For more than a decade, I have preached the words “Put Christ back into Christmas” from the pulpit. I have printed it on Advent notices, spoken it to families preparing for the Nativity, and used it to remind the faithful that Christmas is not sentiment but the Incarnation—God made man for our salvation. The phrase has appeared on parish notice boards, Catholic mission posters, evangelical banners, diocesan Advent reflections, and catechetical materials across Britain. It has never before been called extremist. It has been catechesis, not controversy.
That is why, when Tommy Robinson announced a public carol service in London using the same phrase, I did not expect the nation’s press to declare it a threat. The phrase did not change. Only the presumption of motive changed. When a minister says it, it is evangelical zeal. When Robinson says it, it is “Christian nationalism.” Here lies the strange crisis of our time: naming the Saviour at His own feast is safe or dangerous depending on who speaks His name.
The accusation is not theological; it is sociological. It does not claim the doctrine is wrong; it claims the speaker is unacceptable. The question has become not “Is Jesus Christ Lord?” but “Who has permission to say so in public?”
The accusation precedes the evidence The accusation did not arise from what Robinson said. It arose from what might be imagined if the same words were spoken by the wrong person. Newspapers warned of an “extremist event dressed up as a carol service,” of “Christian imagery at protests raising fears of racial nationalism,” and advised readers “not to be fooled by hymns,” as if the Gloria could conceal a programme for civil unrest.¹–⁴ Imagination became evidence. A possibility was declared a certainty. This could be so became this is so.
One national broadsheet framed Robinson’s call to “put the Christ back into Christmas” as “exploiting the Christian message for populist politics,” linking the phrase directly to “anti-migrant rhetoric” and calling his carol service a “political use of Christmas.”⁵
The logic was not: “he said something racist.” The logic was: “someone like him could say something racist.” This is not evidence. It is fiction used as accusation, a verdict delivered in advance of any offence.
The manufacture of racism The racism charge rests on a simple falsehood: that criticism of an ideological current within Islam is a form of racial hatred. But Islam is not a race. To treat theological disagreement as racism is to evacuate the word of moral meaning in order to silence the speaker. It is not a perspective on racial justice; it is a tactic of erasure, turning a debate about belief into a crime against identity.
The accusation also collapses when confronted with Robinson’s actual record. There is no public evidence of him preaching racial superiority or describing any ethnic group as inferior. His record shows the opposite. In the early years of the English Defence League he expelled neo-Nazis and racial supremacists, issued statements denouncing them, and clashed with those who attempted to turn the movement into a racial platform.⁶ He ultimately stepped down because he feared infiltration by racist elements.⁷ He has repeatedly stated that his opposition is to an ideology, not ethnicity, and his collaborators have included ex-Muslims, British Sikhs, and others who reject Islamist extremism.⁸
This is incompatible with the label “racist.” But the accusation is not made because of a record; it is made because the label is useful. When a curate says “Christ is King”, it is evangelical. When Robinson says it, it is “white nationalism.” The content does not change—only the assumption of motive changes.
Importing America into Britain The second falsehood is the claim of “Christian nationalism.” The phrase is borrowed from American politics, where it refers to a distinct sociological phenomenon: the fusion of Evangelical identity with Republican ideology, a restorative narrative of lost Christian nationhood, and a history marked by civil conflict. There are distinctive features—“Seven Mountains” rhetoric, Confederate symbolism, megachurch populism, and a political bloc shaped by Evangelical voting patterns.⁹ It is a real, debated current in American political religion.
Britain has none of these conditions. There is no Evangelical political constituency, no myth of a lost Christian republic, no Confederate memory, no party shaped by theology, no restorationist nationalism with ecclesial energy behind it. The Church of England is established as heritage, not conviction. Denominations are post-Christian, shaped more by contemporary ethics than apostolic doctrine. The English crisis is not Christian nationalism; it is Christian amnesia. The danger is not that Christianity will govern the nation, but that it no longer governs the conscience of it.
Why then is the American phrase used here? Because it functions as ready-made condemnation. It does not describe what exists; it prevents what might exist. It says, in effect: “You may not speak Christ in public unless authorised.” It is a means of policing proclamation, not analysing reality.
The paradox: the denominations politicised Christmas, not the layman Here the heart of the matter is revealed.
The denominations did not reject the phrase “Put Christ back into Christmas.” They affirmed its meaning and reproduced its theology. But they condemned the layman who spoke it publicly—not for doctrinal fault, but for identity. It was not Robinson who politicised Christmas, but the denominations who imagined politics into his proclamation. They heard nationalism where there was creed, and then used their rebuttal to preach asylum policy in the name of the Christ they were reluctant to name. Christmas itself was not defended by proclaiming the Incarnation; it was reframed as a message about immigration. The Child was not announced; the visa was. Thus the paradox: a layman proclaimed Christ, and was accused of ideology; the denominations preached ideology, and called it Christ.
This is the inversion: the accusation does not describe Robinson—it describes the response to Robinson.
Denominational adoption of the secular accusation The Church of England adopted the same framing. According to national coverage, bishops urged Christians to “resist the capture of Christian language and symbols by populist forces” and launched a campaign of bus-stop posters reading “Christ has always been in Christmas” and “Outsiders welcome.”¹⁰ The Independent reported this as a confrontation with the “exploitation of the Christian message for populist politics,” and described Robinson’s call to “put the Christ back into Christmas” as an attempt to “drive an anti-migrant agenda.”¹¹
The Bishop of Kirkstall declared that Robinson’s conversion “did not give him the right to subvert the faith so that it serves his purposes,” and urged believers to resist “populist forces seeking to exploit the faith for their own political ends.”¹¹ No doctrinal error was identified. The issue, again, was not the truth of the Incarnation but the identity of the man proclaiming it.
Coverage in The Telegraph likewise presented the initiative as a “pushback against the rise of Christian nationalism” and the “appropriation of Christian symbols by far-Right protesters,” quoting an open letter from seven Church of England bishops condemning “the co-opting of the cross” at Robinson’s rally.¹² The symbolism of Christianity—the cross, biblical citation, public carol singing—was treated as ideological when carried by laity, though identical when used by denominations.
This is the central paradox made visible: the denominations politicised Christmas in order to accuse someone else of politicising Christmas.
A feast without faith This controversy is possible only in a culture that remembers Christmas but no longer believes it. Britain still keeps the feast: markets fill the squares; schools sing about angels they do not believe in; “goodwill to all” is quoted without the One who gives peace. The nation loves the warmth of Christmas while fearing the fire that gives it meaning. The census records a fall from 59.3% identifying as Christian in 2011 to 46.2% in 2021.¹³ Among the young, Christianity is not rejected—it is forgotten.
The BBC documented the other side of this crisis: individuals “who do not necessarily believe in God, but have started going to church” after attending Robinson’s rallies, motivated by a sense that Christianity itself “could be replaced” in Britain.¹⁴ They carry wooden crosses and biblical texts not as political symbols, but because they recognise that what once was Christian has become secularised, and seek a return to what gave Britain its moral architecture. The institution’s response has been uncertainty: not doctrine, but discomfort. According to the same report, the Church of England is “grappling with fundamental questions” because this return comes from outside its authorised structures, without catechesis, yet with conviction.¹⁴
The BBC described clergy speaking of a “difficult road” as they attempt to welcome those whose return is motivated by cultural memory rather than doctrinal formation.¹⁴ They do not reject Christ—they do not yet know Him. Yet the institutional response has been to lead with condemnation, describing the presence of crosses as “co-opting” and “excluding others.”¹² The crisis revealed is not a movement of extremism against the Church, but a Church unable to welcome those who come seeking the Christ it no longer proclaims with conviction.
The constitutional duty of the Church of England, and the moral duty of all denominations It must be stated plainly: the silence—or rather, the mis-speech—of the Church of England is not merely a pastoral failure; it is a constitutional breach. The Church of England is established not as a chaplaincy to private sentiment, but as the public guardian of the nation’s Christian identity. Its bishops sit in Parliament to proclaim the Gospel, not to echo secular narratives. The Coronation oath binds the monarch to defend the faith; those who anoint him are charged to uphold that oath in public life.¹⁵ Establishment is not ornament; it is obligation. When public proclamation of Christ is denounced as extremism, the established church must be the first to correct the error—not the first to affirm it.
Yet the same pattern of abdication was seen among other denominations. A duty rooted in history obliges the Church of England; a duty rooted in baptism obliges every community that bears the name of Christ. The Methodist Church, the Baptist Union, the United Reformed tradition, and other signatories of the Joint Public Issues Team were not compelled by any Crown, oath, or statute to speak—but their speech still bore the weight of Christian witness. They might have defended the Incarnation by proclaiming the Saviour’s birth. They might have used their public voice to call a restless people to faith. Instead, they accepted the same framing handed to them by secular media: that proclaiming Christ at His own feast could be extremist, and that the proper Christian answer to the Nativity was the language of immigration policy.
When they affirmed “Christ has always been in Christmas,” they affirmed the doctrine. When they followed it with campaign posters about “outsiders welcome,” they displaced the doctrine into political messaging. None of these denominations corrected the impossible idea that a carol service could cloak a programme of hate. None challenged the bizarre suggestion that a wooden cross held by a layman is a symbol of exclusion while a wooden cross held by clergy is a symbol of inclusion. None confronted the underlying falsehood: that the birth of Christ is dangerous when proclaimed by the wrong person.
Their failure is not constitutional, but evangelical. By adopting the same secular accusation—and echoing it with ecclesial authority—they participated in the same politicisation of Christmas they claimed to resist. It was not Robinson who turned Christmas into a referendum on migration: it was the denominations who imagined that message into his proclamation and then preached the world’s politics under the banner of Bethlehem.
Establishment gives the Church of England a unique responsibility. But every denomination has a spiritual one: to proclaim the Gospel without fear or favour. If the Church of England must speak to the nation as its established church, the other denominations must speak to the nation as its un-established conscience. In this hour, neither fulfilled the true vocation of Christmas. The Child born of Mary was not announced in the name of salvation, but invoked in the name of policy. The Nativity became a billboard. The shepherds were replaced by slogans.
Establishment demands clear speech: Jesus Christ is Lord. Evangelical fidelity demands the same.
Until both are recovered, we will continue to witness this strange moment: the proclamation of the Saviour at His own feast treated as extremism—not because it is dangerous, but because Britain has forgotten what Christmas means.
The only restoration worthy of the feast begins where Christmas always begins—not in politics, but in worship. The shepherds did not negotiate asylum clauses; they knelt. The Magi did not issue rapid-response resources; they adored. The world was changed not by a campaign but by a revelation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Renewal will not come from rallies or counter-posters, but from conversion, catechesis, sacrament, and the fearless proclamation of Christ as truth—not metaphor.
Christmas is not a symbol for a social programme. It is the birth of the Saviour. If Britain would have Christ in Christmas, it must hear His name again.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour.
Daily Record, commentary warning of “an extremist event dressed up as a carol service”, December 2025.
The Mirror, advising readers “not to be fooled by hymns”, December 2025.
iNews, analysis referring to “Christian imagery at protests raising fears of racial nationalism”, December 2025.
The Independent, opinion framing carol events as a “front” for far-Right mobilisation, December 2025.
Eleanor Burleigh, “Church of England hits out at Tommy Robinson for ‘exploiting’ Christmas message”, Daily Express, 7 December 2025.
Interviews and official statements on expelling neo-Nazis from the EDL, 2009–2011.
Robinson resignation citing infiltration concerns, Channel 4 News, October 2013.
Record of public collaborations with ex-Muslim and Sikh activists in multiple interviews (TalkTV, LBC), 2017–2024.
Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, Taking America Back for God, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Press reporting on Church of England poster campaign, December 2025.
Holly Bancroft, “Don’t exploit the Christian message for your populist politics”, The Independent, 7 December 2025.
Poppy Wood, “Churches using pro-migrant posters to challenge Tommy Robinson”, The Telegraph, 8 December 2025.
Office for National Statistics, Religion in England and Wales: Census 2021.
Aleem Maqbool and Catherine Wyatt, “Tommy Robinson supporters are turning to Christianity, leaving the Church in a dilemma”, BBC News, 23 November 2025.
A warning misunderstood As Britain prepares to mark Remembrance Sunday, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has once again stepped into the public square with an appeal that is at once sincere and symptomatic. Together with several Anglican bishops, he issued a statement condemning what he called the rise of “Christian nationalism” in the United Kingdom.¹
The clergy’s declaration, published in The Catholic Herald, denounced the alleged “misuse of Christian symbols to exclude or stigmatise others.” Bishop Anderson Jeremiah of Edmonton insisted that such actions “betray the heart of the Gospel,” while Bishop Rosemary Mallett of Southwark added that “we must reject any narrative that says the Cross is a symbol of exclusion.”²
Williams himself declared: “It is more than time to challenge the story that every migrant approaching our shores is an unfriendly alien with unintelligible and hostile values. Christian culture, rightly understood, is based simply on the recognition that we share common human needs and that we are given strength and generosity in Christ’s Spirit.”³
The language is eloquent, the tone charitable, yet beneath it lies the enduring confusion that has haunted Anglicanism since its birth — a confusion between revelation and sentiment, between the Church as divinely constituted society and as social conscience for the modern state.
The liberal inversion of the Cross Williams’ appeal is not without truth: the Cross must never become an emblem of hatred or a tribal totem. But he proceeds as though these are the only two possibilities — either the Cross is sentimental philanthropy, or it is political idolatry. He cannot imagine the third and only true alternative: the Cross as the throne of the world’s Redeemer, before whom all nations must bow.
The danger of false universalism lies in severing compassion from conversion. For the Incarnation does not merely affirm humanity’s shared needs; it redeems humanity from sin. The Christian does not embrace the stranger because all religions teach kindness, but because Christ commands us to love as He has loved — a love that presupposes truth. Without truth, compassion becomes indulgence, and mercy without justice is mere sentimentality.
Thus the Cross ceases to be the key to salvation and becomes an empty metaphor of moral approval. A Christ who demands nothing, who never judges nor calls to repentance, cannot save. He becomes the patron of progressive causes, not the Redeemer of souls.
Christendom and the nation under God This misreading of the Gospel’s universality manifests most clearly in how modern churchmen misunderstand the concept of Christian nationhood. The Catholic tradition does not equate the faith with nationalism — indeed, it is the only religion that transcends ethnicity and language by divine constitution — yet it insists that the political order itself must acknowledge the moral authority of Christ.
This principle, solemnly reaffirmed by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King as a counter-revolutionary act against the secularisation of nations.⁴ The Pontiff warned that when states deny Christ’s sovereignty, “discord and enmities arise, because they have cast away the yoke of our Lord.”⁵
To be patriotic, therefore, is not to idolise one’s nation, but to seek its sanctification. The Catholic loves his homeland as part of the created order, subject to divine law, not as an end in itself. This is why St. Thomas Aquinas classed patriotism under the virtue of piety — it is honour paid to those through whom we receive temporal goods, second only to those through whom we receive eternal ones.⁶
By contrast, the Anglican position, oscillating between civic religion and moral philosophy, lacks any coherent theology of nationhood. Its ecclesial imagination is tied to the English state, yet its moral sympathies belong to cosmopolitan liberalism. Hence it condemns “Christian nationalism” without offering a vision of Christian order.
A Remembrance emptied of remembrance It is particularly revealing that this denunciation was timed for Remembrance Sunday — the day Britain recalls her war dead, whose graves bear not political slogans but the Cross. Those young men did not die for an ideology of universal tolerance; they died for a civilisation shaped by the Cross and for the moral inheritance that Williams now calls oppressive.
Their sacrifice, sanctified by chaplains and priests in muddy fields, was not rooted in a hatred of the foreigner, but in a love of home, faith, and justice. The very “common humanity” Williams invokes was defended by those who knew that civilisation without Christ collapses into barbarism. To forget that is to forget why the Cross stands upon our cenotaphs.
The modern misuse of ‘Christian nationalism’ The term itself has become a rhetorical weapon. Like “far-right” or “extremist,” it is deployed less to clarify than to condemn. Any attempt to restore Christian moral order, to defend natural law, or to preserve the family and national identity shaped by the Gospel is caricatured as “Christian nationalism.”
In truth, what many decry under that label is not nationalism but Christendom — the social embodiment of faith in public life. The Church’s mission is not confined to the sacristy; it extends to every aspect of human order. “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me,” says the Lord (Matthew 28:18). To exclude Him from governance, education, or culture is to enthrone chaos.
Two errors to reject The Catholic must therefore avoid two opposing heresies. The first is the neo-pagan nationalism that substitutes blood and soil for baptism and creed. The second is the liberal humanitarianism that reduces faith to empathy and the Church to an NGO.
Against both, the Cross proclaims that every nation finds its dignity in submission to Christ. “He must reign,” wrote St. Paul, “until He has put all His enemies under His feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). This reign is not merely spiritual but moral, social, and visible in the institutions and laws that reflect divine order.
The call to restoration In our day, to proclaim the Kingship of Christ is to invite misunderstanding. It is to affirm that governments, schools, parliaments, and even churches must conform to the law of God. Yet this is precisely the task of Christians who love their nation rightly. Only a people that honours Christ as Lord can preserve liberty without licence and unity without tyranny.
Let us, therefore, resist both the politicisation of faith and its privatisation. The flag must never replace the Cross — but neither must the Cross be hidden out of fear of offending the world. The true synthesis is found not in nationalism but in sanctification: a people, culture, and law transformed by grace.
That is the meaning of Remembrance Sunday for Christians: not nostalgia for empire, nor guilt over history, but thanksgiving for those who died that Christian civilisation might live — and a renewal of the vow that Christ, not Caesar, shall reign.
¹ The Catholic Herald, “Rowan Williams and Anglican clergy speak out against Christian nationalism ahead of Remembrance Sunday,” 7 Nov 2025. ² Ibid., statements by Bp Anderson Jeremiah and Bp Rosemary Mallett. ³ Ibid., Rowan Williams quoted in full. ⁴ Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), nn. 11–12. ⁵ Ibid., n. 24. ⁶ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.101, a.1.
To the clergy, religious, and faithful of the Old Roman Apostolate, and to all those who seek to preserve the Catholic faith in its integrity and fullness: grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Carissimi
Concerning the obedience of truth — that golden chain which binds intellect and will to God — the faithful are once more unsettled by a voice from Rome claiming to defend devotion while, in fact, diminishing it. The newly issued Mater Populi Fidelis of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved by Pope Leo XIV on 3 November 2025, declares that the ancient and venerable Marian titles Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix omnium gratiarum are “theologically and pastorally inappropriate.”¹ It exhorts pastors to avoid them, proposing instead that Our Lady be invoked in more general terms as Mother of the Faithful or Mother of the People of God.
At first glance, such language might appear modest and uncontroversial. Yet beneath its mild tone there breathes the spirit of the age — that cautious, calculating moderation which hides its unbelief behind diplomacy. To the modern ear, “pastoral sensitivity” has become the velvet phrase by which the bold truths of revelation are softened, reshaped, or quietly withdrawn. But divine truth cannot be domesticated. The mysteries of the faith are not ours to edit or abbreviate for fear of offending men. To forbid the ancient titles of the Mother of God in the name of prudence is to repeat the perennial temptation: that the Church should make herself more acceptable to those who do not believe.
This new prohibition therefore touches not only Marian devotion but the heart of the Church’s obedience to divine revelation. When the voice of authority ceases to echo the voice of Tradition, the faithful rightly ask: to whom, and to what, must our obedience be given? For obedience in the Church is not servile submission to the variable opinions of men, but the joyful adherence of the mind to what God has revealed once for all. It is the obedience of faith — oboedientia fidei — by which the soul bows before truth, not before expediency. When obedience is detached from truth, it becomes mere conformity; when truth is detached from obedience, it becomes pride. Only when both are united in charity does the Church remain whole.
Mater Populi Fidelis is presented as a refinement of devotion, an act of “pastoral clarity.” Yet what appears merciful to men may in fact wound heaven’s truth. The Church has never feared to proclaim the glories of the Mother of God; she has only feared to neglect them. From the Apostolic age to our own, it has been a mark of orthodoxy to magnify her privileges, for in magnifying her, the Church magnifies the Lord who chose her. Every age that has diminished Mary has soon diminished Christ. Her titles — Theotokos, Mediatrix, Co-Redemptrix — are not the adornments of sentiment but the necessary expressions of doctrine. Each title protects a mystery of faith; remove one, and the whole balance of truth begins to collapse.
To silence the Mother’s titles is, therefore, to muffle the voice of the Incarnation itself. For no Mary, no Jesus. The flesh by which the Word redeems us is the flesh she gave Him; her consent is the hinge upon which the world’s salvation turned. Grace does not abolish nature — it perfects it — and in Mary that perfection is complete. Her fiat was not merely a passive permission but an active cooperation with the divine will. In her, grace and freedom met in perfect harmony: the human will so united to the divine that her very “Be it done unto me” became the first note in the hymn of redemption. The Word became flesh not by divine decree alone, but through her living obedience.
Her compassion beneath the Cross was the consummation of that obedience. She stood, as St John records, when the apostles had fled — standing not merely in body but in faith. She stood beneath the storm of blasphemy, beneath the sword of Simeon’s prophecy, beneath the weight of every human sin. There, as Christ offered Himself for the life of the world, she offered the Son of her womb and the love of her heart. Her maternal anguish became an oblation united to His, so that in the single sacrifice of Calvary both Priest and Mother gave what was dearest to them: He, His life; she, her Son. And from that hour she received all men as her children.
To diminish this truth under pretext of “ecumenism” is to misunderstand both charity and unity. True charity does not flatter error; it redeems it. True unity is not achieved by negotiation but by conversion. The world was not saved by compromise between light and darkness, but by the blood of the Cross. Every time the Church hesitates to proclaim what is true for fear of division, she repeats the cowardice of Pilate: “What is truth?” Every time she trims the Gospel to suit the tastes of the age, she forgets that she was born from a Crucified God.
When, therefore, ecclesiastical authority speaks as though Mary’s co-operation were an embarrassment to the modern world, the faithful must remember that the obedience owed to men is measured by the obedience owed to God. The Church does not exist to please her critics; she exists to sanctify them. The shepherd’s staff is crooked indeed when it bends toward convenience rather than Calvary. To stand beneath the Cross with Mary is to stand in the truth — and in every age, it is truth, not diplomacy, that saves souls.
Ecumenism and the Temptation to Compromise
The Dicastery itself admitted that this prohibition was motivated partly by the wish to foster “greater ecumenical understanding” among Christians separated from the Catholic Church, for whom such titles were deemed “obstacles to unity.”² Yet here lies the gravest irony: to veil revealed truth in the name of unity is not to heal division but to multiply it. Unity without truth is not communion but confusion. True peace is not purchased by the silence of faith but by the harmony of souls in the same confession of Christ.
The only authentic ecumenism is conversion — the return of all who are separated to the one Fold under the one Shepherd (John 10:16)³. It cannot consist in trimming doctrine to avoid offence, nor in re-phrasing dogma to placate unbelief. To change the Church’s speech so that error may feel comfortable is not charity but deceit. The desire for unity is noble, but it must be unity in the truth that makes us free. When that truth is obscured, all we achieve is the illusion of agreement and the death of conviction.
Modern man prizes dialogue, but he fears definition. Dialogue, in its proper sense, is the exchange that leads souls to the truth; yet when dialogue becomes an end in itself, it degenerates into the polite coexistence of contradictions. The Church cannot be content to sit at round tables while souls drift toward perdition. The charity that once sent missionaries across oceans now seems afraid to cross the street. What began as the call of Christ — “Go, and teach all nations” — has been diluted into the empty courtesy of “listen and learn.”
True charity speaks the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15)⁴; false charity whispers half-truths and hides the Cross. The martyrs were not slain for ambiguity. They died not for “dialogue,” but for doctrine. St. Stephen did not win the crown of glory by avoiding offence, but by speaking the truth to those who gnashed their teeth against it. St. Polycarp, St. Thomas More, the English martyrs — none of them sought compromise with error; they bore witness to the reality that love without truth is not love at all.
The Church of our time risks forgetting that unity must be built upon conversion, not concession. “If I yet pleased men,” warns the Apostle, “I should not be the servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10)⁵. Yet many shepherds, anxious to be praised by the world, have begun to measure success by applause rather than by sanctity. They confuse the noise of consensus with the voice of the Spirit. But the Holy Ghost is not the author of confusion; He is the Spirit of truth, whose unity is wrought through baptismal faith and sacramental grace, not through the erasure of doctrine.
Consider the bitter fruit of false ecumenism: when the Church dilutes her witness, the world is not converted — it simply ceases to take her seriously. When she hides the Cross behind vague affirmations of goodwill, she ceases to be the light of the world and becomes merely one lamp among many, flickering in the fog. The scandal of the Cross cannot be removed without removing the Cross itself. The only way to make Christianity inoffensive is to make it meaningless.
The faithful must understand this clearly: to love our separated brethren is a command of Christ; to withhold the truth from them is a betrayal of Christ. We cannot invite men to the fullness of faith by pretending that fullness does not matter. We cannot heal division by amputating dogma. To suppress the Marian titles affirmed by the Magisterium, lest they offend those who reject the Mother, is to betray the Son. The Church was not founded to negotiate truth but to proclaim it; not to conform to the world, but to convert it.
The ecumenism of the saints was not a diplomacy of accommodation but a passion for conversion. It was the zeal of St. Peter preaching to the Jews and Gentiles alike, of St. Paul confronting idolatry at Athens, of St. Francis Xavier baptizing pagans on distant shores. Their unity was not a truce with error but the triumph of grace over division. To imitate them, the Church must rediscover her missionary heart. She must cease apologising for her dogmas and begin again to proclaim them. Her unity will not be restored by hiding the Mother of God, but by exalting her — for wherever Mary is honoured, Christ is known, and wherever she is silenced, the Gospel fades.
The Church’s task is not to make peace with the world but to win the world to peace in Christ. It is not the business of the Bride of Christ to apologise for her purity in the company of adulterous creeds. When she blushes for her motherhood, she ceases to be a mother and becomes a widow. When she forgets her Marian heart, she forgets how to bring souls to birth in grace. The more she hides the Virgin’s glory, the more she hides the glory of her own identity.
Therefore, let us reject this false ecumenism which disguises compromise as compassion. Let us cling to that true ecumenism which the saints practiced: the unity of all men in the one faith, the one baptism, the one Church, the one truth. For unity divorced from truth is treason to both.
The Faith Once Delivered and the Continuity of Catholic Tradition
Holy Scripture and the constant witness of the Church bear unanimous testimony to the Virgin’s singular participation in the Redemption wrought by Christ. She conceived the Redeemer by the power of the Holy Ghost (Luke 1:35)⁶, stood steadfast beneath the Cross (John 19:25–27)⁷, and was foretold from the beginning as the Woman whose seed would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15)⁸. As Eve once cooperated in man’s ruin, so Mary freely cooperated in his restoration. The whole rhythm of salvation turns upon that contrast: through the disobedience of one woman came death; through the obedience of another came life. St. Irenaeus, at the close of the second century, called her causa salutis nostrae — the cause of our salvation — for “as Eve by her disobedience became the cause of death, so Mary by her obedience became the cause of salvation.”⁹ St. Augustine echoed the same truth: “The woman who merited to bring forth Life merited thereby that life should return through her.” In her womb, obedience undid the knot of pride, and from her fiat flowed the stream of grace that has never ceased to water the Church.
This faith, born in Scripture and confirmed by the Fathers, matured through the centuries into the Church’s constant tradition. In the early centuries, the faithful instinctively perceived that Mary’s role was not marginal but central in God’s plan. She was the Ark of the New Covenant, the living tabernacle in which the Word took flesh; the new Eve, standing beside the new Adam in the drama of redemption. Her image adorned the catacombs; her name was invoked in the earliest prayers. When heresy threatened to divide the Church, it was her title Theotokos — “God-bearer” — that preserved the truth of the Incarnation against Nestorius and his followers. To defend her was to defend her Son’s divinity; to deny her was to dissolve the mystery of the Word made flesh.
By the tenth century, liturgical hymns and sermons were already venerating her as Redemptrix, and by the fifteenth century the faithful invoked her as Co-Redemptrix in public devotion.¹⁰ The Church did not invent these expressions; she recognised in them the faithful echo of her own heart. What was first the intuition of the saints became the prayer of the people, and in time, the teaching of the Popes. For as theology matures, it does not abandon what is old but makes explicit what has always been believed. The oak of doctrine grows from the acorn of revelation; and just as Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary was the flowering of the divine will revealed at Bethlehem, so the titles of Mary are the unfolding of the truths implicit in her motherhood.
Thus, Leo XIII (1885) approved prayers calling her corredentrice del mondo, “the Co-Redemptrix of the world.”¹¹ Pius X, that pope of orthodoxy and reform, confirmed the title in three separate decrees of the Holy Office between 1908 and 1914, recognising in it nothing contrary to the faith but rather a profound affirmation of the mystery of the Incarnation.¹² Benedict XV, in Inter Sodalicia (1918), gave the matter its most explicit formulation: “We may rightly say that she redeemed the human race together with Christ.”¹³ These are not the words of poetic enthusiasm but of papal theology. Pius XI, addressing pilgrims in 1933, declared: “By necessity, the Redeemer could not but associate His Mother in His work; for this reason we invoke her as Co-Redemptrix.”¹⁴ And Pius XII, who crowned the Marian century with a clarity worthy of the Fathers, affirmed in Mystici Corporis Christi that she “offered her Son to the Eternal Father on Calvary, together with the holocaust of her maternal rights and love,” adding in Mediator Dei that she is “Mediatrix of all graces.”¹⁵
The Second Vatican Council, far from abandoning this tradition, restated it with serenity and precision. “In suffering with Him as He died on the Cross,” the Council Fathers taught, “she cooperated in the work of the Saviour in an altogether singular way.” (Lumen Gentium §§56–61)¹⁶ Here we find the same faith clothed in conciliar formality: the doctrine remains, though phrased for a restless age. The Council did not invent Marian cooperation, nor did it demote her; it simply assumed what every previous century had confessed — that the Mother of God’s participation in the Redemption is unique, subordinate, and yet indispensable to the divine plan.
St. John Paul II, reading the Council in continuity, used the title Co-Redemptrix repeatedly between 1985 and 2000. In his address at the Shrine of Our Lady of Bonaria, he proclaimed: “Mary was spiritually crucified with her crucified Son; her role as Co-Redemptrix did not cease with the glorification of her Son.”¹⁷ His theology of the body extended also to the Body of the Church, showing how Mary’s maternal participation exemplifies the cooperation of every Christian soul with grace. In her, the Church contemplates her own vocation — to suffer with Christ, to bring forth souls into new life, to become, in a mystical sense, co-redeemers under the one Redeemer.
Thus the Church, from the catacombs to the Council, from the Fathers to the modern Popes, has spoken with one mind and one heart. The title Co-Redemptrix does not place Mary on equality with her divine Son; it proclaims that she cooperated with and under Him — that the Almighty, in His mercy, willed to redeem mankind not by bypassing human freedom but by ennobling it in one sinless Woman. In her, grace reached its human summit; in her, creation consented to its Creator. She is not the fountain of grace but the channel; not the source of redemption but its maternal instrument. Through her, the divine condescension touched the human race not abstractly but personally, not as a decree from heaven but as the embrace of a Mother.
To deny or suppress this truth, therefore, is not pastoral sensitivity but pastoral blindness. It ruptures the continuity of faith and introduces ambiguity where the saints and Popes have spoken with luminous simplicity. It deprives the faithful of the language by which the mysteries of salvation are most beautifully expressed. To take from the Church the title Co-Redemptrix is to take from her lips the word by which she has long confessed the depth of her gratitude to God. The Church may change her vesture, but she cannot change her voice.
As Professor Miravalle observes, “a public denial of the title Co-Redemptrix would gravely and negatively impact authentic Christian unity, since it would oppose the revealed truth of Scripture, the consistent voice of Tradition, and the sensus fidelium.”¹⁸ The faithful instinctively recognise that to honour the Mother is to honour the Son; to obscure her prerogatives is to diminish His glory. To obscure Mary’s office is to obscure the Incarnation itself. If the Church forgets the Mother, she will soon forget the Son who took flesh from her. Therefore, let us speak boldly what the ages have confessed humbly: that the Mother of God cooperated uniquely in the work of salvation, and that in honouring her, we safeguard the truth of Christ’s humanity and the splendour of divine mercy.
For as St. Louis de Montfort wrote, “Never was there, and never will there be, a creature who gives more glory to God than the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Her very being proclaims the logic of the Incarnation: that God’s grace does not destroy the natural order but elevates it; that He redeems not by rejecting the world He made, but by entering it through a woman. In her, heaven and earth meet; and through her, man learns how to say fiat again.
The Nature of True Obedience
Authentic obedience is never servility; it is the intelligent and loving submission of the will to divine truth. The Church does not command blind surrender, but enlightened assent to what God has revealed and entrusted to her keeping. Pastor Aeternus of the First Vatican Council teaches that the Holy Spirit was given to Peter’s successors “not to make known new doctrine, but to guard and faithfully expound the revelation handed down through the Apostles.”¹⁹ The Pope is the guardian of Tradition, not its author; his authority is ministerial, not creative. When he speaks rightly, he echoes the Word; when he deviates, he must himself be recalled to that same Word which he is bound to serve.
True obedience is therefore a participation in truth, not a suspension of conscience. It is the free act of a soul enlightened by faith, not the servile reflex of fear. The saints obeyed not because they were credulous, but because they believed in a God who cannot deceive. Their obedience was luminous, not blind — an obedience illuminated by understanding and inflamed by love. They obeyed authority precisely because they discerned in it the echo of Christ’s voice. When that echo fell silent, they clung to Christ Himself. For obedience is not primarily to men, but to the divine truth entrusted to men.
The Church has always taught that conscience is not an autonomous tribunal, but the application of divine law within the human heart. To obey God rather than men is not rebellion but fidelity when human commands contradict the divine order. Thus St. Peter, standing before the Sanhedrin, declared without hesitation: “We must obey God rather than men.” The same principle applies within the Church herself, for no human authority, not even the Supreme Pontiff, possesses power over the deposit of faith. He is its steward, not its master.
Therefore, when a papal or curial act appears to contradict or obscure what the Church has always taught, it loses its moral force. Authority is binding only when it is truthful; when it ceases to serve truth, it ceases to oblige conscience. The document Mater Populi Fidelis, being inconsistent with the prior Magisterium, cannot bind the faithful. It is disciplinary, not doctrinal — it attempts to regulate language, but it cannot erase the truths those titles enshrine. The divine constitution of the Church admits of no rupture between one era and another, for truth is one, and Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. To demand assent to a novelty that contradicts Tradition is to ask obedience to falsehood — an impossibility for any Catholic conscience.
The Council of Trent declared that all ecclesiastical discipline must be “wholesome and in conformity with sound doctrine.”²⁰ The Church’s laws exist to protect her dogmas, not to replace them. Likewise, Donum Veritatis permits theologians, when confronted by non-definitive statements that appear contrary to earlier teaching, to withhold assent — provided this is done with reverence, fidelity, and charity.²¹ Even the Code of Canon Law recognises the same principle: subordinates may suspend compliance with an order that is manifestly unlawful or contrary to the Church’s mind.²² Thus the Church, in her own legislation, admits that obedience without discernment is not virtue but weakness. True obedience never abandons reason; it perfects it in faith.
St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that obedience is a moral virtue, and like every virtue, it is bounded by right reason. It lies between the extremes of pride and servility. He writes, “It is better to obey God than men; and when the superior commands what is contrary to God, then the subject is bound to disobey.”²³ This is not an encouragement to defiance but a reminder of hierarchy: divine law stands above human law, eternal truth above temporal command. Even a pope is not infallible in every utterance; his authority is bounded by the perennial Magisterium. To resist error is therefore not disobedience but fidelity to the higher obedience owed to God.
Throughout history, the Church’s greatest defenders have exemplified this discernment. St. Athanasius resisted the majority of bishops when they faltered into Arianism, yet he was vindicated by time and by God. St. Catherine of Siena admonished popes to return from exile and restore reform, yet she never wavered in filial reverence. St. Paul resisted St. Peter to his face when the first Pope, out of human weakness, obscured the universality of the Gospel. Each of these saints teaches that authentic obedience may sometimes require holy resistance. Such resistance, when born of faith and charity, is not rebellion but purification.
The saints were not obedient to error but to grace. They bowed to authority because it reflected Christ; they resisted when it betrayed Him. So too must we. To refuse novelties that wound the deposit of faith is not schism but fidelity. When a father commands what dishonours the household, the son who disobeys preserves the family’s honour. Likewise, when churchmen attempt to dilute the faith, the faithful who hold fast preserve the Church herself.
This is not a call to insubordination but to integrity. True obedience is measured not by silence but by sanctity. The one who obeys truth obeys Christ Himself, even if this places him at odds with those who misrepresent Christ. The one who confesses what the saints confessed is not outside the Church but at her very heart. For the Church’s unity is the unity of truth, not the uniformity of error. To stand with Tradition is to stand with the living Magisterium in its continuity; to stand with novelty against Tradition is to oppose the very nature of the Church.
In our time, when many appeal to “synodality” or “discernment” as though these were virtues independent of truth, we must remember that discernment without doctrine is delusion, and synodality without faith is merely politics. The path of obedience is narrow, but it leads to freedom; the path of compromise is broad, but it leads to the loss of the soul. Therefore, let the faithful hold fast to the obedience of truth — humble before legitimate authority, but unyielding before error. For fidelity to Christ is the highest form of obedience, and He never contradicts Himself.
The Law of Prayer and the Law of Faith
Our forebears expressed the indissoluble bond between worship and belief in that sacred maxim: ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi — that the law of prayer establishes the law of faith.²⁴ This phrase, attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine, was not a mere aphorism but a theological axiom, summarising the Church’s living method of guarding the deposit of faith. The lex orandi and the lex credendi are not two separate realities but two aspects of the same mystery: the faith of the Church finds its purest expression in her prayer, and her prayer, in turn, safeguards the integrity of her faith.
The Church’s liturgy is not an ornament to theology but its living voice. In her prayers, her gestures, her silence, she confesses what she believes and believes what she confesses. The altar, the chant, the incense, the posture of the priest — all are doctrinal statements rendered in sacred sign. To touch the liturgy, therefore, is to touch doctrine; to change the language of prayer is to reshape the content of belief. Every heresy in history has sought, sooner or later, to alter the worship of the Church, because the devil knows that the surest way to change what men believe is to change what they pray.
In the early centuries, before creeds were formalised, the Church’s liturgy was her catechism. The faithful learned the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist by the prayers they heard and the rites they saw. The baptismal formula, the Eucharistic canon, the sign of the Cross — these were the Church’s first theology textbooks. Thus, when Prosper wrote that the law of prayer establishes the law of belief, he was describing a reality already ancient: that orthodoxy breathes through worship. If worship falters, faith soon suffocates.
To alter the lex orandi is therefore never a neutral act. When official prayer no longer names the Virgin as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix, the faithful will slowly cease to believe what those titles signify. The Church’s piety is her memory; to silence her traditional language is to induce amnesia in her children. Suppress the words, and the truths they convey wither from memory. Language, once sanctified, forms the channels of belief; to dam them is to starve the soul. This is why the saints, even amid persecution, preserved the integrity of the sacred liturgy — because they knew that right worship is the guardian of right faith.
Pius XII warned: “The liturgy is a profession of immutable faith.”²⁵ To change that profession without necessity is to endanger the mysteries it proclaims. When the Church ceases to sing what she believes, she begins to forget it. And when she forgets, the world forgets with her. For the Church is the memory of mankind; her liturgy is the heartbeat of salvation history. Every time a sacred word or gesture disappears from her worship, some aspect of the divine truth grows dim in the world’s consciousness.
This is why the suppression of traditional devotions or venerable titles, such as Co-Redemptrix or Mediatrix, carries consequences far beyond vocabulary. To forbid their use in prayer is to diminish their place in theology; to expel them from theology is to impoverish the faith. Once the Church stops praying as she has always prayed, she will soon stop believing as she has always believed. This is not speculation but history. Every age that tampered with the liturgy — from the iconoclasts of the eighth century to the rationalists of the eighteenth — saw a parallel decay in doctrine. Worship and belief rise and fall together, for they share one soul.
The Old Roman liturgy, venerable in its unbroken continuity, has always borne witness to this truth. Its collects, prefaces, and hymns express not only devotion but doctrine: the kingship of Christ, the intercession of the saints, the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the mediation of Mary. When that language is silenced, the faith it embodies begins to erode. The Novus Ordo reforms, though claiming to simplify, in practice impoverished the Church’s spiritual vocabulary. The altar was turned to face man instead of God, the silence of adoration replaced with dialogue, and many prayers of atonement and sacrifice were reduced or omitted. The faithful were told that nothing essential had changed — yet the law of prayer had been rewritten, and with it the perception of belief.
Today, we witness a similar danger in Mater Populi Fidelis. By discouraging the invocation of Mary as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix, it touches the same nerve as those earlier liturgical innovations: it proposes to refine devotion by diminishing doctrine. But truth cannot be refined by subtraction. To silence the language of the saints is not progress but regression; it is to sever the present from the living stream of faith that flows from the Upper Room to the altars of today.
The faithful must therefore hold fast to the Church’s ancient prayers and titles, not as relics of nostalgia but as vessels of truth. The liturgy, like the Virgin Mary herself, is a mother: she nourishes faith by repetition, by beauty, by the familiar rhythms of sanctity. When we pray the same words that our fathers prayed, we breathe the same faith they breathed. In that continuity lies the Church’s identity. To rupture it is to fracture her memory, and a Church that forgets her past cannot recognise her future.
Let us, then, guard with jealous reverence the law of prayer that our forefathers handed down. Let us invoke Our Lady with the titles she has borne for centuries, confident that to do so is to join the unbroken chorus of believers who have honoured her from the dawn of Christendom. For the lex orandi is the Church’s heartbeat: when it falters, the body weakens; when it is strong, the whole Church lives. To wound the lex orandi is to imperil the lex credendi. But to preserve both, through fidelity to Tradition, is to remain in the full light of truth.
The Peril of Pastoral Innovation
Modern ecclesiastics often appeal to “pastoral necessity” as a cloak for doctrinal revision. The word pastoral — once rich with apostolic meaning — has been stretched until it hides a multitude of evasions. It once described the shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep; now it too often means the bureaucrat who refuses to offend the wolves. But pastoral care, if it is to remain truly Catholic, must always serve truth, never disguise it. Charity divorced from clarity is counterfeit; mercy without truth is sentimentality.
Christ Himself was the Good Shepherd — Pastor bonus — but He was also the Truth. He led His flock not by compromise but by conversion. His mercy was never at the expense of His mission. When He forgave the adulterous woman, He said, “Go, and sin no more.” When He healed the paralytic, He first said, “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” Divine mercy never bypasses moral reality. Yet modern pastoralism pretends to do just that: it seeks to heal wounds by denying that they exist. It replaces the Cross with comfort and the call to repentance with reassurance. It baptises compromise as compassion.
The Church’s mission is to convert the world, not to conform to it. Yet under the banner of “renewal,” whole generations have witnessed the retreat of faith beneath the banner of progress. This inversion is the essence of modernism — that ancient heresy reborn as sentimentality — which insists that the Church must adapt her truths to the needs of each age. Pius X warned that modernism “perverts the eternal concept of truth by making it subject to change,” and he foresaw that its most dangerous form would not be open rebellion but “pastoral adaptation.” When pastors prefer the approval of men to the fidelity of God, they cease to shepherd souls and begin to manage decline.
The tragedy of our age is that pastoral has been pitted against doctrinal — as though the care of souls could ever be severed from the truth that saves them. But genuine pastoral wisdom flows from doctrine; it is the application of divine law to human lives. The confessor who absolves without contrition is no healer but an accomplice. The bishop who refuses to preach repentance for fear of losing popularity abandons the souls entrusted to him. The priest who replaces penance with affirmation ceases to be a physician of souls and becomes their undertaker. Every age of decadence in Church history has begun when doctrine was set aside “for pastoral reasons.”
Under the pretext of outreach, the faithful were deprived of their inheritance. The Novus Ordo Missae was presented as a friendly gesture to “modern man,” a bridge toward unity with Protestants — yet it dismantled the very altar on which unity with heaven had been maintained. The sacred language of sacrifice was softened; the altar turned toward the congregation; the priest was reimagined as presider rather than sacrificer. The gestures of adoration faded, and faith in the Real Presence withered with them. The people were told that nothing essential had changed, but they awoke to find that the vocabulary of faith had been rewritten and the supernatural eclipsed by the horizontal.
The architects of this pastoral revolution promised renewal, but the fruits have been decline. Vocations dwindled, faith collapsed, and the faithful were scattered. When worship was made to please man, man ceased to worship. The lex orandi had been altered, and with it the lex credendi. This was not accidental; it was the inevitable consequence of substituting human psychology for divine theology. The liturgy was redefined as assembly rather than sacrifice, participation replaced contemplation, and the transcendent was eclipsed by the therapeutic. In this new climate, the language of salvation was replaced by the language of wellbeing — the shepherd became a facilitator, and the sheep were left without a guide.
The same logic animates Traditionis Custodes (2021), which, under the guise of “pastoral necessity,” sought to restrict the Mass that had nourished the saints for centuries. The faithful who clung to the ancient rite were accused of division — yet it was the decree that divided them from their patrimony. The document claimed to preserve unity by suppressing diversity, but true unity rests on truth, not uniformity in error. It declared the lex orandi of all time to be “abrogated” for the sake of unity — a phrase unknown to the Fathers and unimaginable to the saints. The irony was complete: the Mass that had built the Church was now treated as a threat to her stability.
Now, in Mater Populi Fidelis, the same pastoral sophistry has migrated from the sanctuary to the realm of doctrine. What was once called Co-Redemptrix is branded “theologically inappropriate”; what was once sung in prayer is now forbidden for “ecumenical sensitivity.” As the altar was stripped of its silence and sacrifice, so the Mother of God is stripped of her titles and honour — all in the name of “prudence.” But prudence without fidelity becomes deceit. Authentic prudence is the practical application of wisdom; false prudence is the camouflage of fear. To “protect unity” by suppressing truth is to imitate the chief priests who said, “It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” Such logic crucifies truth anew.
Both Traditionis Custodes and Mater Populi Fidelis spring from the same delusion: that the faith can be made more acceptable by concealing its splendour. Yet the Church’s task is not to please men but to glorify God. To make peace with error by muting truth is not evangelisation but apostasy. St. Paul’s warning rings with renewed power: “If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.”²⁷ The Church must choose between popularity and prophecy; she cannot have both. The prophets were never “pastoral” by worldly standards, yet through their fidelity the people of God were saved.
This is the perennial law of renewal: every true reform has been a return to clarity, not a descent into compromise. St. Gregory the Great, reforming the clergy, did not dilute doctrine to win sympathy; he called his priests to penance and sanctity. St. Charles Borromeo, faced with scandal and laxity, restored discipline by fidelity to Trent, not by softening its demands. The saints reformed the Church not by appealing to fashion but by conforming to the Cross. Their “pastoral method” was sanctity; their “strategy” was conversion. And their reward was the salvation of souls.
Therefore, dear brethren, let us recognise the danger of this false pastoralism that dresses accommodation as compassion. Let us expose its poison with the antidote of truth. The true shepherd does not alter doctrine to fit his flock’s desires; he calls his flock to the pasture of holiness. The voice of Christ still speaks: “My sheep hear My voice.” The sheep do not change the Shepherd’s song; they follow it. And that song, echoing through the ages, is the unchanging melody of Tradition. To silence it in the name of pastoral sensitivity is to betray both the Shepherd and His sheep.
Let the Church therefore return to the courage of her saints and the simplicity of her faith. Let her remember that no age was ever converted by compromise, but only by conviction. The blood of martyrs, not the ink of committees, has redeemed the world. The Cross remains the only true pastoral programme, and the Mother who stood beneath it remains the model of all pastoral fidelity. To follow her is to stand unflinchingly at the foot of truth, no matter the cost.
Exhortation to the Faithful
Dear brethren, do not be dismayed by shifting policies or ambiguous decrees. These pass like clouds; the sun of truth remains. Hold fast to what the Church has always believed and prayed. Continue to honour the Blessed Virgin under her rightful titles of Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces. These names are not innovations, but the echoes of centuries of faith. To speak them is to join the chorus of saints and martyrs who confessed that “God became man through her, and through her we are brought to God.” Teach your children these truths; enshrine them in your homes and chapels; let them resound again from your altars and in your Rosaries. For if the faithful fall silent, even the stones will cry out.
You live in an age of noise and confusion, when many voices claim to speak for the Church while contradicting the faith that built her. Do not be troubled. The voice of Christ still speaks clearly to those who love Him. You have received the rule of faith, and you know the sound of the Shepherd’s voice. You need not follow every wind of novelty that blows through the hierarchy. The barque of Peter has weathered greater storms than these, and she will weather this one too — but only if her children cling to the mast of Tradition. Remember that truth does not evolve with fashion, nor holiness with convenience. What sanctified your forefathers will sanctify you; what saved the martyrs will save you still.
True obedience is obedience to truth. To obey those who oppose the faith is not obedience but confusion. To persevere in the ancient faith is not rebellion but fidelity to the Bride of Christ, who cannot deny her own voice. The Church lives by continuity, not novelty. When novelty intrudes, continuity must resist. This resistance is not disloyalty; it is the defence of loyalty itself. As St. Paul withstood St. Peter to his face, not in pride but in faith, so too the faithful may withstand error when it masquerades as authority. To stand with the saints of every age is to stand with the living Church, not against her.
Take courage, therefore, and remember the vocation of the Old Roman Apostolate — to preserve the faith whole and entire, without alteration or diminution; to guard the ancient liturgy; to keep alive the doctrine and devotion that sanctified our forebears. You have not been called to comfort but to witness; not to convenience but to sacrifice. The world demands compromise; God demands fidelity. In every age He raises up those who will not bow to idols, even when those idols wear episcopal robes or synodal slogans. To be faithful in such an age is to share in the Cross; but to bear that Cross is to reign with Christ.
Let your homes be schools of prayer, your chapels be beacons of truth, and your hearts be altars of charity. Teach the young that to honour Mary is to love Jesus more deeply; to defend her titles is to defend His Incarnation. Let your children grow hearing her name pronounced with reverence, and the saints’ names invoked with gratitude. Sing again the old hymns and litanies, for they carry within them the soul of the Church. Keep the feasts, observe the fasts, and frequent the sacraments. The enemy may change his tactics, but the weapons of victory remain the same: faith, prayer, and perseverance.
Above all, hold the Rosary in your hands and the Creed in your hearts. Pray for the Holy Father — not that he may please the world, but that he may once again confirm his brethren in the faith. Pray for priests, that they may preach boldly, offer reverently, and live purely. Pray for the bishops, that they may remember that their mitres are crowns of thorns, not emblems of power. Pray for yourselves, that you may not lose the joy of faith amid the trials of fidelity. The battle for truth is not fought only in Rome; it is fought in every parish, every home, and every heart. Your steadfastness, your prayers, and your sacrifices sustain the Church more than any decree or synod could ever do.
Do not be afraid to stand apart if standing apart means standing with Christ. The saints were always a minority before they became the cloud of witnesses. They were mocked as rigid, condemned as schismatic, and persecuted as obstinate — yet in their fidelity the Church was preserved. What you defend now, future generations will thank you for defending. You are custodians of a holy inheritance; guard it with reverence, transmit it with love, and suffer for it with joy. For fidelity to truth is the truest obedience, and the obedience of truth is the highest act of love.
Therefore, beloved in Christ, lift up your hearts. The darkness of confusion is deep, but dawn always follows Calvary. Let us stand with the Mother of Sorrows beneath the Cross of this age, confident that the Resurrection will vindicate her and all who have remained faithful. The world may sneer, prelates may scold, but the Immaculate Heart will triumph. When it does, may she find in us sons and daughters who never ceased to call her Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces — not because Rome commanded it, but because heaven revealed it.
Haec est via.
I.X.
Brichtelmestunensis Die VI Octavae Omnium Sanctorum, A.D. MMXXV
Oremus
Deus, fons omnis veritatis et gratiae, qui in Unigenito Filio tuo plenitudinem lucis revelasti, praesta nobis, quaesumus, ut, Spiritu Sancto roborati, in oboedientia veritatis perseveremus, nec umquam seducamur blanditiis erroris. Da Ecclesiae tuae constantiam in fide, et corda pastorum tuorum accende zelo pro veritate. Fac ut, exemplo Beatae Mariae Virginis, quae in humilitate cooperata est Redemptori, nos quoque in caritate et fide quotidie respondeamus gratiae tuae. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.
V. Maria, Mater Veritatis, R.Ora pro nobis, ut veritatem semper confiteamur in caritate.
O God, source of all truth and grace, who hast revealed the fullness of light in Thine Only-Begotten Son, grant us, we beseech Thee, strengthened by the Holy Ghost, to persevere in the obedience of truth, and never be led astray by the allurements of error. Give Thy Church constancy in faith, and enkindle the hearts of her shepherds with zeal for truth. Following the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who in humility cooperated with the Redeemer, may we too respond each day to Thy grace in charity and in faith. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
V. Mary, Mother of Truth, R. Pray for us, that we may ever confess the truth in charity.
¹ DDF, Doctrinal Note: The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Faithful (Mater Populi Fidelis), 3 Nov 2025; cf. Vatican News, “Doctrinal Note: Mother of the Faithful, Not Co-Redemptrix,” 3 Nov 2025. ² Ibid., Prefatory Explanation, §2. ³ John 10:16. ⁴ Ephesians 4:15. ⁵ Galatians 1:10. ⁶ Luke 1:35. ⁷ John 19:25–27. ⁸ Genesis 3:15. ⁹ St Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses III, 22, 4; cf. St Augustine, De Sancta Virginitate §6. ¹⁰ Miravalle, Mary Co-Redemptrix Is Catholic Tradition (2024). ¹¹ ASS 18 (1885), p. 93. ¹² AAS 41 (1908), p. 409; AAS 5 (1913), p. 364; AAS 6 (1914), pp. 108–109. ¹³ AAS 10 (1918), p. 182. ¹⁴ L’Osservatore Romano, 29 Apr 1933, p. 1. ¹⁵ AAS 35 (1943), pp. 247–248; Mediator Dei §90. ¹⁶ Lumen Gentium §§56–61 (1964). ¹⁷ Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II XXIII/1 (2000), p. 630. ¹⁸ Miravalle, Mary Co-Redemptrix Is Catholic Tradition (2024). ¹⁹ Pastor Aeternus, ch. 4 (1870). ²⁰ Council of Trent, Sess. XXII, ch. 4. ²¹ CDF, Donum Veritatis §§30–31 (1990). ²² Code of Canon Law, Canons 33 §1; 41 (1983). ²³ Summa Theologiae II-II, q.104, a.5. ²⁴ Prosper of Aquitaine, Indiculus, ch. 8. ²⁵ Mediator Dei, §46 (1947). ²⁶ Hebrews 13:8. ²⁷ Galatians 1:10.
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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.
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.
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)
When Our Lord told the sons of Zebedee, “You know not what you ask,”¹ He revealed that kingship in His Kingdom bears no likeness to the ambitions of men. For He reigns not by command but by sacrifice; not through armies, but through love. The throne of Christ is the Cross, and His crown is of thorns. Every other throne, every other crown, is legitimate only insofar as it reflects that mystery.
This is the heart of the doctrine proclaimed by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas: that Christ’s kingship is not confined to the sanctuary or the soul, but extends over nations, laws, and rulers—that “He must reign,” not merely in private hearts, but in social and political order.² The Social Reign of Christ the King is no abstraction; it is the blueprint of reality restored to grace. Without it, every state eventually becomes its own idol.
The Bourbon Appeal and the Crisis of France It is striking that, a century after Quas Primas, these truths should echo once again through the words of a French prince. Earlier this month, Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou and head of the historic House of Bourbon, declared: “The situation has never been so serious; the Fifth Republic is on the verge of collapse. My family has served France for centuries, and if France calls upon me, I will be at its service. The indispensable condition is that France desires the return of the monarchy—a monarchy above parties, unifying.”³
His words were not anachronistic but prophetic. They arose from a nation whose political structures have lost moral direction, whose secularism has bled into cynicism, and whose people hunger for meaning. The Fifth Republic endures in form but not in faith. The prince’s offer of service—“above parties, unifying”—speaks to the deeper truth that sovereignty without sanctity cannot save a nation.
France was once the Eldest Daughter of the Church, baptised with the tears of St. Remigius and consecrated by Clovis. Her kings, for all their failings, were anointed as lieutenants of Christ the King—vicars of divine order within the temporal realm. The glory of St. Louis IX, who built Sainte-Chapelle to enshrine the Crown of Thorns, was not that he ruled, but that he ruled in obedience to Christ. When Louis XVI forgave his executioners, he did so as one who knew that true kingship is cruciform. In them both, we see the image of Christ’s reign—authority purified by sacrifice.
From Christendom to the Republic of Man When France severed the bond between altar and throne in 1789, she inaugurated not liberty, but a new servitude: the worship of man in the place of God. As Joseph de Maistre warned, “Every nation has the government it deserves, for it has the religion it confesses.”⁴ Having expelled God from public life, modern states have enthroned the will of man as absolute. The result is instability, fragmentation, and despair. The secular republic has produced not unity but emptiness, not enlightenment but exhaustion.
Louis de Bourbon’s appeal is not nostalgia—it is a reminder that the Social Kingship of Christ is the only true foundation of freedom. The monarchy he envisions, “above parties,” is one that points beyond politics to Providence, one that restores the vertical order between heaven and earth. Such a vision is not antiquated; it is urgently prophetic.
The Hollow Crown of Britain Across the Channel, the same truth confronts us in inverse form. The British monarchy endures, but without the faith that once gave it meaning. The Coronation of King Charles III in 2023 was grand but spiritually impoverished. The words “defender of the Faith” have been replaced with “defender of faiths.”⁵ In striving to honour all, the Crown affirms none. What was once a covenant between monarch and God has become a contract between monarch and media.
The Coronation’s sacred oil still flowed, yet the divine Kingship it symbolised was no longer confessed. A Crown that once promised fidelity to the “laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel” now guards a civil creed of inclusivity—a religion of tolerance without truth. Britain’s monarchy, in so far as it mirrors the world rather than Christ, has ceased to image kingship; it has become merely decorative. The “Defender of Faith” has become custodian of relativism.
Here lies the tragedy: a Crown wedded to politics loses its soul, while a Crown consecrated to Christ becomes the conscience of the nation. When rulers cease to kneel before the altar, they eventually kneel before opinion.
The Social Reign and the Restoration of Order The kingship of Christ is no private devotion. As Pius XI wrote, “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”⁶ The Church’s mission, therefore, is not to retreat from the world but to reclaim it for its rightful King.
Louis de Bourbon’s words remind us that temporal authority, when rightly ordered, can serve as a visible sacrament of that greater Kingdom. The monarch anointed under God serves as father to his people precisely because he himself is subject to the Father of all. This is the model of hierarchy redeemed by humility—the antithesis of modern power politics.
The world calls this reactionary; the Church calls it reality. The throne, like the altar, must once again become a place of offering.
Britain, France, and the Two Temptations Both nations illustrate opposite temptations: France’s rejection of monarchy in the name of liberty, and Britain’s retention of monarchy at the cost of truth. The first killed the king; the second forgets the King of Kings. Yet both demonstrate that without the social reign of Christ, human authority collapses into either revolution or ritualism.
The renewal of monarchy, if it is to come, must therefore be Eucharistic—a renewal of sacrifice, not spectacle. To restore the crown is not to revive aristocracy, but to restore sanctity. The ruler must once again be a servant of Christ’s law, not of public mood. The same is true of every priest, politician, and parent. For all authority shares one source: “All power in heaven and on earth is given unto Me.”⁷
The Kingdom and Its Prayer When we pray Adveniat regnum tuum—“Thy Kingdom come”—we invoke not only the Second Coming but the sanctification of our present age. This prayer is the charter of Christendom. It proclaims that the laws of nations must conform to the moral law; that peace without justice is false; that liberty without truth is slavery. The reign of Christ is social because His redemption is universal.
The call for “Monarchy and God Again” is, in essence, a call for the restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ—for the re-evangelisation of culture through the conversion of rulers and the sanctification of law. France, once baptised by saints, and England, once consecrated as Our Lady’s dowry, must both rediscover that their national vocation lies in serving the divine.
The kingdoms of this world will pass away. The republics of men will crumble. But the Kingdom of Christ endures, because it is built not upon compromise but upon the Cross. The world awaits not the return of kings, but the return of Christ the King in public life, in conscience, in culture, and in law. Only then will liberty be true, and order be just.
Let every sceptre, every crown, and every constitution confess what the Church still dares to sing: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.
¹ Gospel according to St. Mark 10:38. ² Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (Encyclical on the Kingship of Christ), 11 December 1925, §§18–19. ³ “Louis de Bourbon prêt à servir la France si elle veut le retour de la monarchie,” Le Figaro, 10 October 2025. ⁴ Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797), ch. II. ⁵ The Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla, Official Liturgy (London: Church House Publishing, 2023), pp. 10–14. ⁶ Quas Primas, §19. ⁷ Gospel according to St. Matthew 28:18.
A gesture without conversion Tomorrow, in the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, His Majesty King Charles III — Supreme Governor of the Church of England — will kneel beside the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. He will be received as Royal Confrater of that venerable Benedictine basilica, where the Apostle to the Gentiles lies beneath the ancient words Ut unum sint — “that they may be one.”
A chair has been made for the occasion, carved in English oak and adorned with the royal arms. Its purpose, we are told, is to symbolise the friendship between Canterbury and Rome. Yet this is not friendship born of faith, nor unity grounded in truth. It is a gesture of diplomacy, not a sign of conversion — a symbol of goodwill without repentance, and of courtesy without confession.
The denial of the Sacrifice For the monarch being honoured is not returning to the faith of his forebears, but stands as the constitutional head of a communion that long ago repudiated the Apostolic See, denied the Sacrifice of the Mass, and enthroned Parliament above the altar of God. The Church of England’s own doctrinal formularies remain explicit: “The sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.”¹ In one sentence, the very heart of Catholic worship is rejected — the doctrine of the Holy Sacrifice that unites heaven and earth.
An irregular honour Even more disquieting is the personal irregularity that accompanies this royal recognition. The King is twice married, having for years lived in public adultery with his present consort — who herself was married in a Catholic ceremony to Andrew Parker Bowles, a union that, as public record confirms, was never annulled by the Church.² Thus, while her first marriage remains sacramentally binding, she is now styled Queen and received in papal circles with honour. The incongruity speaks for itself: an ecumenical gesture extended to those whose very marriage contradicts the indissolubility of the Sacrament.
The end of dialogue Meanwhile, the Church of England, over which the King presides, has confirmed the appointment of a woman to the See of Canterbury — a decisive act of apostasy that seals the final rupture with apostolic tradition and renders null any serious hope of reunion.³
Whatever promise once flickered in the ARCIC process — the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, established jointly by Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey in 1967 to seek doctrinal convergence — has now been extinguished.⁴ The ARCIC I Final Report (1981) expressed cautious optimism, affirming that “the Eucharist is a sacrifice because it is the memorial of Christ’s one sacrifice” and that “ordained ministry is a gift of God to his people.”⁵ Later ARCIC statements — The Gift of Authority (1999), Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005), and Walking Together on the Way (2017) — attempted to sustain this tone of progress, yet none restored doctrinal unity.⁶
Rome’s official responses, though courteous, have been clear: substantial agreement has not been achieved, and full communion remains impossible while the Anglican Communion persists in errors regarding Orders, moral theology, and sacramental discipline.⁷ Thus, by placing a woman in Augustine’s chair, Canterbury has extinguished any remaining theological credibility for reunion. The door, long narrowing through innovation, has now been slammed shut from within.
The creedless humanitarianism of our age But the greater tragedy lies not merely in the hollowness of this gesture, but in the ideological spirit that animates it. For both monarch and pontiff are shaped by the same pluralist creed — the modern superstition that truth must bow to inclusivity. The King, long an advocate of “faiths” in the plural, publicly stated that he wished to be known as “Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the Faith,” to signify his belief in the equal validity of all religions.⁸ Pope Leo XIV, for his part, has continued the post-conciliar trajectory of pluralist diplomacy: emphasising fraternity among religions and global harmony above the conversion of souls. His addresses on “the unity of humanity,” his renewal of the Document on Human Fraternity signed by his predecessor, and his insistence that the Church must “learn to listen to other paths of truth”⁹ reveal a conception of unity far removed from the missionary mandate of Christ.
What unites them is not creed, but a creedless humanitarianism — the gospel of coexistence, where religion is reduced to symbol and morality to sentiment. The meeting of King and Pope thus becomes the liturgy of modernity itself: a ceremony for a world that believes in everything and therefore in nothing.
The betrayal of witness Yet what does this spectacle mean for the faithful — for the descendants of England’s recusants, and for Catholics who still revere the martyrs who shed their blood for the Mass now dismissed as a “blasphemous fable”? What are they to make of such an “act of charity” emptied of the charity of truth? Those who hid priests in their homes, who whispered the Rosary under threat of death, who saw their families ruined for refusing the Oath of Supremacy — they did not endure so that popes might flatter kings or trade the Cross for concord. The men who died on Tyburn Tree, the women who perished in prison for harbouring a priest, did so out of love for the very faith now diluted into diplomacy.
To those English Catholics who still hold that faith, this event can only appear as betrayal — not of politics, but of the Gospel itself. For charity divorced from truth is not love but indulgence, and unity without conversion is not reconciliation but surrender. The Church’s mission is not to make all faiths comfortable, but to make all souls holy. When Peter’s successor forgets that, he ceases to confirm his brethren and begins to confuse them.
A call to prayer and witness This “empty chair” in St Paul’s, carved and gilded for a monarch who does not believe as the Church believes, stands as a parable of modern ecumenism itself: beautifully made, ceremoniously placed, and spiritually hollow. It asks to be filled — not with a king, nor with applause, but with truth, repentance, and the fire of faith.
If this gesture stirs anything, may it be the conscience of England. For unity cannot be staged; it must be sanctified. The only path to reunion remains the same now as in the days of Campion and More: conversion to the truth of Christ in His one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.
Let every faithful Catholic, then, take this moment not as cause for despair but as a summons to renewal. The collapse of visible unity is not the end of the Church’s mission but a reminder of it. We must become witnesses of authentic charity — rooted in truth, animated by prayer, and expressed through holiness of life. If false unity is made through ceremony, true unity will come only through sanctity.
Pray, then, for our nation — for her King, her people, and her clergy. Pray for the conversion of hearts, for courage in the face of compromise, and for the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary over indifference and unbelief. Let every home become again a small chapel of fidelity; let every Catholic life be a quiet act of reparation for the betrayal of truth.
For the unity Our Lord prayed for — that they may be one — will not be achieved through diplomacy or synodality, but through the Cross. The path to unity is the path of Calvary: truth preached, grace embraced, and love purified in sacrifice. Until that day dawns, the empty chair in the basilica of St Paul Outside the Wall’s will stand as both a rebuke and a promise — that unity without Christ is void, but unity in Christ will one day restore all things.
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, cuius Unigenitus Filius, Iesus Christus Pastor Bonus, dixit: “Et alias oves habeo, quae non sunt ex hoc ovili; et illas oportet me adducere, et vocem meam audient, et fiet unum ovile et unus pastor”; effunde, quaesumus, divitias benedictionum tuarum super Apostolatum Vetus Romanum, ut ad hoc serviat consilio tuo, oves perditas et errantes colligendo. Illumina, sanctifica, et vivifica illud per inhabitationem Spiritus Sancti, ut suspiciones et praeiudicia tollantur, ac reliquae oves, vocem veri Pastoris audientes et agnoscentes, ad unam ovilis tui unitatem perficiendam adducantur, in una sancta Ecclesia Catholica tua, sub sapienti ac amanti custodia Vicarii tui. Per eundem Iesum Christum, Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate eiusdem Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Almighty and everlasting God, Whose only begotten Son, Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd, has said, “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd”; let Thy rich and abundant blessing rest upon the Old Roman Apostolate, to the end that it may serve Thy purpose by gathering in the lost and straying sheep. Enlighten, sanctify, and quicken it by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, that suspicions and prejudices may be disarmed, and the other sheep being brought to hear and to know the voice of their true Shepherd thereby, all may be brought into full and perfect unity in the one fold of Thy Holy Catholic Church, under the wise and loving keeping of Thy Vicar, through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who with Thee and the Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth God, world without end. Amen.
More background information and analysis at Nuntiatoria
Footnotes ¹ Articles of Religion, Article XXXI, The Book of Common Prayer (1662): “Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross.” ² Aleteia, “Is Camilla Parker Bowles a Catholic?” 12 Feb 2022; Catholic Herald archives, “Camilla’s Marriage and Canon Law: Why No Annulment Was Granted,” 9 Apr 2005. ³ Associated Press, “Sarah Mullally Appointed First Woman Archbishop of Canterbury in Historic Move,” 18 Oct 2025. ⁴ Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, “Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC): Background,” http://www.christianunity.va. ⁵ ARCIC I Final Report (1981), §§ 5, 13–17, “Eucharistic Doctrine” and “Ministry and Ordination.” ⁶ ARCIC II documents: The Gift of Authority (1999), Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005); ARCIC III: Walking Together on the Way (2017); see anglicancommunion.org. ⁷ Official Response of the Holy See to ARCIC I Final Report (1991); Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Press Statement on ARCIC III (2017). ⁸ Charles, Prince of Wales, interview with BBC Panorama, “Defender of Faith,” 29 June 1994; Time Magazine, “Charles and the Faiths,” 3 Nov 2008. ⁹ Pope Leo XIV, “Address to the Ambassadors of the World Faith Forum,” 5 March 2025; L’Osservatore Romano, “Pope Leo Renews Commitment to the Abu Dhabi Human Fraternity Charter,” 7 March 2025.
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.
It began, as many moral crises do, with something small — a room, a rule, and a refusal to be silent. At Darlington Memorial Hospital in County Durham, a group of women working in one of Britain’s most trusted public institutions found that the ordinary expectation of modesty and safety could no longer be taken for granted. When a male colleague identifying as female began to use the women’s changing room — despite confirming that he was not taking hormones and was trying to conceive a child with his girlfriend — the women raised concerns. They did not call for punishment, only for privacy. But management’s response was to order them to undergo “re-education,” to expand their “mindset” and become more “inclusive.”¹
When twenty-six nurses signed a collective letter to human resources, they were removed from their own changing area and assigned to a converted office that opened directly onto a public corridor. The new space, they said, was degrading, exposed, and humiliating. One of the nurses, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, later described suffering panic attacks at the thought of changing in front of a biological male.² What began as a question of policy soon became a question of conscience.
The women sought help from the Christian Legal Centre, which began representing them in what is now an active employment tribunal case alleging harassment, indirect discrimination, and breach of workplace safety regulations.³ Their stand quickly drew public sympathy as ordinary people recognised in their plight something emblematic of a wider unease: the steady dismantling of boundaries once considered self-evident — between man and woman, truth and fiction, reality and ideology.
The nurses’ case inspired a petition launched by CitizenGO under the title Stand with Darlington Nurses for Safe Spaces for Women.⁴ The petition calls for government and NHS leaders to reaffirm women’s legal right to single-sex changing rooms and toilets, grounded in biological sex rather than subjective identity. By the end of 2024, nearly 50,000 people had signed, transforming what began as a local workplace dispute into a national cause.⁵ It stands now as a rallying point for those who refuse to see womanhood reduced to a feeling or belief.
On 28 October 2024, representatives of the nurses met with Health Secretary Wes Streeting in Whitehall to deliver the petition in person. Streeting, though a Labour minister, spoke with unexpected candour. “Sex is biological,” he said, “and single-sex spaces matter.”⁶ It was a rare moment in British politics — an acknowledgment that compassion cannot be divorced from truth. Yet it also highlighted the contradiction now at the heart of public policy: the attempt to uphold women’s rights while redefining what a woman is.
At issue is not mere etiquette but the law itself. Under the Equality Act 2010, “sex” and “gender reassignment” are both protected characteristics. NHS trusts have adopted internal policies allowing employees to use the facilities of their chosen gender identity, claiming to act in compliance with equality duties. Yet the same law allows for single-sex services and spaces “if it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”⁷ Recent judgments — including rulings cited by the Supreme Court and the Scottish appeals process — have reaffirmed that the term “woman” in legislation refers to biological sex, not self-identification.⁸ The contradiction, therefore, lies not in the law but in its misapplication.
For the Darlington nurses, this is not an abstract legal puzzle but a daily moral trial. They have spoken of losing faith in their profession’s leadership, of being mocked as “bigots,” and of finding solace only in the solidarity of their colleagues and the prayers of strangers. Their testimony cuts through the euphemisms of officialdom: they are not asking for privilege, only for the restoration of common sense — that women should not be compelled to undress beside men, however they identify.
The Trust’s “Transitioning in the Workplace” policy, which first allowed the disputed access, remains under review.⁹ The Health and Safety Executive’s 1992 regulations require employers to provide separate facilities for men and women unless private single cubicles are available.¹⁰ Yet such statutory safeguards mean little when administrators, afraid of controversy, interpret every protest as prejudice. In this sense, the Darlington affair reveals more than one institution’s confusion; it exposes the moral cowardice of a nation that no longer believes it may distinguish between truth and error without apology.
The Christian understanding of the body as a revelation of divine order offers an antidote to such confusion. “Male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27) is not a social construct but a statement of ontology. From this truth flow the principles of modesty, privacy, and respect — not as concessions to fragility but as protections of human dignity. A society that denies these foundations cannot long defend the vulnerable, for it loses the very language of protection. When the nurses of Darlington refused to be silent, they acted not merely as employees defending workplace rights, but as witnesses to a deeper reality: that compassion divorced from truth becomes cruelty disguised as care.
To sign the petition in solidarity with these women is not an act of partisanship, but of conscience. It is a declaration that biological truth and moral integrity are not negotiable, that every woman deserves safety and dignity in her workplace, and that society must not sacrifice reality to ideology. The quiet courage of these nurses invites each of us to stand with them — for when truth is silenced in the hospital, it will soon be silenced everywhere.
In every age there are those who stand quietly against the prevailing wind, reminding the world that conscience still breathes beneath the bureaucracy. The Darlington nurses did not seek fame, yet their steadfastness has compelled both politicians and citizens to confront the consequences of ideological conformity. Whether their legal case succeeds or fails, their example has already begun to restore moral clarity. For in defending the meaning of womanhood, they have defended the very notion that truth can still be spoken without fear.
Christian Concern, Safe Spaces for Women: Nurses Meet with Health Secretary, 2024.
Christian Concern, Darlington Nurses Given “Dehumanising” Changing Room, 2024.
Christian Legal Centre, Case File: Darlington Nurses, 2024.
CitizenGO, Stand with Darlington Nurses for Safe Spaces for Women, accessed October 2025.
Christian Concern, Safe Spaces for Women: Nurses Meet with Health Secretary, 2024.
Ibid.
Equality Act 2010, c. 15, Schedule 3, Part 7, s. 26.
For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers [2022] CSIH 4; Re Sex Matters [2023] UKSC 33.
The Times, “NHS Trust Policy Allowed Biological Men to Use Women’s Changing Room,” 2 Nov 2024.
Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, SI 1992/3004, Reg. 20.
