved him for that serenity. When he was last arrested in 2020, on the eve of the Assumption, they gathered to pray the Rosary in secret, confident that their shepherd would again emerge unbroken.
The underground Church
To understand his witness, one must grasp the nature of the underground Church in China. These are Catholics who refused to join the state-controlled Patriotic Association, which since 1957 has claimed to be the “Chinese Catholic Church” independent of Rome. They are loyal to the Successor of Peter and to the universal Magisterium, yet their loyalty costs them their liberty. They celebrate the sacraments in hidden chapels, move from house to house to avoid surveillance, and raise their children knowing that Baptism might one day demand blood.
Pius XII foresaw their plight. In Ad Sinarum Gentem (1954) he warned that “no one can serve two masters: Christ and the state cannot both claim the allegiance of the same heart.”⁴ He urged Chinese Catholics to resist all attempts to build a national church apart from Rome, promising them that fidelity would one day be vindicated. That vindication has yet to come.
When the Holy See entered its secret “provisional agreement” with Beijing in 2018, many hoped it would secure the recognition of faithful bishops and end the long agony of division. Instead, the opposite occurred. The government continued to appoint bishops without papal approval, the faithful underground continued to suffer harassment, and Rome, bound by its own diplomacy, uttered few protests.⁵
The diplomacy of silence
Why has the Vatican not spoken of Bishop Jia? The answer, we are told, lies in diplomacy. Rome, anxious to maintain its fragile accord with the Chinese state, avoids words that might offend. But this policy of silence betrays a profound theological amnesia. The Church is not a political actor negotiating coexistence between powers; she is the mystical Body of Christ, called to bear witness to truth even when inconvenient.
Paul VI, in Evangelii Nuntiandi, declared that “there is no true evangelization if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the kingdom, and the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth are not proclaimed.”⁶ By the same measure, there is no true diplomacy that obscures the martyrs’ confession. When bishops and priests are imprisoned for fidelity to the Pope, the successor of Peter cannot remain mute without obscuring his own office.
Silence toward tyrants becomes complicity. Pius XII spoke plainly during earlier persecutions: “The Church has no desire to dominate, but neither will she be silent when the rights of conscience are violated.”⁷ To honour Bishop Jia publicly would be to declare that conscience still matters. To ignore him is to suggest that communion is negotiable.
A Church divided within herself
There is a deeper tragedy in this silence. The very allegiance for which the underground bishops suffered has become the pretext for their abandonment. They resisted the regime because they would not renounce Rome. Now Rome, in its pursuit of compromise, turns its gaze elsewhere. They are too Roman for Beijing and too Chinese for the Curia — witnesses without patrons.
Many of them live under house arrest or in hiding. Priests who refuse to register with the Patriotic Association are stripped of their churches, fined, or imprisoned. Yet they continue to celebrate the Mass in secret, reciting the Canon that unites them to Peter. They pray for the Pope even when he forgets them. Their fidelity has outlasted every persecution, but it has not been met with gratitude.
When Rome speaks of “inculturation” or “synodality,” it often forgets that true communion is forged in suffering, not in bureaucratic consensus. The underground Church of China is not a relic of the Cold War but a living reminder that faith has enemies, both open and subtle. They do not seek political privilege — only to be recognised as Catholic.
Faith stronger than the State
The authorities may imprison bishops, but they cannot imprison the faith. Tertullian, addressing the pagan Empire, wrote: “The more you mow us down, the more we grow; the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.”⁸ In China that paradox remains visible. Every raid on a house-church drives the faithful deeper into conviction; every arrest exposes the fragility of an atheistic state that fears prayer more than protest.
Bishop Jia’s diocese of Zhengding stands as a symbol of that indestructible faith. Decades of harassment have not destroyed it. Young men still discern priestly vocations; families still catechise their children by candlelight; the Eucharist is still adored in makeshift tabernacles hidden from state eyes. This endurance refutes the illusion that faith can be negotiated.
The shadow of modern indifference
Yet persecution alone cannot wound the Church as deeply as indifference can. In former centuries, martyrs faced the fury of pagan emperors; now confessors face the apathy of their own brethren. Western Catholics, preoccupied with ideological fashions and ecclesial politics, scarcely glance toward Asia. The suffering Church is no longer fashionable.
In the halls of the Vatican, words like “dialogue” and “mutual understanding” are spoken with reverence. But dialogue without truth becomes the language of surrender. To negotiate with a regime that imprisons bishops while silencing those who defend them is to trade the Cross for comfort. It was not for such an accommodation that Bishop Jia endured his chains.
When he was ordained, he promised to “preach the Gospel in season and out of season.”⁹ That promise included the risk of death. His fidelity reveals how far much of the modern Church has drifted from the radicalism of its own vows. The Cross is no longer preached as the price of discipleship but as a metaphor for difficulty.
The forgotten testimony
The faithful of Zhengding issued a statement upon his death: “Your heart as a pastor never changed. Even when arrested and imprisoned, you continued to care for the flock, preserving the flame of hope in the darkest nights.”¹⁰ That simple tribute contains more theology than a dozen curial statements. It recalls the image of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep — not the hireling who flees when the wolves approach.
In ancient Rome, confessors who survived persecution were revered almost as martyrs. Their names were commemorated, their tombs visited. Bishop Jia belongs to that lineage of confessors: not slain, yet wholly consumed in the offering of fidelity. To forget him is to forget what the priesthood means.
The underground Church of China is not an embarrassment but a mirror. In its humility we see what the Church universal has lost — courage, clarity, and the readiness to suffer for truth. Its priests know that every Mass might be their last. Its faithful understand that the price of Communion may be a prison cell. That is what it means to believe in the Incarnate Word when words are forbidden.
Lament for a silent Rome
It would have been a simple act — a telegram, a brief note, a prayer from the window of the Apostolic Palace. Instead, the Vatican remained still. Perhaps officials feared that even the name of Bishop Jia would irritate Beijing. But what does it profit a Church to gain the favour of princes and lose her confessors?
Saint Ambrose once said, “The Church’s glory is the suffering of her bishops.”¹¹ By that measure, China’s underground Church is glorious indeed. But that glory shames the worldly prudence that now governs Rome. In neglecting her confessors, the Church risks exchanging her birthright for a bowl of political lentils.
The lament is not only for Bishop Jia but for what his silence reveals: a Church hesitant to speak when truth costs. The Lord promised that the gates of hell would not prevail, but He did not promise that cowardice would not wound. Fidelity remains, shining in the darkness — but from Rome, only silence.
¹ Cardinal Kung Foundation, Biographical Note on Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo (2025).
² AsiaNews, “Bishop Joseph Fan Xueyan and the Bishops of the Underground Church,” 2011.
³ UCANews, “Bishop Jia of Zhengding dies at 91,” 30 Oct 2025.
⁴ Pius XII, Ad Sinarum Gentem, n. 17 (7 Oct 1954).
⁵ Holy See Press Office, “Provisional Agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China on the Appointment of Bishops,” 22 Sep 2018; see also Cardinal Joseph Zen, For Love of My People I Will Not Remain Silent (Ignatius Press, 2019).
⁶ Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, n. 22 (8 Dec 1975).
⁷ Pius XII, Allocution to the Sacred College, 24 Dec 1949.
⁸ Tertullian, Apologeticum, c. 50.
⁹ 2 Timothy 4:2.
¹⁰ Statement of the Catholic community of Zhengding, quoted in AsiaNews, 30 Oct 2025.
¹¹ St Ambrose, Epistula extra collectionem 11, PL 16: 1154.
From Revelation to Conversation: The New Ecclesiology of Leo XIV
By the Titular Archbishop of Selsey
When the Church trades doctrine for dialogue,
she risks mistaking noise for the Holy Ghost.
During his Jubilee of Hope, Pope Leo XIV has sought to cast a universal vision of renewal: a Church of accompaniment, dialogue, and missionary openness. Yet what should have been an anthem of divine certainty has become an ode to uncertainty. The tone of his address to the Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies was not apostolic but anthropological—not the voice of Peter confirming his brethren but that of a moderator convening a forum.
Rome once sent missionaries to convert the nations; now it sends facilitators to listen to them. Once the Church proclaimed that she alone possessed the fullness of revelation, today she hesitates even to say that truth can be known. Under Leo XIV, the “Church of listening” risks becoming a Church of forgetting—forgetting her own authority, her divine commission, and her supernatural identity.
This is the paradox of the modern pontificate. While the Vatican adorns itself with banners proclaiming “Hope,” it offers a hope emptied of content—a hope whose object is no longer salvation through truth but coexistence through conversation. The Apostle’s command, “Preach the word, be instant in season and out of season,” has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s dictum: “Let us listen together.”
The present crisis is not one of governance alone but of essence. What kind of Church believes it must seek the truth when her Founder declared, “I am the Truth”? The danger is no longer external persecution but internal dissolution—the slow surrender of doctrine to dialogue.
A New Gospel of Synodality
On 24 October 2025, Pope Leo XIV stood before more than two thousand delegates in the Paul VI Hall and announced that the Church “is not looking for a uniform model.” He explained that “synodality will not come with a template where everybody and every country will say, ‘This is how you do it.’ It is rather a conversion to a spirit of being Church, of being missionary, and of building up the family of God.”² Later that evening, within St Peter’s itself, he made his most startling declaration: “No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together.”³
Those who applauded heard humility; those who wept heard apostasy. For if the Church no longer claims to possess the truth, she ceases to be its guardian. Leo’s words dissolve the very distinction that defines Catholic identity—the difference between the Church that teaches and the world that must be taught. “No one possesses the whole truth” may sound pastoral, but it negates the promise of Christ that His Spirit would lead the Church “into all truth.”⁴
A Church that must seek truth alongside the world has ceased to be the world’s light. She no longer teaches but consults, no longer judges but surveys, no longer baptises the nations but immerses herself in their confusion. Her new commandment seems to be: “Go into all the world and hold dialogue with every creature.”
From Revelation to Conversation
According to the Synod Office, the purpose of this Jubilee was to “translate the orientations of the Synod’s Final Document into pastoral and structural choices consistent with the synodal nature of the Church.”⁵ Leo described synodality as “a way of being Church… not a campaign but an attitude, beginning with learning to listen.”⁶ He urged patience with those “not yet capable to understand,” encouraged “formation at every educational level,” and praised the “growth of regional groupings of churches as expressions of communion.”⁷
Even the question of women’s participation was reframed not in terms of revealed order but cultural adaptation, as the Pope spoke of promoting “a culture of co-participation” in societies where women “are considered second-class citizens.”⁸ In every line the theological foundation gives way to sociological language. The Church’s identity, once defined by her relation to God, is now described by her relation to culture.
This is the new ecclesiology: revelation replaced by process, doctrine by discernment, faith by feedback. The Church no longer speaks from authority but seeks validation from experience. Her image shifts from the Bride of Christ to a human family endlessly negotiating its terms of cohabitation.
The Warning Voices
Among the hierarchy, the most urgent warnings come from those who remember that the Church’s authority descends from heaven, not consensus. Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong, writing with the clarity of a confessor, warned that “two opposing visions” now compete within the Church: one hierarchical and apostolic, founded by Christ upon the apostles and their successors; the other democratic and undefined, a “people’s Church” inventing its own mission. “If the latter prevails,” he cautioned, “even the doctrine of faith and the discipline of moral life may change.”⁹
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who once headed the very congregation charged with guarding doctrine, went further, describing the synodal process as “a hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ,” designed to prepare Catholics to accept false teaching under the guise of reform.¹⁰ Theologian Larry Chapp, though less severe, noted that a truly synodal Church “would require the rediscovery of the Cross as the only guarantee of unity”—a rediscovery conspicuously absent from synodal language.¹¹
These voices are not reactionary; they are prophetic. They remind the faithful that communion without truth is not unity but illusion. A Church that listens without teaching soon forgets what she was sent to proclaim.
The Voice of Tradition
The perennial magisterium has already spoken against these illusions. In 1906, Pope St Pius X taught in Vehementer Nos that “the Church is essentially an unequal society, comprising two orders of persons, the Pastors and the flock. The duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.”¹² This was not arrogance but humility: the obedience of faith before divine order. The Church’s hierarchy is not a human invention but a reflection of heaven’s own structure, where authority serves truth and truth sanctifies authority.
Leo XIV’s language inverts that divine hierarchy. His “participatory Church” imagines authority that rises from below rather than descending from above. Bishops become moderators, priests become facilitators, and the Pope becomes the chairman of an ecclesial roundtable. The magisterium ceases to be a voice and becomes an echo. The Church that once converted the world now asks the world to help her discern what she believes.
A Crisis of Definition
In former ages the Church resolved tension by defining doctrine. The Councils of Nicaea, Trent, and Vatican I all brought peace through clarity. Today’s Church prolongs tension as a sign of vitality, mistaking unresolved contradiction for the breath of the Spirit. The Church Life Journal at Notre Dame noted the danger: “Critics of the synodal project fear that doctrinal decision-making may become obscure and unaccountable, blurring distinctions between ordained and lay authority.”¹³
It is precisely such obscurity that corrodes faith. If synodality is merely a “way of being,” then truth becomes elastic and unity accidental. Catholic Culture observed that the organisers of the Synod “could not answer basic questions—what exactly will change, or must change—betraying the danger of a Church walking without knowing the way.”¹⁴ The image is apt: a pilgrim people wandering in circles, congratulating themselves on their sense of motion.
Modernism Revisited
The ghosts of Modernism have returned, speaking the language of synodality. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis the idea that truth evolves through human experience, calling it “the synthesis of all heresies.” Leo XIV’s claim that “no one possesses the whole truth” is that same heresy with a smile. It cloaks skepticism in the garments of humility.
Even Commonweal, sympathetic to synodal ideals, admitted that critics of the process are “not entirely wrong to fear that, if the magisterium ceases to claim possession of truth, Catholic identity itself is imperilled.”¹⁵ When even the progressive press recognises that the Church risks forgetting who she is, the warning has become universal.
The Lay Reaction
Among the faithful, reaction has been both articulate and anguished. Many sense instinctively that something essential is being lost. American journalist and traditional Catholic commentator Chris Jackson, writing in Hiraeth in Exile, described the Jubilee liturgy as “a Church that no longer teaches but takes minutes,” a powerful metaphor for the paralysis of authority.¹⁸
At Catholic Vote, Joshua Mercer warned that “synodality, if detached from revelation, becomes a process of perpetual self-reference, a Church listening to herself rather than to God.”¹⁹ Meanwhile, Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture observed that “a Church that listens to everyone will soon obey the loudest,” while Eric Sammons of Crisis Magazine remarked that “the rhetoric of dialogue too easily replaces the duty to proclaim.”²⁰
These lay critics do not speak from bitterness but from love of the faith handed down to them. They long for shepherds who will lead, not facilitators who will facilitate. Their collective anxiety stems from fidelity, not rebellion. They fear that, as one English layman put it after reading the papal text, “the shepherds have traded the crozier for the microphone.”
The Church That Listens to Herself
Synodality has made the Church introspective. Having ceased to listen to the Word of God, she listens now to her own echo. The act of listening—once the path to obedience—has become a substitute for belief. Certainty is portrayed as pride, while doubt is called humility. Dogma is dismissed as rigidity; confusion is rebranded as compassion. Under this logic, the shepherd who refuses to speak is praised as pastoral.
Cardinal Müller’s warning resounds: “Pastoral relativism leads to theological collapse.”¹⁶ When truth becomes pastoral preference, the Church’s moral authority disintegrates. The salt loses its savour. What began as the “walking together” of synodality risks becoming a march into the wilderness, where every voice is equal and none is divine.
A Call to Clarity
If Leo XIV’s words are to bear fruit, it will be only by forcing a return to fundamentals. The Church is not an experiment in religious coexistence but the divine institution of salvation. She does not assemble truth by consensus but receives it by revelation. She does not evolve through dialogue but is purified through conversion.
Pius XI declared in Mortalium Animos that “the unity of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ.”¹⁷ That unity presupposes truth possessed, not sought. The Church that seeks truth as though she did not have it has already lost her faith in the promises of Christ.
Conclusion: Beyond the Babel
We stand again at Babel’s threshold, where the multiplication of voices masquerades as vitality. A synodal Church, ever talking and never teaching, risks becoming a Church “ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The true reform the Church requires is not methodological but moral: repentance, not process; sanctity, not strategy; conversion, not conversation.
If Pope Leo XIV would truly renew the Church, let him begin where all true renewal begins—on his knees before the crucifix. Let him set aside the microphones of dialogue and take up the keys of Peter. The world does not need another symposium; it needs salvation. The faithful do not hunger for a new model of synodality; they hunger for the living Bread of doctrine, the unchanging truth that sanctifies and saves.
Only when the Church rediscovers her voice as the Bride of Christ will the confusion end. Only when she proclaims again that she possesses the truth, because she belongs to Him who is the Truth, will the world once more hear the Word of God in her preaching. The Church must again be the pillar and ground of truth—or she will be buried beneath the ruins of her own synodal Babel.
¹ 1 Timothy 3:15
² CNA, Pope Leo XIV: There’s No Template for Synodality Across All Countries (25 Oct 2025)
³ Vatican News, Jubilee of Synodal Teams: Pope Calls for Humble Search for Truth (24 Oct 2025)
⁴ John 16:13
⁵ Synod Office communiqué, 25 Oct 2025
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ ACI Africa, Pope Leo XIV on Women and Synodality (25 Oct 2025)
⁹ Cardinal Joseph Zen, How Will the Synod Continue and End? (2024)
¹⁰ Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, interview in Die Tagespost (Oct 2022)
¹¹ Larry Chapp, The Pillar (Oct 2025)
¹² Pope St Pius X, Vehementer Nos (1906)
¹³ Church Life Journal, “Should We Be Skeptical About Synodality?” (Mar 2023)
¹⁴ Catholic Culture, “The Dangerous Spirit of Synodality” (Nov 2024)
¹⁵ Commonweal, “Synodality and Catholic Amnesia” (Apr 2024)
¹⁶ Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, interview with Catholic World Report (2023)
¹⁷ Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos (1928)
¹⁸ Chris Jackson, Hiraeth in Exile, “The Synodal Séance” (28 Oct 2025)
¹⁹ Joshua Mercer, Catholic Vote editorial on synodality (Nov 2024)
²⁰ Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture commentary (Nov 2024); Eric Sammons, Crisis Magazine analysis (Feb 2025)
Reflection: “On the Fickleness of Authority and the Fidelity of Tradition”
By the Titular Archbishop of Selsey
It is a curious thing, that the Church which once converted the world now seems intent on converting herself—away from what she once proclaimed, away from what she once adored. The recent episode in Cleveland, where the Holy See graciously “permits” two parishes to continue the traditional Latin Mass for two more years, is but the latest act in a long and weary play.
The faithful who have endured fifty years of exile—praying in borrowed chapels, basements, barns, and makeshift sanctuaries—are once again treated as troublesome guests at their own family table. They are fed with permissions, not sacraments; appeased with temporary “indults,” not fatherly assurances. When the shepherd’s staff becomes a bureaucratic pen, mercy turns to management, and the faithful are made to feel as tenants in their Father’s house.
The Fickleness of Policy and the Constancy of Faith
Since Traditionis Custodes, the Church has witnessed a remarkable inversion of pastoral principle. Where once shepherds strove to preserve unity in diversity, we now find diversity enforced in the name of a counterfeit unity. What is presented as “walking together” has too often become walking in circles—bishops issuing contradictory decrees, permissions granted then rescinded, tolerance followed by reprisal.
The faithful who love the ancient Mass are told one day that they are “custodians of division,” and the next that their devotion is a “gift to the Church.” They are praised for their reverence, then punished for their fidelity. It is a cycle of baiting and gaslighting—confusing, exhausting, and profoundly uncharitable. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and yet the very walls of tradition are being deliberately shaken by those who claim to protect it.
The Nature of True Obedience
Obedience in the Catholic sense has never meant servile compliance with novelty. It means docility to the truth, to the perennial faith once delivered to the saints. It was not obedience to error that sanctified Athanasius or preserved the Church in the Arian crisis, but obedience to God over men. So too today, the faithful who cling to the Mass of Ages do so not from rebellion but from fidelity—to Christ, to His Sacrifice, and to the unbroken voice of the Church through the centuries.
We obey the living Magisterium insofar as it is in harmony with the Deposit of Faith. When it departs from that harmony—when it demands acceptance of ambiguity as doctrine or novelty as norm—then silence and steadfastness become the truest form of obedience. To “recognise and resist” is not to abandon Peter, but to uphold the faith he was commanded to guard.
Why We Keep Our Distance
For this reason, the Old Roman Apostolate and the Priestly Society of St Pius X maintain a cautious distance from those structures which have allowed the faith and liturgy to be compromised. This is not separation born of pride, but of prudence. We cannot build upon shifting sand, nor pledge fidelity to documents that redefine truth by the fashions of the age.
The Tradition cannot be negotiated, parceled out by diocesan committees, or measured by Roman indulgence. It belongs not to any particular pontificate, but to the Mystical Body itself. The Mass of our forefathers is not an “extraordinary form”; it is the ordinary voice of the Church’s prayer across the centuries. To preserve it is not an act of nostalgia but an act of conscience.
The Light Beyond the Eclipse
What, then, are we to make of these alternating gestures—approval and suppression, concession and chastisement? They are the tremors of an institution in confusion, uncertain whether to embrace its inheritance or erase it. Yet the eclipse of truth is never its extinction.
There will come a time, perhaps sooner than many think, when the young priests who now whisper the Latin Mass in borrowed chapels will be the bishops of a new generation. Then, the Tradition will again be spoken aloud, not as an exception but as the norm. For the truth, once suppressed, has a way of breaking through the cracks of every false peace.
Until then, let us remain faithful—not to policies, but to principles; not to shifting decrees, but to the unchanging Word of God. Let us continue the work of sanctifying souls through the liturgy that formed saints, sustained martyrs, and glorified God for a thousand years before the present confusion began.
The Church may forget Herself for a time, but the Bride of Christ cannot divorce her own Tradition. The shepherds may falter, but the sheep still know the voice of the Shepherd. And we who keep that voice alive—however faintly, however scorned—do so not in defiance of the Church, but in defence of her soul.
Background at Nuntiatoria
The Orphaned Altar: On the Crisis of Episcopal Fatherhood
By the Archbishop of Selsey
A Silent Crisis Beneath the Surface
There are moments in the Church’s history when the gravest crises are not those proclaimed in thunder from the pulpits or the decrees of Rome, but those suffered in silence by her sons. Such is the case today, when many priests—those who once came to the altar aflame with the love of God—now minister beneath the shadow of a wounded fatherhood. Their suffering is seldom spoken of; yet it gnaws at the heart of the Church. It is the hidden trial of a generation of priests orphaned not by heresy or persecution, but by the cold neglect of their spiritual fathers.
The crisis of fatherhood—so visible in society, where fathers have abdicated responsibility for their children—has entered the sanctuary. Bishops, once spiritual patriarchs who guided their clergy as sons, have become administrators, functionaries, and managers of decline. Their governance too often resembles the bureaucracy of a corporation rather than the heart of a father. The result is an orphaned presbyterate: weary, mistrustful, and fearful. What begins as administrative efficiency ends as spiritual sterility.
The Fatherhood that Gives Life
The priesthood, by its nature, is relational. Every priest must stand both in persona Christi and sub episcopo, in filial obedience to his bishop as to a father in Christ. The bishop’s ring signifies not only governance but spousal fidelity to the Church and paternal love for his priests. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “Where the bishop is, there is the Church”¹—yet he also meant that where the bishop is not father, the Church withers into institution.
In the golden age of the Fathers, bishops were shepherds whose charity bound together the presbyterate and flock in a single spirit. St. Gregory the Great described the bishop as “a watchman set upon the walls of Israel”², one who guards both the purity of doctrine and the souls of those under his care. The bishop’s first duty was not strategy but sanctity. He was to pour himself out for his priests, that they might pour themselves out for their people.
But today, that supernatural fatherhood is often eclipsed by managerial pragmatism. Meetings replace mentorship; compliance replaces counsel; fear replaces fraternity. Many priests now dread a summons to the chancery more than the final judgment. They no longer expect paternal concern, only procedural rebuke. In such a climate, holiness becomes private heroism rather than shared pursuit.
The Withering of Fraternal Communion
The health of the Church depends not on policies but on love. When bishops cease to love their priests, when priests no longer feel the warmth of fatherly affection, the supernatural life of the Church begins to bleed away. The priest, deprived of affirmation and guidance, turns inward. Some grow cautious, preaching only what offends no one. Others grow hardened, their zeal dulled by cynicism. Still others, desiring escape, fill their lives with distractions and comforts.
In earlier centuries, the bishop’s household was a school of holiness. Priests were formed by the example of their prelate’s prayer, fasting, and simplicity. But in many dioceses today, bishops live in splendid isolation, surrounded not by brothers but by lawyers, secretaries, and consultants. The house of prayer has become an office; the mitre, a badge of status. The faithful look on, bewildered, while the priests beneath such leadership struggle to remember why they first left all to follow Christ.
The Holy Curé of Ars laboured eighteen hours a day, hearing confessions and offering the Holy Sacrifice with tears. His sanctity rebuilt a nation scarred by revolution. Yet he would be dismissed in many modern dioceses as “too pious,” “too rigid,” or “insufficiently pastoral.” His zeal is out of fashion because the supernatural has been eclipsed by the sociological. Bishops speak of accompaniment but rarely of conversion; of mercy but seldom of repentance. They wish to smell like the sheep, yet too often smell only of politics.
Bureaucracy and the Eclipse of the Supernatural
One of the great deceptions of our time is to confuse activity with vitality. Endless consultations, synodal reports, and policy documents give the illusion of motion while the soul of the Church languishes. The very structures designed to support priests have become labyrinths of paperwork. The priest who once found solace in his bishop’s blessing now finds himself mired in compliance forms and risk assessments.
It is not administration that kills, but the substitution of administration for fatherhood. When the shepherd delegates the care of souls to committees, his priests are left to fend for themselves. “Feed my sheep,” said the Lord to Peter³—not “survey them,” nor “appoint a task force.” Yet many priests live as though their father has forgotten those words. The Church cannot be governed as a corporation without ceasing to be a family.
The Psychological and Spiritual Toll
Behind the statistics of declining vocations lies a deeper tragedy. Priests today are among the loneliest men in society. Studies show widespread distrust between clergy and bishops⁴; many confess to isolation, anxiety, and fear of reprisal. The priest who preaches the moral law risks complaint; the one who maintains reverence in the liturgy risks accusation of rigidity. In such conditions, virtue becomes suspect and mediocrity safe.
Some priests respond with stoic endurance; others withdraw into a safe professionalism that avoids controversy but also avoids conversion. A few, deprived of spiritual fatherhood, lose themselves to the very world they were ordained to sanctify. Thus the bishop’s failure to father becomes the devil’s victory twice over—first by silencing truth, then by corrupting its messenger.
A Mirror of the World’s Fatherlessness
The collapse of paternal identity among bishops mirrors the world’s wider loss of fatherhood. The same cultural forces that have made earthly fathers absent, fearful, or effeminate have also weakened spiritual fathers. Many bishops, trained in the post-conciliar decades of experimentation and ambiguity, have never known genuine paternal formation themselves. They were not taught to command with love, nor to love with authority. They are products of a therapeutic age that mistrusts both discipline and sacrifice.
And yet the Church can no more survive without fathers than a family can. When bishops cease to be fathers, priests become orphans, and the faithful—children of those priests—grow rootless. The contagion of fatherlessness spreads from chancery to rectory, from rectory to home, until the very idea of authority is despised. The devil, who hates the name “Father,” rejoices in such a hierarchy.
The Patristic Measure of True Shepherds
The Fathers of the Church would scarcely recognize many of today’s episcopal priorities. St. Cyprian taught that a bishop must be “united in heart with his priests, sharing their labours, their tears, and their dangers”⁵. St. John Chrysostom warned that the bishop who neglects his clergy commits a sin against the Body of Christ. St. Gregory Nazianzen resigned his see rather than become a mere functionary, declaring that “to lead others, one must first be purified oneself.”
This is the pattern of episcopal life the Church once held up as ideal: ascetical, paternal, prophetic. The bishop was not an administrator of budgets but a man of prayer, whose tears could baptize a diocese. When such men led, their priests followed willingly—even unto martyrdom. The vitality of the early Church sprang not from programs but from the living transmission of holiness.
The Roots of Renewal
The renewal of the priesthood will not begin in offices or conferences. It will begin when bishops again become fathers, and priests sons. True fatherhood does not flatter; it corrects, encourages, and forgives. It does not isolate; it draws near. It does not fear holiness in its sons; it rejoices in it. Bishops who imitate Christ the Good Shepherd will attract vocations even in desolate times, because love always begets life.
What can the faithful do in the meantime? First, pray and fast for priests and bishops. The Rosary is no longer optional in this war for souls. Offer reparation for the sins of shepherds, but also for their wounds. Many bishops act as they do because they have forgotten that they, too, were once priests trembling at the altar. Pray that they may recover the simplicity of their first Mass.
Second, give your priests the warmth of genuine friendship. Invite them into your homes. Encourage them when they preach the truth. Write to them when they are maligned. Many have never heard a layman say, “Father, your priesthood has changed my life.” Such words can rekindle hope more powerfully than any policy.
Finally, resist the temptation to despair. The priesthood belongs to Christ, not to bureaucrats. The same Lord who called Peter from his nets can still raise up saints from the ruins of clericalism. When the hierarchy forgets the Cross, God raises prophets from the laity. The Church’s renewal will come not from strategy but from sanctity.
The Model of the Crucified Father
Christ on the Cross is the image of every true bishop: arms outstretched, heart pierced, blood spent for his children. In Him, authority and love are one. The world can imitate compassion, but it cannot imitate Calvary. It is there that spiritual fatherhood finds its meaning—not in power, but in sacrifice. The bishop who forgets this becomes an official; the priest who forgets it becomes a hireling.
When bishops once again weep for their priests, and priests once again lay down their lives for their flocks, the Church will bloom even in the desert. Until then, we live in the long Lent of ecclesial fatherlessness. Yet even now, grace is not absent. Among the ruins, there are still fathers who love and sons who obey, still altars where the Lamb is offered in purity and faith. In that hidden fidelity, the Church endures.
A Call to Courage and Contrition
Every bishop should kneel before his priests and ask himself: “Do they see in me the face of Christ? Do they hear in my words the voice of a father?” If the answer is uncertain, repentance is the only path forward. The episcopal palace must again become a house of prayer. The miter must be exchanged for the towel of the servant. The shepherd must rediscover the smell not only of the sheep but of the Cross.
The world’s night grows darker, and the Church must shine the brighter. Our age does not need bishops who blend into the world’s noise, but men who bear within themselves the stillness of Gethsemane. Priests will find their courage again when they see courage on the cathedra; they will become holy when holiness is enthroned above them.
Conclusion: Hope Through Paternal Renewal
The renewal of the Church will not come from the top down, nor from the bottom up, but from heart to heart—from father to son. When bishops once more speak to their priests as fathers, when priests rediscover in their bishop the image of Christ, the channels of grace will open again. And from that grace will flow the courage to confront the world’s darkness with divine charity.
Let us therefore pray not for new strategies but for new hearts: hearts of fathers, hearts of sons, hearts conformed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who is both Priest and Victim, Shepherd and Lamb. Then the orphaned priests of our time will cease to wander, and the Church will once more be known not for her structures, but for her sanctity.
- St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8:1.
- St. Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis (Book II, ch. 4).
- John 21:17.
- The Catholic Project, Catholic University of America, Survey of American Catholic Priests (2022).
- St. Cyprian of Carthage, De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, 5.
A Primer for Catholic Parents: The Principles of Catholic Teaching on “Sex Education”
By the Archbishop of Selsey
The Parental Duty in Catholic Education
When Catholic parents entrust their children to schools established by the Church, they rightly expect that the instruction provided will be faithful to Catholic doctrine. This duty extends not only to the moral content of teaching but also to the subjects taught. The Church has always upheld a clear and comprehensive body of doctrine, transmitted from the apostles, against which mere human theories or social trends hold no weight. Yet in many Catholic schools today, especially in the West, civil authorities have pressured educational institutions to adopt programmes of so-called “sex education” that conflict with both divine and natural law.
The Primary Educators of the Child
It is indeed necessary that children, at an appropriate time, be instructed about the realities of human reproduction and the moral obligations that accompany these truths. However, the responsibility for this instruction belongs to parents alone. This duty is given directly by God and cannot be rightfully taken over by the state, by educators, or even by bishops. Parents may, for practical reasons, delegate certain aspects of education—such as mathematics or science—to others who possess the requisite expertise, but this delegation always proceeds from the authority of the parents and remains under their supervision.¹
The Limits of Delegation
The Church teaches that parents, strengthened by the grace of the sacrament of marriage, have the responsibility and privilege of evangelising their children and forming them in virtue.² Teachers, priests, and catechists share in this mission only insofar as parents freely authorise them to assist in what properly belongs to the family. Certain subjects—such as the training in personal virtue, purity, and moral discernment—cannot be delegated. The state may require that citizens be educated for civic duties, but its jurisdiction ends where the intimate and moral formation of the child begins.
The Superiority of the Family over the State
The Church firmly rejects any attempt by governments to replace or control parental authority. Leo XIII warns that when the state “sets aside the parent and sets up a State supervision,” it violates natural justice and destroys the structure of the home.³ The Catechism reminds us that the family is the primary school of solidarity and virtue, and that parents must protect their children from “compromising and degrading influences.”⁴ Indeed, Leo XIII affirms that the family is “a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State.”⁵
This principle is also recognised in civil law. The European Convention on Human Rights explicitly protects the rights of parents to educate their children in conformity with their religious and philosophical convictions (Article 2, Protocol 1) and recognises family life as a sphere of privacy and protection against state interference (Article 8). These provisions reflect what the Church has always taught—that the family possesses rights anterior to the State, grounded in natural law and divine order.
Moral and Practical Formation
Parents naturally instruct their children in language, manners, modesty, and virtue. To neglect these areas or to surrender them to institutions is to abdicate a sacred trust. Among these responsibilities lies the duty to educate children about human reproduction and sexuality—matters that require both moral maturity and personal sensitivity. No classroom teacher can judge with precision the appropriate time or method for every child, since these depend upon individual development, temperament, and grace.
Cautions on Implementation and Parental Vigilance
In recent years, Catholic-approved Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programmes—such as Life to the Full by Ten Ten Resources—have been widely adopted, reportedly by the majority of Catholic schools in England and Wales.⁶ While the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) and the Catholic Education Service (CES) state that RSE should promote chastity, dignity, and respect for life, traditional Catholic commentators have expressed serious concerns about the way such programmes are implemented.
Traditionalists, including the Society of Saint Pius X (UK District), warn that some RSE programmes risk undermining the parental role and present sexuality in an overly naturalistic or psychological manner, divorced from the supernatural virtue of chastity.⁷ They argue that materials sometimes prioritise “risk mitigation” or “self-esteem” over moral formation and fail to acknowledge humanity’s wounded nature and need for grace.⁸ The danger, they note, is that RSE lessons become exercises in information rather than formation—transmitting biological facts without grounding them in moral and theological truth.
Scholars examining traditional Catholic resistance to sex education likewise record the same concern: that Catholic schools, even when guided by Church documents, can inadvertently “supplant rather than supplement” the parental role.⁹ In mixed or collective settings, discussions of sexuality risk becoming occasions of curiosity or embarrassment rather than of virtue. The Church has consistently warned against “collective or public sex education” that ignores the discretion and modesty owed to each child’s stage of development.¹⁰
When RSE Becomes a Contravention of Parental Rights
In principle, Relationships and Sex Education can be delivered within Catholic schools without violating parental rights. However, in practice, such rights are frequently compromised or constrained by state mandates and the secular assumptions underlying modern educational frameworks.
RSE contravenes parental rights when it:
- introduces sexual or moral content without parental knowledge or consent;
- normalises behaviours contrary to Catholic moral teaching, such as contraception, cohabitation, or same-sex acts;
- pre-empts parental judgment about a child’s readiness for such instruction;
- or discourages withdrawal through social pressure or institutional policy.
These practices directly violate both the natural-law right of parents to form their children in moral truth and the legal right protected under Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees education in conformity with parental convictions.¹³ They also conflict with the Church’s explicit teaching that “it is incumbent on parents to strain every nerve to ward off such an outrage, and to hold exclusive authority to direct the education of their offspring.”¹²
The Poison of Naturalism
The recurring fault identified by traditional Catholic critics is the persistence of naturalism—the belief that moral formation can be achieved through reason or social conditioning alone, without recourse to divine grace. As Pius XI explains, such approaches “refuse to recognize the inborn weakness of human nature” and disregard “the means of grace” by which purity is preserved.¹¹ The Church teaches that because fallen man bears the wounds of original sin—ignorance, malice, weakness, and concupiscence—mere human instruction cannot preserve chastity without spiritual formation and sacramental life.
Parental Vigilance and Partnership
For this reason, parents must be vigilant regarding what is taught in the name of “Catholic education.” They should review all RSE materials used by their children’s schools, exercise their right to consultation and, if necessary, withdraw their children from any lessons inconsistent with Catholic doctrine. True partnership between home and school means not merely compliance or trust, but collaboration under parental authority. The right to know, to approve, and to object is not only a civil entitlement but a duty arising from the parental vocation.
A Call to Restore Catholic Integrity
Catholic schools must remember that they exist not to reflect the prevailing culture but to redeem it. To comply with statutory RSE obligations while neglecting the Catholic vision of purity and grace is to betray their mission. The teaching of human sexuality must always be presented as part of the call to holiness—never as a technical or social matter detached from faith. Where government policy or secular expectations conflict with divine law, Catholic schools must stand firm in fidelity to Christ and to the Magisterium.
As Pius XI urged, parents must “strain every nerve to ward off such an outrage” as the corruption of family life by worldly influences and to “hold exclusive authority to direct the education of their offspring.”¹² In our time, this vigilance is not merely prudent; it is indispensable to preserving innocence, virtue, and faith in the hearts of children.
¹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2225–2226.
² Ibid.
³ Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 14.
⁴ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2224.
⁵ Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 12.
⁶ Catholic Education Service, “Relationships and Sex Education,” catholiceducation.org.uk.
⁷ Society of Saint Pius X (UK District), “Sex-Ed in Catholic Schools,” fsspx.uk.
⁸ B.R. Taylorian, The Opposition of Traditionalist Catholics to Sex Education (University of Central Lancashire, 2024).
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Society of Saint Pius X, “The Catholic Attitude to Sex Education,” fsspx.uk.
¹¹ Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri (1929), 65–67, citing Silvio Antoniano, On the Christian Education of Children (“The Golden Treatise”).
¹² Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, 42.
¹³ European Convention on Human Rights, Article 2 of Protocol 1; Article 8.
From Ruin to Restoration: The Story of Catholic England
By the Archbishop of Selsey
On the feast of St Michael, 29 September 1850, Pope Pius IX restored diocesan bishops to England and Wales. Nicholas Wiseman, made Archbishop of Westminster, cried out with joy that Catholic England was “restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament.”¹ That orbit had been broken for nearly three centuries. The Church in England had lived in eclipse. It had been stripped of its altars, mocked by its enemies, betrayed by its rulers, and sustained only by the blood of martyrs and the courage of recusants. What was restored in 1850 had first been shattered in 1559, when Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity outlawed the ancient Mass.²
The parish altar, once the heart of every village, was torn down. Chalices were hidden in cupboards, vestments ripped for rags, bishops thrown into prison, priests exiled or compelled to conform. Families were dragged to court, fined into ruin for missing the new services. By the 1580s, a Catholic who refused to attend owed £20 each month, a fine calculated to destroy.³ In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in the bull Regnans in Excelsis.⁴ To Catholics, it was a defence of truth; to the Crown, it was proof of treason. Parliament tightened the law still further. In 1585, the Act against Jesuits and Seminary Priests decreed that any priest ordained abroad who returned home should die as a traitor, and any layman who gave him shelter could share his fate.⁵ From that moment, the presence of a Catholic priest on English soil was a hanging crime.
Yet priests came anyway. Edmund Campion, Oxford’s golden boy, traded honours for a disguise and a chalice. He moved by night, heard confessions in barns, preached Christ in attics. Caught, racked in the Tower, he went to Tyburn in 1581 and told his judges they condemned their own ancestors. He died with calm defiance.⁶ Margaret Clitherow, the butcher’s wife of York, opened her home to fugitives. When arrested, she refused to plead, knowing that a trial would force her children to betray her. For this she was crushed to death beneath stones in 1586, thirty-three years old, pregnant, praying for her killers.⁷ Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit carpenter, turned wood and stone into weapons of survival. He built priest-holes so cunning that many remain hidden even now. He saved countless priests, then died under torture in 1606.⁸ More than three hundred Catholics were executed under Elizabeth and James, many for nothing more than saying Mass.⁹
For those who lived, recusancy meant a slow martyrdom. Fines ruined estates, laws excluded children from schools, informers prowled villages. Whole communities gathered at midnight for a furtive Mass, watchmen posted on the lanes. Rosaries were fingered in whispers, catechisms taught in secret, faith lived under constant threat. The Armada of 1588 convinced Protestants that Catholics were Spain’s agents. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the folly of a few, stained the entire community with treason. Bonfires and sermons each November renewed the suspicion. Later, Titus Oates’s fabricated Popish Plot in 1678 sent innocent men to the gallows.¹⁰ In 1780, the Gordon Riots set chapels aflame and mobs howled “No Popery!” in the streets.¹¹
Rome did not abandon England. In 1623, Pope Gregory XV appointed William Bishop as Vicar Apostolic, the first of a line of bishops without dioceses, shepherds of shadows who confirmed children in barns and ordained priests abroad.¹² And in London, Richard Challoner sustained the hidden faithful with his revision of the Douai-Rheims Bible and his Garden of the Soul (1740), a book of prayers that became the catechism of generations who had no parish or procession but carried the Church in their hearts.¹³
By the late eighteenth century the storm began to lift. The Relief Act of 1778 permitted Catholics to inherit land, though it provoked the Gordon Riots. The Act of 1791 allowed registered chapels and schools, still under scrutiny.¹⁴ At last the great Relief Act of 1829 swept away most remaining restrictions. Catholics could sit in Parliament, hold office, live as citizens.¹⁵ The long night of penal times was ending.
But the missionary structure of vicariates could no longer suffice. Catholics were multiplying, parishes thriving, schools spreading. In 1850, Pius IX restored the hierarchy by Universalis Ecclesiae. Thirteen dioceses were created, with Westminster as metropolitan. Wiseman, newly made cardinal, was appointed archbishop.¹⁶ Protestant England fumed. Lord John Russell railed against papal aggression in his “Durham Letter.”¹⁷ Effigies of the Pope were burned, and Parliament passed the Ecclesiastical Titles Act forbidding Catholic bishops to use Anglican titles.¹⁸ But the storm passed, and the hierarchy endured.
Catholic England was visible once more. Parishes multiplied, schools flourished, orders revived, Irish immigration filled churches, and converts like John Henry Newman gave prestige. Westminster Cathedral rose in 1895 as a sign of permanence.¹⁹ Through two world wars Catholics fought, served, and suffered alongside their countrymen. Chaplains brought the sacraments to the trenches, parishes endured the Blitz. By mid-century, Catholics were no longer outsiders. The old stigma of recusancy was gone.
But even as the Church grew strong in public, new storms rose from within. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) sought renewal but brought upheaval. The traditional Latin Mass, the anchor through centuries of persecution, was replaced. Vocations fell. Catechesis faltered.²⁰ The faith that had survived rope and rack now waned in an age of comfort. Meanwhile Britain itself drifted into secularism, with laws liberalising abortion and divorce, reshaping family life, and eroding Christian morality. Later decades exalted ideologies hostile to Catholic truth. Attendance dwindled, parishes closed, vocations dried up. The diocesan structure restored in 1850 still stands, but the Church it governs is weakened.
And yet the story is not finished. The martyrs still speak. Campion from the scaffold, Clitherow from beneath the stones, Owen from the hidden chamber, Challoner from the secret chapel. They endured not only for their own age but for ours. Their sacrifice is our summons. The England that once outlawed the Mass now shrugs at it. Indifference has replaced hostility. But the demand remains the same: fidelity to Christ, whatever the cost.
If Catholic England was restored to its orbit in 1850, it must not drift into eclipse today. The Church that survived rope and rack must not surrender to compromise. Catholic England will be truly restored only if her children reclaim the fidelity of the martyrs, the patience of the confessors, the courage of the recusants. The dawn broke once before. It can break again. But only if the faith that endured the darkness burns as brightly in our own time.
- Nicholas Wiseman, Pastoral Letter from out of the Flaminian Gate (1850).
- Statutes of the Realm: 1 Eliz. I, c.1–2 (1559).
- 23 Eliz. I, c.1 (1581).
- Regnans in Excelsis (Pius V), 25 February 1570.
- 27 Eliz. I, c.2 (1585).
- Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (1935).
- John Mush, A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow (1586).
- Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (2006).
- John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (1975).
- John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (1972).
- Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (1999).
- Catholic Encyclopedia, “England (Ecclesiastical History).”
- Richard Challoner, The Garden of the Soul (1740).
- 18 Geo. III, c.60 (1778); 31 Geo. III, c.32 (1791).
- 10 Geo. IV, c.7 (1829).
- Universalis Ecclesiae (Pius IX), 29 Sept. 1850.
- Lord John Russell, “Durham Letter,” Hansard (1850).
- 14 & 15 Vict., c.60 (1851).
- Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (1990).
- Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (2004).
The Halal Meat Debate and the Christian Conscience
By the Archbishop of Selsey
The debate over halal meat in Britain has once more risen to national prominence, and rightly so. Parliament has heard petitions about animal welfare; campaigners have spoken of religious liberty; and politicians have traded rhetoric about British identity. Yet in all this clamour one vital question is forgotten: the conscience of the Christian.
We live in an age that prizes transparency, yet when it comes to our food — the very substance that sustains life and, in the Eucharist, becomes the Body of Christ — our society traffics in ambiguity. In Britain today, halal-certified meat, sometimes stunned, sometimes not, enters the general food supply with scarcely a word of disclosure. Schoolchildren, hospital patients, soldiers in barracks may all be eating meat prayed over in the name of Allah without ever knowing it.¹
Case Study: Newcastle University
In May 2025, Newcastle University’s catering service introduced halal-only chicken and lamb across several outlets. Students soon raised complaints: some were unaware until after eating, others said they felt deprived of choice, while Christian and secular students alike objected to being compelled to consume food ritually consecrated in another faith.² After pressure from the Students’ Union, the university agreed to review provision, but the incident illustrates the wider problem: without transparency and alternatives, consumers are left with no meaningful freedom of conscience.
Here lies the injustice. The Apostle Paul taught the Corinthians that meat in itself is indifferent, yet warned: “If any man say to you: This has been offered in sacrifice; do not eat, for his sake that told it, and for conscience’ sake” (1 Cor. 10:28).³ The principle is plain: Christians cannot knowingly share in the rites of another religion, nor can they be compelled to do so in ignorance. To obscure the truth about what we eat is to force believers into a silent participation, stripping them of the freedom of conscience that is the hallmark of true liberty.
The Restore Britain campaign has seized upon this issue, raising alarms about halal-only menus in schools and even in parts of the military. They have called for a ban on non-stun slaughter, appealing to animal welfare and cultural integrity.⁴ Their concern strikes a chord, for no Christian can remain indifferent to truth or to the slow erosion of our Christian heritage. But the danger is that zeal for justice may give way to hostility, that righteous concern for conscience may be disfigured by rhetoric that stirs division rather than illuminating truth.
The Christian answer is not prohibition but clarity. Muslims and Jews must be free to follow their dietary laws. That is a legitimate exercise of religious liberty. But Christians, too, must be free to decline participation in rites they do not share. That is an equally legitimate exercise of conscience. True pluralism is reciprocal: one liberty does not trample another. The solution is as simple as it is just — mandatory labelling of meat, procurement reform in public institutions, and transparency in supply chains.⁵ With truth, conscience is protected. Without truth, liberty collapses into coercion.
Under the Equality Act 2010, religion and belief are recognised as protected characteristics. This means that Christians, like members of other faiths, are legally entitled to have their convictions respected in public life, education, and the workplace. Where food or services risk conflicting with conscience — such as being compelled to consume ritually consecrated meat without disclosure — Christians have a lawful basis to request transparency and fair treatment. The Act upholds that no one should be discriminated against or coerced in matters of faith.
Let us not deceive ourselves. This debate is not merely about animals, nor merely about politics. It is about the soul of our society. A civilisation that conceals the truth about its food will soon conceal the truth about its faith. The lie at the butcher’s counter becomes the lie in the classroom, the hospital, the courtroom, the parish church. What begins as silence in the marketplace ends as silence in the conscience. And silence in the conscience is death to the soul.
Christ said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). It is time to apply that wisdom in Britain today. Let Muslims be Muslims, Jews be Jews, and Christians be Christians — but let none be compelled to share in another’s rite against their conscience. This is not intolerance; it is honesty. It is not exclusion; it is justice. In the end, it is not prohibition that will protect our faith and our freedom, but truth.
A Pastoral Appeal
I urge Christian families, schools, chapels, and institutions: do not be afraid to ask your suppliers plainly how the meat you are being offered has been sourced and prepared. Request transparency about whether animals were stunned, and whether the meat has been consecrated in the name of another faith. This is not an act of hostility but of integrity. When consumers calmly but firmly demand clarity, suppliers and institutions will learn that conscience matters. And in defending conscience, we defend not only our faith but the freedom of all.
Here is a sample letter template that Christian families, schools, chapels, or institutions could adapt when writing to their suppliers, asking for transparency about meat sourcing and preparation. It is courteous but firm, framed around conscience and integrity.
For a more indepth presentation visit Nuntiatoria.org
Footnotes
¹ UK Parliament, Non-Stun Slaughter of Animals, Westminster Hall debate, 9 June 2025, Hansard HC Deb 9 June 2025, c39WH.
² Newcastle University Students’ Union, debate over halal-only provision in campus catering, reported May 2025.
³ 1 Corinthians 10:28.
⁴ Restore Britain campaign materials, e.g. Rupert Lowe MP, Facebook post, 2025; ConservativeHome, “The Tory cause could be strengthened by Lowe’s Restore Britain,” 15 July 2025.
⁵ RSPCA, “Clearer labelling needed on method of slaughter,” Campaign briefing, 2023; UK Government, Welfare of Animals at the Time of Killing (England) Regulations 2015.
The Westminster Declaration: Conscience or Compromise?
By the Archbishop of Selsey
The new Westminster Declaration has brought before us once again the perennial question of how Christians must witness to truth in a society increasingly hostile to the divine law. Conscience, rightly formed, is not a private instinct but the echo of God’s law written upon the heart. The Declaration rightly identifies threats to life, marriage, education, and freedom, but these concerns must be situated within the broader framework of Catholic doctrine, lest our testimony to Christ be reduced to mere cultural conservatism.
There is a danger, in our present moment, of multiplying words where a few burning words of witness would suffice. The first Westminster Declaration had the ring of prophecy: it spoke of conscience and truth, life and marriage, with the clarity of martyrs. The new Declaration, though well-intentioned, reads more like a petition to Parliament than a trumpet blast to the nation. By citing statutes, rulings, and commissions, it risks grounding Christian witness in the shifting sands of policy rather than the rock of divine law. Yet one cannot deny that the issues of education, gender, and technology now cry out for attention. The challenge is whether Christians will stand as witnesses, or merely as lobbyists.
The Church has always taught that man’s first and fundamental right is the right to know, love, and serve God. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei (1885), made clear that the foundation of civil society rests upon the recognition of God as supreme Lawgiver and Judge, and that rulers are bound to govern according to His eternal law.¹ Likewise, Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925) reminded the world that true peace and justice cannot be secured except under the Kingship of Christ.² These encyclicals, and others like Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), affirm that liberty has meaning only when ordered to truth and virtue.³ Freedom of conscience cannot mean license to error; rather, it means freedom from coercion in obeying the law of God.
It is precisely here that we must contrast the perennial doctrine with the ambiguities introduced by Dignitatis Humanae (1965). While the Council insisted that it “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine” (§1), it nevertheless advanced the novel claim that every person has a natural right not to be restrained from publicly professing even erroneous religious belief (§2). This formulation, vague and unqualified, was a rupture with the consistent teaching of the popes from Gregory XVI (Mirari Vos, 1832) to Pius XII, who maintained that although error may at times be tolerated for the sake of public peace, it can never be clothed with a natural right.⁴
This ambiguity has borne bitter fruit. What was once prudential toleration has been transformed into a supposed liberty to promote error, even in public institutions. In the decades since Vatican II, secular governments, often citing “religious liberty” in conciliar language, have come to treat the true religion and false religions as juridically equal. Worse still, they have turned this principle inward, using it to deny Christians the very right to profess truth, because truth is redefined as one “opinion” among many. The irony is stark: in the name of religious liberty, Christians are increasingly coerced into silence, while ideologies opposed to the natural law are granted legal protection and cultural dominance.
Contemporary Catholic critics foresaw this danger. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre argued that Dignitatis Humanae “turns its back on the doctrine of Gregory XVI and Pius IX,” and that by equating liberty with the right to profess error, it would produce “apostasy in practice.”⁵ Romano Amerio, in Iota Unum, noted that Vatican II’s declaration “changes the concept of tolerance into a right of error, which is absurd and destructive of truth itself.”⁶ Michael Davies, writing in Religious Liberty and the Second Vatican Council, warned that the document’s ambiguity was “the Trojan horse through which liberalism would capture the Church.”⁷
The martyrs of England bore witness to a different vision. They resisted unjust laws not with elaborate petitions to Parliament, but with the silent eloquence of their sacrifice. St Thomas More affirmed before his execution that he died “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” In this he exemplified the Catholic understanding of religious liberty: obedience to lawful authority, but never at the expense of divine law. Their blood confirms the truth that rights are not created by the State, nor grounded in shifting social compacts, but flow from the sovereignty of Christ the King.
The Westminster Declaration of 2025 addresses many urgent matters: gender ideology, parental rights in education, and the moral challenges of artificial intelligence. Yet we must be clear that our defence of life, marriage, and conscience is not simply a matter of civic freedom or cultural heritage. It is rooted in the sovereignty of Christ the King, the unchanging law of God, and the mission of the Church to sanctify the world. To forget this is to reduce Christian witness to political advocacy.
As Pius XII once warned, “A people that separates itself from God becomes enslaved to error and passion.”⁸ Our task is not only to preserve the remnants of Christian conscience in law, but to proclaim anew the social Kingship of Christ, upon which the true rights and dignity of man depend. Only then will any declaration bearing the name of Westminster avoid becoming a political manifesto, and instead recover the prophetic power of a Christian witness rooted in the Cross.
For a more indepth presentation visit Nuntiatoria.org
- Pius XII, Address to the International Union of Catholic Women’s Leagues (29 September 1957).
- Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1 November 1885), §§3–6.
- Pius XI, Quas Primas (11 December 1925), §§18–19.
- Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum (20 June 1888), §§16–17.
- Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos (1832); Pius IX, Quanta Cura (1864); Pius XII, Allocution Ci Riesce to the Roman Forum (1953).
- Marcel Lefebvre, Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1986), pp. 39–41.
- Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century (Kansas City: Sarto House, 1996), §210.
- Michael Davies, Religious Liberty and the Second Vatican Council (TAN Books, 1992), pp. 117–119.
