If I had somehow found myself sitting around a table with Pope Leo and his advisers as they planned this visit to France, I think the first question I would have asked would have been a very simple one: what, when the aircraft takes off again at the end of these few days, do we actually want to have achieved?

It sounds obvious, but I think it's the most important question to ask, because a papal visit can very easily become a succession of speeches, meetings, ceremonies and carefully negotiated encounters, all perfectly worthwhile in themselves, but without any single idea being communicated strongly enough to remain in the national imagination once the Pope has gone home. Leo has only a few days in France and his presence there will be really important to a lot of people, but he cannot reverse generations of secularisation, rebuild parish life, restore vocations or address every political and social problem confronting the country, and so I would want to think really carefully about the thing France most needs to hear from the successor of St Peter at this particular moment in its history and return to it throughout the visit.

For me, the leitmotif would be something along the lines of: France, remember who you are, rediscover who man is, and do not be afraid to rediscover God.

I don't mean that as a nostalgic appeal for France to pretend that the last two hundred years never happened, or as some romantic attempt to recreate an imagined Catholic golden age. France is not going back to the thirteenth century, and evangelisation cannot consist in wishing that it might. What I mean is that France has been engaged for a very long time in one of the great experiments of modern European civilisation: the attempt to construct a society in which Christianity becomes progressively less important to the way people understand themselves, their families, their communities and ultimately the purpose of human existence.

The promise underlying that experiment has been enormously powerful. As religious belief receded, we were going to become freer and more rational; ancient moral constraints would fall away; material prosperity, technological progress and individual autonomy would give men and women possibilities their ancestors could scarcely have imagined. We would retain the humanitarian and moral achievements of Christian civilisation while gradually dispensing with the metaphysical claims upon which so much of that civilisation had been built.

If I were Leo, I think I would have the courage to ask France, very gently and without the slightest sense of triumphalism, how that experiment is actually going. Are people happier? Are families stronger? Are young people more hopeful about their futures? Has unprecedented material prosperity satisfied the human longing for meaning? Has sexual liberation produced more secure relationships? Has radical individual autonomy made us less lonely? Has removing God from the centre of our culture made the great questions of suffering, love, death, purpose and human dignity disappear, or have we simply deprived ourselves of the language in which previous generations attempted to answer them? Above all, I think I would ask one question repeatedly, particularly when speaking to young people: what are we telling our children that their lives are ultimately for?

This is where I think the Church has something much more profound to offer modern France than a list of things Catholicism opposes. Christianity offers an account of what a human being actually is, and that account is desperately needed in a culture which increasingly appears confused about the answer.

The Christian claim is that you are not an accidental collection of matter which happens to be conscious for a few decades between birth and oblivion, nor are you simply a consumer whose purpose is to accumulate experiences before death. Your value is not determined by your productivity, intelligence, health, attractiveness, wealth or usefulness to somebody else. You are created deliberately and loved before you achieve anything. Your body has meaning, your freedom has a purpose beyond the satisfaction of appetite, love necessarily involves sacrifice, suffering does not render a life worthless, and the weak and dependent remain infinitely valuable even when they can offer nothing economically useful in return.

Most importantly, Christianity claims that all of this is not simply a comforting philosophy devised to make existence bearable. It rests upon an astonishing historical claim: that God entered His creation in the person of Jesus Christ, suffered, died and rose again, and that consequently neither suffering nor death has the final word. If that were the central argument, I would then use each stage of the French visit to develop another part of it rather than treating every audience as an entirely separate event.

At the Élysée, I would speak about the limits of politics and remind those exercising political power that human dignity is not something bestowed by the state but something the state is morally obliged to recognise. Governments can create laws and institutions, but they cannot manufacture the meaning of human existence, and history should make us extremely wary whenever political authority begins to imagine that the value of human life is something which can be defined according to utility, dependency or circumstance.

At UNESCO, the same argument could be applied to technology and artificial intelligence. The most important question about AI is surely not simply how intelligent our machines can become, but what kind of human beings we are becoming while we build them. Our technological power has developed at an astonishing speed, but capability and wisdom are not the same thing, and a civilisation which continually asks whether something can be done without first developing a coherent understanding of whether it should be done risks becoming immensely powerful without becoming correspondingly wise.

Then there is Notre-Dame, where the argument becomes almost tangible. France magnificently restored that cathedral after the terrible fire of 2019, and the achievement deserves admiration, but Notre-Dame was not built merely because medieval Frenchmen wanted Paris to possess an exceptionally beautiful building. Those stones were raised by generations of people who believed something to be true. The altar, the windows, the sculptures, the orientation of the building and those extraordinary vaults all belong to a coherent Christian understanding of reality. France has demonstrated that it knows how to preserve the monuments of Christian civilisation; the more interesting question is whether it still understands the faith which made those monuments intelligible.

But if I were Leo, it would be the encounter with young people which I would regard as perhaps the greatest opportunity of the entire journey, because I suspect they need something rather more substantial than another general encouragement to hope.

I would tell them that our culture has given them a deeply inadequate definition of freedom. Freedom cannot simply mean keeping every possibility permanently available, because the greatest things human beings ever do require us to close possibilities down. Marriage, parenthood, friendship, vocation and faith become meaningful precisely because we commit ourselves to something beyond ourselves. A person committed to nothing may theoretically remain completely free, but eventually he may also discover that he belongs nowhere and to nobody.

I would tell them that they do not have to spend their lives endlessly constructing an identity from nothing, as though every human being arrives in the world as a blank sheet upon which an entirely autonomous self must be invented. I would acknowledge their loneliness and anxiety rather than dismissing them as the inevitable complaints of youth, and ask whether a culture offering almost limitless digital connection, sexual freedom, entertainment and consumer choice has actually delivered the happiness it promised.

And then, unapologetically, I would tell them about Christ.

Not a carefully diluted Christ translated into the therapeutic vocabulary of the age until there is almost nothing distinctively Christian left, but the Christ who tells the rich young man that possessions cannot satisfy him; who tells the woman at the well that the thirst she is trying to satisfy is deeper than she realises; who tells frightened disciples not to be afraid; who offers forgiveness to sinners; who weeps at the grave of Lazarus and then tells Martha that death is not the end; and who makes the profoundly countercultural claim that the person who spends his life desperately trying to preserve it will ultimately lose it, while the person willing to give his life away may finally discover what life is for.

I would also make Leo's encounter with the catechumens and newly baptised Catholics central to the visit, because something genuinely interesting is happening among young French people. Thousands are approaching the Church for baptism, many of them having grown up without the cultural Catholicism their grandparents would once have taken for granted. Rather than immediately telling them what their conversion means for the Church, I would want the Pope to ask them what they had discovered.

What did you find here that the surrounding culture was unable to give you? What made you walk into a Catholic church when so many previous generations were walking out? What did you encounter in Christianity which persuaded you not merely to admire it but to change your life because of it?

And then I would listen carefully to the answers, because those young converts may understand something about the evangelisation of post-Christian Europe which those of us who inherited Christianity can easily miss.

Finally Leo will go to Lourdes, and I can hardly imagine a better place to bring the argument together. After the presidential palace and UNESCO, after the speeches, diplomatic receptions and intellectual discussion about the future of Europe, the Pope will arrive at a grotto where an impoverished fourteen-year-old girl once knelt in the mud and said she had encountered the Mother of God.

There is something wonderfully subversive about that progression. The modern world instinctively looks upwards towards power, wealth, expertise, celebrity and influence, whereas Christianity repeatedly directs our attention downwards: towards a stable in Bethlehem, towards fishermen, lepers and the poor, towards a man nailed to a Cross and, at Lourdes, towards Bernadette Soubirous kneeling beside a muddy grotto while respectable society wondered whether she had lost her mind.

That is where I think I would want to leave France, not with an accusation but with an invitation to reconsider the direction in which modern European civilisation has been travelling. France has tried extraordinary material prosperity, consumerism, sexual liberation and radical individual autonomy. It has increasingly tried constructing a public culture in which God is unnecessary to the great questions of human existence. It seems perfectly reasonable, after several generations of this experiment, to ask whether it has delivered the flourishing it promised and whether the loneliness, anxiety, demographic collapse and loss of meaning visible across so much of modern Europe might suggest that something essential has been forgotten.

Christianity does not ultimately ask France merely to preserve its cathedrals, admire its saints or remember that its history was once Catholic. Those things matter, but they are not evangelisation. The genuinely unsettling Christian proposition is that the faith which produced so much of the civilisation modern France still cherishes might not simply be historically interesting or culturally useful…It might actually be true.

If I were advising Pope Leo, that is the possibility I would want hanging in the air after he had gone home. I would want a young Frenchman who heard him at the Stade de France, a politician who heard him at the Élysée, an intellectual who heard him at UNESCO and an ordinary family who encountered the visit through television or social media to find themselves returning to the same question. Perhaps the crisis confronting modern France is not simply that it has forgotten part of its history. Perhaps, somewhere along the way, it has forgotten something about what a human being is. And perhaps the answer is not to travel further down the same road, but to turn around and look again at what was left behind.

France, remember who you are, rediscover who man is, and do not be afraid to rediscover God.

On 24th September 2026, in St Louis, the Church beatified Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, a man whose voice carried the Catholic faith into millions of homes and whose work for the missions carried his concern far beyond the audience he could see. The ceremony offers an occasion to ask what made his witness extraordinary. Christ commanded his disciples to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations; Sheen recognised that, in the twentieth century, the journey into that world might begin at a radio microphone or before a television camera, while its horizon remained the conversion of souls and the universal mission of the Church.

Beginning with The Catholic Hour on radio in 1930, Sheen learned to address people who had never entered a Catholic church and might never have sought out a priest. Later, Life Is Worth Living brought theological and moral argument to a vast television audience without dumbing down or asking viewers to leave their intelligence at the door. He could speak of sin, sacrifice, the Virgin Mary and the Cross in the language of a common human predicament, drawing a listener from an apparently ordinary question towards the claims of Christ. As national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith from 1950, he also supported the Church’s missions across the world. His broadcasting and his missionary work belonged to the same vocation: the Gospel was given to be proclaimed to everyone.

Even Pope Leo XIV has spoken of Sheen as someone whose evangelisation he witnessed while growing up. That personal recollection captures something numbers cannot. Sheen entered homes through a medium commonly assumed to belong to entertainment and commerce, and spoke there of eternity. He understood how to use the instruments of his age without allowing those instruments to dictate the content of the faith. At the centre of his preaching stood neither a programme of social improvement nor a vague assurance that life possessed spiritual meaning, but Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, calling men and women to conversion.

It is consequently strange that arguments surrounding his beatification have come to turn upon one of his darkest warnings. In 1947 Sheen described an Antichrist who would imitate Christian concern for humanity while separating it from repentance and the fatherhood of God. He foresaw a counterfeit Church, an “ape of the Church”, retaining an outward resemblance to the real thing while being emptied of its divine content. Some Catholics now invoke those words to suggest that the Church governed from Rome has become the counterfeit he anticipated. Yet among traditionalists who welcome that interpretation are also critics who oppose Sheen’s beatification because of his praise for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The irony deserves more than a clever observation, for it exposes how readily Sheen can be treated as authoritative when his language appears to condemn the Vatican and unreliable when his judgement complicates a preferred account of Catholic orthodoxy.

The objection concerning Teilhard is substantial, and devotion to Sheen gains nothing by minimising it. In Footprints in a Darkened Forest, published in 1967, Sheen treated Teilhard’s attempt to understand Christianity within an evolutionary vision of the universe with unmistakable sympathy. He was drawn to a picture of creation moving towards Christ and to the ambition of presenting the faith on a scale equal to the immensity disclosed by modern science. His admiration went so far that he predicted that Teilhard might eventually be recognised as a spiritual genius of the twentieth century, once arguments over his vocabulary had faded. Such praise cannot be reduced to an isolated courtesy or a passing remark.

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Last Wednesday, the Vatican released A Journey of Hope: Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, published jointly by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue (you can read it in full on the Vatican website here).

Importantly, this is not merely an unofficial study document. Leo XIV approved the Note on 22 June 2026 and ordered its publication, with his approval recorded ex audientia at the end. The expression means that the approval was given during an audience with the Holy Father. In other words, Leo has authorised its publication and publicly associated his pontificate with its teaching. It is a Note rather than an encyclical, apostolic exhortation or declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Papal approval ex audientia confirms that the Note was issued with Leo XIV’s knowledge and authority, but it does not necessarily mean that he has formally made every formulation his own as an act of the papal Magisterium, particularly when the approval was not given in forma specifica. Nevertheless, the document cannot reasonably be dismissed as three Vatican departments freelancing. It is an official, papally approved expression of the Holy See’s present theological and pastoral approach to Nostra Aetate.

The document is doctrinally more careful than much of its early presentation on social media would suggest, but it is also theologically uneven. Its explicit Christology provides a strong orthodox interpretative key, while its weakest passages occur where the vocabulary shifts from Christology and soteriology into the more elastic language of fraternity, encounter, otherness, mutual enrichment and dialogue.

Perhaps most significantly for assessing Leo XIV, this is not merely a retrospective celebration of Vatican II. Leo has formally approved a document which presents Pope Francis’s programme of fraternity and interreligious encounter as part of a continuous trajectory extending from Paul VI through John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis and Leo himself. At the same time, the Note deliberately surrounds that programme with considerably stronger language about doctrinal identity, Christ’s unique redemption, evangelisation and the rejection of syncretism than one might imagine from the extracts currently circulating widely on social media. It is therefore an official, papally approved reaffirmation of Nostra Aetate for the present day, defending interreligious dialogue and fraternity while attempting to anchor them in the uniqueness of Christ, the missionary nature of the Church and the rejection of religious relativism. These are all questions at the centre of the present controversy within the Church and are especially pertinent in the aftermath of the SSPX episcopal consecrations at Écône.

Although the Vatican II Declaration Dignitatis Humanae probably represents the clearest doctrinal fault line, Nostra Aetate forms another important part of this dispute. The SSPX argues that the assertion in Dignitatis Humanae of a civil right to religious liberty cannot be reconciled straightforwardly with the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Magisterium, particularly Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos, Pius IX’s Quanta Cura and Syllabus of Errors, and Leo XIII’s teaching concerning the Catholic state. Its objection is not simply to the toleration of false religions for the sake of the common good, since traditional theology already allowed for that. It concerns whether immunity from coercion in religious matters constitutes a natural right extending even to the public manifestation of religious error. Defenders of Dignitatis Humanae reply that the Council did not recognise a moral right to religious error, still less declare all religions equally true, rather it recognised a limited civil right to immunity from coercion, grounded in the dignity of the human person and the fact that faith must be embraced freely. They argue that the earlier condemnations were directed principally against religious indifferentism and an unlimited freedom founded upon individual autonomy, whereas the Council addressed the narrower question of whether the state may compel or prevent religious acts within the requirements of a just public order. Dignitatis Humanae itself insisted that it left intact traditional Catholic teaching concerning the duties of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ. The dispute is therefore whether this distinction represents an authentic doctrinal development or an attempted reconciliation which does not finally resolve the contradiction.

Nostra Aetate represents another dimension of the problem, particularly regarding Judaism, Islam and the positive assessment of elements found within non-Christian religions. Strictly speaking, however, the SSPX’s wider objection to ecumenism is directed at Unitatis Redintegratio and Lumen Gentium as much as, and arguably more than, Nostra Aetate. Its concern is that separated Christian communities and non-Christian religions appear to have acquired a positive ecclesial or salvific significance which traditional Catholic theology had not previously attributed to them in the same way.

Memorably, during our discussion with Bishop Athanasius Schneider, he raised Lumen Gentium §16, which says of Muslims that “together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day”.

Bishop Schneider explicitly rejects this phrasing, regarding its apparent implication that Catholics and Muslims participate in a common act of adoration as highly ambiguous and theologically erroneous. His objection rests upon the distinction between a natural recognition of God, attainable through reason, and the supernatural knowledge of God given through revelation and faith in Christ. Muslims may intend to worship the one Creator, but they do not know or worship him through the Trinitarian revelation, divine adoption and sacramental life given in Christ. Schneider therefore argues that placing Muslim and Christian worship on the same plane risks obscuring the radically distinctive filial relationship with God into which Christians are incorporated through Christ.

At the deepest level, these apparently distinct SSPX objections converge upon the doctrine extra Ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the Church there is no salvation. The Society argues that the cumulative effect of Lumen Gentium, Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae has been to obscure, qualify or practically abandon the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation. If non-Catholic religions are presented positively, their adherents appear to worship God alongside Catholics, and their public propagation is protected as a natural right, the SSPX asks what substantive meaning remains in the claim that the Church is the unique ark of salvation. Its accusation is therefore not merely that individual conciliar formulations are ambiguous, but that together they disclose a fundamentally altered understanding of the Church’s relationship to religious error and the salvation of those outside her visible boundaries.

I examined this deeper accusation back in March, as the SSPX consecrations loomed. I included a clip from a homily by SSPX Bishop Bernard Fellay in which he asserted that the Vatican no longer teaches extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, before demonstrating from the relevant documents that this is simply not the case.

The SSPX warning has real force insofar as the possibility of salvation outside visible Catholic communion has too often been transformed into the assumption that sincere adherence to almost any religion is itself salvific, rendering conversion, baptism and incorporation into the Church practically unnecessary. Yet its polemic can run into the opposite error by treating extra Ecclesiam nulla salus too mechanically, as though visible membership and correct profession were sufficient for salvation, while a person who truly loves Christ and seeks to obey him could be condemned merely because, through ignorance or misapprehension, he has not recognised the Catholic Church as the Church Christ founded. Vatican II perceived this genuine tension. It did not deny that all salvation comes through Christ and possesses an essential relationship to his Church; rather, it attempted, however imperfectly, to explain how that doctrine applies amid the complexities of conscience, culpability, invincible ignorance, implicit desire and the hidden operation of grace. The Council’s formulations may subsequently have been stretched towards indifferentism, but the theological and pastoral questions with which it wrestled cannot responsibly be resolved by repeating the ancient formula without also explaining its full meaning.

The SSPX criticism of Nostra Aetate might be summarised in the form of a question: how can the Church move from warning against religious indifferentism and common religious activity with false religions to speaking positively about interreligious dialogue, the truths found within other religions and the continuing theological significance of Judaism without changing the underlying ecclesiology and soteriology?

A Journey of Hope does attempt to answer this. Indeed, its authors appear conscious that they are addressing precisely this problem. Paragraph 3 almost formulates it explicitly: “How can fidelity to Christian identity be reconciled with a sincere openness to otherness?”

The Note’s answer is essentially that the Church has changed her mode of engagement with other religions without changing her doctrine concerning Christ, revelation and salvation. Such a development was not without reason. The unprecedented proximity of religions in an increasingly interconnected world, the collapse of the old confessional political order, the experience of religious violence and persecution, the legacy of colonialism and above all, the catastrophe of the Shoah required the Church to examine not only what she taught about other religions, but how Christians had spoken about and treated their adherents. Dialogue also represented a retrieval of principles already present within Catholic tradition: the dignity of every person created in the image of God, the truths accessible through natural reason, the “seeds of the Word” discernible among the nations, the universal operation of divine providence and the insistence that faith, by its nature, cannot be coerced.

Such a change is possible because doctrine and its pastoral application are not identical. The truth that Christ is the sole Redeemer does not dictate hostility towards those who do not yet recognise him; on the contrary, Christian charity may require patient listening, cooperation for the common good and the removal of historical prejudices which obstruct the reception of the Gospel. A new mode of engagement need not therefore imply a new doctrine, provided that dialogue remains governed by the truths it is intended to communicate and ultimately ordered towards Christ. That is the central claim running through A Journey of Hope. The important question is whether the Note successfully demonstrates it, or whether the changed pastoral posture has begun quietly to alter the doctrinal content it claims merely to express in a different way.

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Newly published Vatican records have provided a rare glimpse into how the restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass are being administered under Pope Leo XIV.

During 2025, new or renewed permission was granted for Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal to be celebrated in 55 parish churches across 33 dioceses, according to an analysis of the Dicastery for Divine Worship’s Summarium Decretorum by Vatican correspondent Michael Haynes.

The majority were not permissions for entirely new celebrations, but renewals of existing arrangements, generally for another two years. Seven of the relevant decrees were issued while Pope Francis was still alive, with the remainder coming after the election of Pope Leo XIV. (See report here)

On its own it would be impossible to say that this amounts to the beginning of a restoration of the Traditional Latin Mass under Leo. Indeed, the figures are remarkably similar to those for 2024, when around 52 parish churches in 33 dioceses received new or renewed permission. Importantly, these figures from the Vatican do not constitute a census of every Traditional Latin Mass currently being celebrated, they exclude permissions which were not due for renewal during the year, as well as various personal parishes, shrines and churches administered by traditional priestly institutes.

Nevertheless, buried beneath the statistics is something considerably more revealing about the position in which traditional Catholics now find themselves. Under Pope Francis’s 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, diocesan bishops were instructed to provide locations for Catholics attached to the older Missal, but specifically “not however in the parochial churches”. The Dicastery for Divine Worship subsequently provided a mechanism by which bishops could request an exemption when no suitable church, chapel or oratory was available. Francis confirmed in 2023 that the authority to grant such dispensations was specifically reserved to the Holy See.

But Cardinal Arthur Roche’s December 2021 Responsa ad dubia went considerably further in explaining the thinking behind the restriction. The exclusion of the parish church, the Dicastery stated, was intended to establish that celebration according to the previous Missal “is not part of the ordinary life of the parish community”. Even where Rome permits the Traditional Mass to take place in a parish church, the Responsa states that it should not appear in the parish Mass schedule and should not take place simultaneously with the pastoral activities of the parish. If a suitable alternative venue subsequently becomes available, the permission is supposed to be withdrawn.

The practical significance of these Vatican dispensations becomes much clearer when set against what has happened to traditional Catholic communities elsewhere, particularly in the United States, where two dioceses have recently experienced significant changes to their provision of the older liturgy. In the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, Bishop Michael Martin moved to end celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass in the four parish churches where established communities had been attending it. His predecessor, Bishop Peter Jugis, had obtained temporary permission from the Holy See allowing those celebrations to continue. Martin’s decision proved particularly controversial because the four affected pastors reportedly appealed to him to seek another extension from Rome. They warned that Catholics attached to the traditional liturgy had often felt “marginalised and discriminated against” and argued that considerable pastoral work had been undertaken to establish trust between these communities and their parishes. Nevertheless, the parish celebrations ended and the diocesan Traditional Latin Mass was concentrated at the Chapel of the Little Flower in Mooresville.

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Written by Dr Anthony McCarthy for Catholic Unscripted

In The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution the historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala notes approvingly the remark of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) that “what any persons may freely do with respect to sexual relations should be deemed to be an unimportant and purely private matter, which concerns no-one but themselves.” Mill later recorded in his Diary that holding men and women to account for such things, “will one day be thought one of the superstitions and barbarisms of the infancy of the human race.”

Such ‘superstitions’ remained socially powerful in Mill’s world yet were vulnerable to critique. The Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century had helped shape the morals of the earlier part of the nineteenth, supported by the higher regard accorded to the Anglican Church. The rapid rise in the status of naval chaplains during the period is evidence of this different emphasis by the time of the early nineteenth century. Yet by the end of that century, besotted as it was with the idol of progress, secularism had made huge inroads both at elite and lower levels of society. Darwin and German Biblical Criticism had left their unsettling marks, amidst rising prosperity, the influx of people to the growing urban centres and extraordinarily rapid social changes.

Such cultural changes produced deep contradictions in Victorian England. From Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche was to observe of the English:

“They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency…If the English really do believe they will know, of their own accord, ‘intuitively’, what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt…”

John Stuart Mill stands at the forefront of thinkers who were to supply the English elite with doctrines which could replace what had come to be regarded as dying forms. Unbaptised himself and brought up to take “the strongest interest in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest between priestly tyranny for liberty of thought,” Mill was to formulate the famous ‘harm principle’ and the oft-quoted observation that, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

The harm principle was, Mill proposed, that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection… the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

Mill had much more to say about this principle and was certainly not as crude in his thinking about morality and society as are many who parrot his principle as the last word in this area. Yet, how we understand what constitutes ‘harm’ is notoriously difficult to reach consensus on. Mill’s speculations on sexual ethics give us more than a clue to where his moral emphasis emphatically does not lie.

And it is precisely this area of ethics that is most likely to be undermined by philosophical systems that set out to ‘revise’ and ‘reform’ what our frustratingly plural, non-reductive moral common-sense alerts us to in our concrete and distinctive personal encounters with evil. Mill was committed to Utilitarianism as well as his ‘liberty principle’ and in that commitment viewed ethics excessively in terms of ‘social ethics’, minimising what is central to Christian life which, while not blind to such matters, has less to do with them than some imagine and is above all concerned with the ‘personal’ (for which read, ‘private’).

Mill himself ‘disapproved of disapproval’ of the actions (seen themselves as non-harmful) of other people who would be harmed by such a stance. And indeed, ‘harm’ now extends widely, through legislation and mores, to include the ‘harm’ of hurt feelings, though only those of specifically designated groups. The UK’s Conversion Practices Draft Bill 2026 applies to those it classifies as having a ‘particular sexual orientation’ and ‘particular transgender identity’ and characterises as serious ‘abuse’ expressions intended to cause the person (who could be, for example, a trans-identified child or spouse) to reject such orientations or identity and which cause serious alarm or distress. In other words, it condemns on grounds of ‘harm’ words which honestly and even consensually question certain ‘experiments of living’ with a view to preventing harm and improving lives. And for this Mill can be held accountable. For by changing the nature of moral judgement, Mill insists that it becomes paradigmatically ‘immoral’ to express moral disapproval in contexts not sanctioned according to his ‘harm’ principle and in light of his views on liberty.

So, for example, when confronted with the polygamists of Utah, Mill was to write:
“…it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them.”

The combination of tolerance for ‘experiments of living’ (as though the moral life and its progress could be understood in the same way as the natural sciences!) together with heavily moralised condemnations of those who dare to judge such experiments as evil, is a hallmark of our age. While Mill is revered, his contemporary critic and one-time admirer, the abrasive James Fitzjames Stephen is largely forgotten. He responded in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity to Mill’s kind of tolerance in typically blunt fashion, focused most memorably on Mill’s tolerant discussion of whether a person should be free to be a pimp:

“How can the State, or the public be competent to decide that gross vice is a bad thing? I do not think the State ought to stand bandying compliments with pimps…My feeling is that if society gets its grip on the collar of such a fellow it should say to him, ‘You dirty rascal, it may be a question whether you should be suffered to remain in your native filth untouched, or whether my opinion about you should be printed by the lash on your bare back. That question will be determined without the smallest reference to your wishes or feelings; but as to the nature of my opinion about you, there can be no question at all.’”

Fitzjames Stephen was a criminal lawyer and admirer of Thomas Hobbes who lost his faith but not his sensitivity to what resignation to evil looks like.

Such sensitivity should go hand in hand with a recognition that our accountability extends well beyond the ‘social’ or judicial and reaches down towards that deep wound which infects our entire species and constitutes the blinding blindness that leads us to seek in social ethics both redemption and escape. That escapism is far more a sign of the infantilism of our own age – an age which would doubtless have shocked Mill, but for which he prepared the way.

Dr Anthony McCarthy is Director of the Bios Centre (www.bioscentre.org) and a Visiting Scholar at the International Institute of Theology in Trumau, Austria. He is writing in a personal capacity.

In 2016, Bishop Robert Barron published an essay entitled How Strange Is The Cross. This essay contains a point I have heard him make a number of times, perhaps initally in his 2011 series Catholicism. What he says is that we have become so accustomed to crucifixes that we have lost the capacity to see them as a first-century person would. Crucifixion involved nakedness, public humiliation, prolonged agony and often leaving the corpse exposed. Cicero called it the summum supplicium — the supreme or unsurpassable punishment, which makes St Paul’s language deliberately shocking when he says:

“We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” — 1 Corinthians 1:23

Paul isn’t using a pious cliché. To a Roman audience, Christ crucified sounded almost intrinsically absurd: you are proclaiming as Lord and Messiah somebody who suffered the most degrading death the Roman state could inflict. Crucifixion was designed to be a deliberate a sign of disgrace and defeat for its victims. Perhaps this is most powerfully reinforced in Romans 1:16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: for the Jew first and then Greek.” This clearly shows how the Gospel, centring as it does around a man who was put to death on a cross was seen as something scandalous and shameful. Bishop Barron makes this particularly vivid elsewhere:

“How strange this feast would have sounded to someone in the ancient world! The triumph of the cross!”

He compares it to somebody today celebrating “the triumph of the electric chair or the exaltation of the noose.”

So the question is, why would God’s salvation of the human race have to include something as horrifying as crucifixion? Why would the Son of God have to endure not only death, but as Paul eloquently specifies, “death on a cross”? This has long fascinated me and numerous popes have wrestled with it over the centuries, although, perhaps surprisingly, there isn't one encyclical entitled Why the Cross? Rather, the answer emerges across several major papal texts. And I think Benedict XVI gets especially close to the heart of what is so fascinating about this question to the modern mind in Deus Caritas Est.

In §12 Benedict describes Calvary in extraordinary terms. The Cross is not simply a punishment which God inflicts upon Jesus in order to balance an account. In Christ, God Himself enters into the extremity of the human condition:

“His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him.”

And then the crucial sentence:

“This is love in its most radical form.”

This begins to address the question about the horror of crucifixion. If God’s purpose were merely to demonstrate that He possessed the power to forgive sins, the Cross seems unnecessary. Christ could simply have pronounced forgiveness. But if God intends to reveal what divine love actually is, something much more profound is happening. God goes to the furthest point to which fallen humanity can descend — violence, injustice, betrayal, humiliation, abandonment, suffering and death — and enters it Himself. Hence the extremity of the Cross corresponds to the extremity of God’s love.

In his book The Lord, Romano Guardini puts it like this:

God followed man into the no man’s land which sin had ripped open. God not only glanced down at him and summoned him lovingly to return, He personally entered into that vacuous dark to fetch him, as St. John so powerfully expresses it in his opening Gospel. Thus in the midst of human history stood one who was both human and God. Pure as God; but bowed with responsibility as man. He drank the dregs of that responsibility — down to the bottom of the chalice. Mere man cannot do this…The plunge from God towards the void which man in his revolt had began, Christ undertook in love. Knowingly, voluntarily, He experienced it with all the sensitiveness of His divinely human heart. The greater the victim, the more terrible the blow that fells him. No one ever died as Jesus died, who was life itself. No one was ever punished for sin as He was, the Sinless One. No one ever experienced the plunge down the vacuum of evil as did God’s Son.

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I don’t see why I should have to get fat if I eat fatty foods. I don’t see why I should have to get pregnant if I have sex. I don’t see why I should have to be rejected from Cambridge if I didn’t earn top grades. I don’t see why I can’t get married if I’m gay. I don’t see why I can’t be a pilot if I’m blind…

OK, that last one is a stretch, but the sentiment is the same.

In other words: I don’t like the natural consequences, so they must somehow be frustrated artificially.

And this is what we have done.

Unlike wise parents, who recognise that an infant cannot have whatever he wants — either because it is impossible or because constantly relenting will stunt his flourishing — we have become the parents who give in to every whinge, every tear and every complaint simply to pacify the child. We will even invent things to shield him from the consequences of his choices.

What kind of person does that child become?

We all know.

Roald Dahl knew when he sketched out his most memorable child characters, and the result was ugly. We used to recognise ugliness for what it was. Now we pretend it is beautiful.

But it isn’t.

We have become a society of weak cry-babies, throwing tantrums whenever we don’t get what we want. The infants are in charge. Professors who are idiots. Models who are fat and unattractive. Britons who can’t speak English. Boys who are girls.

The infant does not like authority. “It’s not fair!” So every authority must be smashed down, leaving the few remaining adults to live among the ruins.

This revolution has been a long time in the making: a revolution first against God, then against authority, against reason, against one another and, ultimately, against ourselves.

Because that’s how it goes.

Mess with God and with what God has given us, and watch the whole thing unravel. It’s not as though Scripture isn’t absolutely clear on this point. No matter how clever we think we are with our contraceptive pill, our anti-fat injections and our AI, we remain silly babies mucking it all up.

I blame the Protestants (naturally).

In a recent The Rest Is History podcast, Tom Holland commented astutely on über-Prot Martin Luther, saying that he had:

“…a scorn for superstition, overthrowing of idols….some of the things that people prior to Luther had regarded as being profoundly holy, Luther comes to condemn, and this has an impact, not just on Protestants, but on everyone. Before the ‘Reformation’ there was just ‘the Church’. It has become known as the Catholic Church merely by the process of having to define itself against Protestantism. One of the logical end points of Protestantism is atheism, because if you begin by overthrowing superstition you could end up banishing God. Luther has a massive emphasis on Sola Scriptura…all the other panoply of [Catholic] doctrine and tradition is irrelevant…but you could end up following that logic to get rid of the Bible itself, and I think that’s where we are, a progressive morality is a kind of post-believing Protestantism. So secularists and humanists have a very evangelical tone, they are into overthrowing idols and that evangelical quality of Protestantism remains vivid and such a profound moral influence in the 21st Century — that moral progressivism, which is basically a kind of Godless Protestantism, is converting countries that were previously defined by their Catholicism. Think of Ireland. In my lifetime it has gone from being a Catholic country to being a country where the ruling ideology is a Godless Protestantism, and the irony of that is intense.”

And all of this brings me to the inevitable news of the day.

A woman who has chosen to live like a man is whinging because she cannot have the things peculiar to a woman. Well… she can, of course. But she doesn’t want to have to choose. She wants it all, because she is a big, manly baby.

Meg Jones, captain of the England women’s rugby union team, the Red Roses, is in a same-sex relationship with England 7s and Leicester Tigers teammate Celia Quansah and is calling for players to have access to fertility support and egg freezing.

Obviously, it is not enough to be disordered; the cost of the disorder has to be paid by others. Because that’s what love and kindness look like in an upside-down world.

Speaking to BBC Sport, Jones said: “Why should my opportunity to have a family be taken away from me because I want to pursue my career?”

Let’s overlook, for now, the fact that the question is loaded with false assumptions. It seems to me that she isn’t really looking for an answer.

Jones has spoken openly about her plans for motherhood and has already begun exploring fertility options with her fiancée. The couple recently attended a fertility clinic to assess their egg reserves and had considered freezing their eggs. Following medical advice, however, Jones said they decided there was no immediate need to do so and that they were likely to wait until after their wedding before attempting to conceive. (Spoiler alert: they won’t be able to.)

Jones has argued that fertility provision should become a more established part of the support offered to professional female athletes, particularly because sporting careers can coincide with some of the most important years for women considering motherhood.

The Red Roses already benefit from a maternity policy regarded as among the strongest in international women’s sport.

When approached about providing fertility packages for England players, a Rugby Football Union spokesperson said:

“We work hard to support players in the decisions they make around fertility and family planning and are proud to have been at the forefront of industry-leading support in this area. We already have comprehensive maternity and parental policies in place and are always open to exploring how that support can evolve.”

In August, Chelsea Women unveiled a partnership with a fertility company to provide workshops, treatments, counselling and assessments for their players. The Observer reported that the fund established by Chelsea would cover the cost of egg freezing for the whole squad.

Give the infants what they want!

Pass the cost on to others!

I have been married to a rugby player for 20 years. He is a big brute, and it is clear that men and women have different physiques for a reason. Men are generally stronger, faster and able to jump higher than women. Their physical characteristics equip them particularly well for protection and combat. Men are warriors. Rugby is good for men precisely because it channels these combatant tendencies and can cultivate the strong masculine traits needed to safeguard families, homes and communities.

Women’s bodies, meanwhile, are uniquely ordered towards pregnancy, childbirth and the nourishment of children.

Women can, of course, play rugby if they want to. But choices have costs.

And this is the point.

Increasingly, we seem unwilling to accept that anything should have a cost at all. Every door must remain open. Every choice must be reversible. Every natural limitation must be technologically overcome. And, increasingly, somebody else must pay for it.

Elite sport places enormous demands on the female body. Those demands can collide with fertility, pregnancy and motherhood. But rather than asking whether there is something significant in that collision — whether our bodies might be telling us something about the limits we are so determined to overcome — the modern instinct is simply to demand another technological intervention.

There are currently no mothers among the players in the core England women’s football team, despite the fact that the players are at peak fertility. Set that against collapsing birth rates across much of the West and the picture becomes more significant.

The mess is always harder to clean up than it was to make. But it can be cleaned up only if we are prepared to restore what was lost and go cap in hand to God.

He will have us back because He is infinitely merciful. But the humility has to come first. And humility begins with something the infant finds almost impossible to say:

Your will be done, not mine.

News has broken that this year’s Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage to Rome will not be granted permission to celebrate its principal Traditional Latin Mass in St Peter’s Basilica. There is no doubt that this is disappointing. Last year’s return of the pilgrimage Mass, celebrated by Cardinal Raymond Burke at the Altar of the Chair, seemed an important moment for Catholics attached to the traditional liturgy. This year Bishop Athanasius Schneider will instead celebrate at the high altar of St Mary Major and sharply different accounts are already emerging about what this means. The speculation is obvious: Is Pope Leo XIV continuing Francis’s restrictive policy, or is something more complicated going on?

Before rushing to judgement, let’s look carefully at what we actually know, what is being reported, and what remains unknown. Depending upon which report one reads, Pope Leo has either taken another ominous step towards becoming Francis II, traditional Catholics have once again been expelled from St Peter’s, or several thousand pilgrims have been offered the high altar of one of the greatest basilicas in Christendom because they had rather inconveniently become too numerous for the space they occupied last year.

As is so often the case with Vatican stories, the truth appears considerably more interesting than the headline. The essential facts are not really disputed. The fifteenth annual Ad Petri Sedem pilgrimage will take place in Rome from 23 to 25 October. On Saturday morning the pilgrims will process to St Peter’s Basilica, pass through the security controls, enter the basilica and pray at the tomb of the Apostle Peter. They will then make their way across Rome to the Papal Basilica of St Mary Major, where Bishop Athanasius Schneider will celebrate the traditional Mass at the high altar at 3pm. The official programme confirms precisely this arrangement.

What will not happen is what happened last year. In October 2025, Cardinal Raymond Burke celebrated a solemn pontifical Mass according to the traditional Roman rite at the Altar of the Chair in St Peter’s, following permission granted under Pope Leo XIV. It was an extraordinary occasion, not least because the principal Mass of the pilgrimage had been excluded from St Peter’s in 2023 and 2024 following the restrictions imposed under Traditionis Custodes. The organisers publicly thanked Leo for allowing the Mass to return. This year permission for the Mass in St Peter’s has not been granted.

Obviously this is significant and there is little point pretending otherwise. The pilgrimage is called Ad Petri Sedem, “to the See of Peter”, for a reason. St Peter’s is not simply a particularly large and impressive Roman church which happens to have a nice dome. The pilgrimage is an expression of communion with Peter and his successor by Catholics attached to the ancient Roman liturgy and the celebration of its principal Mass in the Vatican basilica therefore possesses an obvious symbolic importance. In that sense, this year’s change is a setback.

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In Apple TV’s futuristic series Silo, characters are given a drug in an attempt to suppress the memory of the person they once were. The protagonist Juliette Nichols is a strong willed woman in constant pursuit of the truth. This instinct is muted by the drugs, but the regime cannot quite make a new woman of her. The tick of her former lover’s watch, the comic tenderness of a PEZ dispenser, the shock of love embodied in familiar objects: these relics pry open a sealed door. Memories of the woman she was keep fighting to surface. Love has left a trace that power could suppress but not quite destroy. There is something unique about the human person, an inseparable unity of body and soul. Despite the attacks, something fights through, a wounded but not eliminated will.

A Catholic friend I once knew used to complain of an abusive spouse. If their story was to be believed they were suffering daily from quite overwhelming abuse, sometimes physical, often mental and undoubtedly spiritual. “But X can’t help it” they would say, “I know it’s not their fault”. The behaviour would always be explained away with stories about a difficult upbringing or early childhood trauma. Whilst there is merit in acknowledging trauma, I was surprised by this attitude of resignation, and wondered whether the despair was symptomatic of the culture at large. “X simply can’t change” I was told.

I have often thought about this. Whether X could change or not. And, if not, to what extent they could be held accountable for their actions? My old friend deduced ‘not at all’.

Yet, don’t we all suffer with wounds throughout life; some lesser, others greater, some hidden, others more obvious. No one gets to adulthood unscathed. To conclude that these wounds define a person and cause them to behave in ways that are out of their control is to deny their dignity as human, made in the image of God.

Where does culpability come in? Determinists would argue that there is no such thing as free will, it is merely an illusion. How we act, what we do, what we think, how we respond is all determined by prior causes outside of our control. Humans follow the same laws of cause and effect as every other physical thing. We are like a man locked in a room, unaware that it is locked and choosing to stay inside. We feel like we made the choice, but the truth is that we could have made no other.

Jean Paul-Satre took a different view; a libertarian who claimed that there was no objective purpose, nor anything else which determines our actions because ‘existence precedes essence’; humans exist before they have purpose and subjectively define their purpose for themselves.

Neither of these positions is adequate for the Catholic, and both lie behind the increasingly therapeutic and pharmaceutical culture that we now find ourselves in. The one that claims we have no control has led to a culture that simply medicates problems, the one that says we are free to choose the path our lives take but removes any destination, offers therapy to those lost in the abyss.

Both are indicative of a people far from God.

I used to work in a large urban high school. I saw poor behaviour reclassified as illness beyond self-control, and I also saw how often this reduced human persons to the level of beasts.

During the period of time I was working in education, between 1998 and 2018, Autism diagnoses increased 787%. There was a 62.4% increase in ‘probable mental health disorder’ among children 8-16. In that time period there was a 130.7% increase in mental health diagnosis among 17-19 year olds, 100% increase in OCD between 2007-2023, 69.5% inscrease in ADHD over the same time period, and 93.2% increase in generalised anxiety disorder. New disorders and syndromes appeared all the time, children were labelled and medication prescribed. The outcome was rarely improved behaviour, better manners, higher academic results. In fact, in a great number of cases, the opposite outcome was true. One is left wondering whether the cure may be worse than the ‘disease’.

The Catholic answer refuses two temptations at once. It refuses the cruelty that ignores mental illness, trauma, coercion and diminished capacity. It also refuses the reductionism that converts every sin into a symptom and every sinner into a victim who could never have acted otherwise. The Church is more compassionate than the first view and more respectful of the human person than the second.

Catholic moral theology begins with distinctions. The moral character of an act and the personal culpability of the one who performs it are related, but they are not identical. An act has an object, an intention and circumstances. Circumstances can increase or diminish responsibility, but they cannot turn an intrinsically disordered act into a good one. A killing carried out by a drugged and manipulated man does not thereby become an act of justice. His guilt, however, may be drastically reduced.

The Catechism states both that ‘Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.’ (1735) and that ‘Every act directly willed is imputable to its author’ (1736)

Catholic teaching has always been realistic without becoming deterministic.

“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed” Blaise Pascal

Unlike the blade of grass, the mountain lion, the ‘intelligent’ dolphin or the machine, the human person has a will. Though he has instincts and desires, man is not (or should not be) a slave to them. He does not simply act instinctively, he can reason, deliberate, judge, experience what American philosopher Harry Frankfurt called ‘higher order volitions’.

Aquinas argues that the will always desires the good, it only chooses evil if the intellect misjudges a lesser good as a current priority. Virtue must be cultivated and reason used to properly order passions, and this is completed by grace. The Catholic tradition has long expressed the harmony of grace and nature in the phrase gratia perficit naturam – grace perfects nature. This principle explains not only the relationship between man and God, but also the proper understanding of human effort. Mans natural gifts are real, good and ordered to truth, but insufficient for his supernatural end.

Every man has a calling to do his part and to allow God to elevate him.

But what becomes of moral responsibility when both the natural element (our own effort) and the supernatural element (God’s grace) are nullified? When every moral failure is treated as though some drug, diagnosis or wound has already answered the question of guilt?

Modernity has invented a peculiar secular absolution. It has no confessional, requires no humility, and asks no restitution. It simply changes the noun. Cruelty becomes a trauma response; betrayal becomes an attachment style; rage becomes dysregulation; greed becomes a coping mechanism, and the culprit becomes the victim.

Which brings me to the Lindsey Clancey case. I claim no expertise in either medicine or law, but neither do I need them. I am not interested, here, in coming to conclusions about her particular case, but rather about what her case points to. There is dark spiritual cloud hanging over the whole thing.

A young British doctor who I admire for his resolute stance on pro-life issues, shared an article entitled ‘Can People Please Stop Being Morons About the Lindsay Clancy Case?’ Describing it as an excellent piece. In it the author chastises those who fail to take account of Clancy’s serious mental diagnosis during the brief time that she was killing her own children. He has a point, but the deeper question is whether we can be confident about the psychology behind the diagnoses in the first place.

‘Mental Health’ is a notoriously slippery field, and Catholics (who have inherited a true anthropology) would be right to have concerns about some of the things presented as ‘facts’ in this field. Much of Freud’s work is, at the very least, questionable and at worst, dangerous. And he is not alone. John Money and Herbert Marcuse both made major contributions to psychology by redefining how the discipline views human sexuality, gender, and societal repression, the effects of which linger in the disordered sexuality and ‘gender’ confusion we see around us today. Much of these putative advancements were discredited down the line, but not before they had taken hold in the academy and the public consciousness.

Whilst it is right to be compassionate where true freedom is curtailed through no fault of one’s own, we must not forget the responsibility each man has to play his part in his growth towards heaven. This includes the choices we make about what medicines and therapies we lean on, what practices we partake in, what distance we leave between us and God, and what idols we place in the way.

Pope Pius XII saw the danger of reducing the person to his psychology. Addressing psychotherapists in 1953, he insisted that the human being must be considered as a whole, as a being ordered beyond himself to God. Of our drives and inner mechanisms, he wrote: ‘They are not the soul nor the man.’ Whilst an external influence may press upon the will; it does not follow that it always compels it.

One external influence that undoubtedly presses upon the will of all women born in the last 60 years, is the normalisation of abortion.

In 1974, Archbishop Fulton Sheen asked us all to think “…How many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul”

And this is, in part, what we are seeing in the disproportionate and disordered response to the Clancy trial. Unlike the medical professionals, who use labels like ‘altruistic filicide’, Sheen understood sin for what it was, a rupture of communion with God, and he understood the remedy – it was not a pill, an injection or a course in psychotherapy.

One of the most wonderful and terrifying things about our faith is that we are free to choose God, or to turn away from him.

God is love, and love is not love if it is forced. This is what makes the notion of altruistic filicide so illogical. A person could no more square a circle than kill a child for their own good. There is, as Sheen pointed out, a relationship between a culture that softens the language around abortion, redefines it as healthcare and describes assisted suicide as ‘dignity in dying’ and the response to this Lindsay Clancy case. The intellect has become so blinded and the conscience so corrupted that women can call the murder of an innocent child in the womb ‘a mercy’ as Anne Hathaway famously did. Should we, then, be surprised to see tens of thousands of women identifying with Clancy in this trial?

Whatever external influences impressed upon Lindsay Clancy we can’t be sure. But what we do know is that, as a child of God, she still had a will. Only God knows why she did not exert it that fateful day in protection of her children. As one friend said ‘It is hard to imagine what sort of evil would drive a person to do what she did, irrespective of whatever illness oppressed her.’

Perhaps the most important lesson we can take from this case, is how desperately close to the precipice we are as a society, and how badly in need we are of remembering who we are. We, who God created, and God calls, are all in there somewhere, but we have a responsibility to fight…to break out of the shackle’s modernity has placed around us. Francis Thompson’s famous poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’ opens with the powerful depiction of a soul desperately fleeing from divine pursuit through the “labyrinthine ways of my own mind.” How pertinent these words are to our times. How many routes have been laid out before us, on which we can flee? How many drugs, excuses, labels, distractions, images, and lies try to interrupt that memory of who we really are?

Yes the Hound of Heaven hunts us, but how will we respond?

We do still have a choice.

On 29 August the Holy See announced that Estrada, until now an auxiliary bishop of Cuzco, had been appointed coadjutor of the ancient Peruvian archdiocese. This is more than simply an honorary promotion because a coadjutor possesses the right of succession. Barring some extraordinary intervention, Lizardo Estrada will therefore become the next Metropolitan Archbishop of Cuzco.

Under ordinary circumstances there would be nothing particularly startling about that. Estrada is 52, has been a bishop since 2021, holds advanced degrees in moral and pastoral theology, has considerable experience of Augustinian government and formation and since 2023 has served as Secretary General of CELAM, the Latin American Episcopal Council. On paper, at least, one can understand why his name might appear on a terna for metropolitan office. But these are not ordinary circumstances. Only sixteen days before his promotion, Estrada participated in an indigenous ceremony in Cuzco which involved an offering to “Mother Earth”. The ceremony took place on 13 August at the opening of the gathering Entrelazando Voces por la Dignidad. According to the available reports and footage, participants were given coca leaves while the woman leading the ceremony spoke about Mother Earth and the significance of the month of August. The participants were instructed to breathe upon the leaves and then place them into an offering. Estrada did not merely observe what was happening from a respectful distance, he jumped right in and participated in the prescribed ritual action.

Estrada was not the only senior churchman to participate. Alongside him was Mgr Jordi Bertomeu, an official of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and one of Pope Francis’s most trusted troubleshooters, whom Francis repeatedly employed as his personal envoy in some of the Church’s most sensitive investigations. Bertomeu has spoken with striking enthusiasm about the Bergoglian project, praising Francis as the Pope who understood that the Church must enter into “modernity”, coexist with other beliefs and seek what unites rather than separates, a pontiff who, in Bertomeu’s memorable phrase, had the Second Vatican Council “in his DNA”.

The connection did not end with Francis. Bertomeu knew Robert Prevost before the conclave, exchanged messages with him and subsequently revealed that Prevost had been his own preferred candidate for the papacy. Indeed, after Leo’s election Bertomeu immediately interpreted the new pontificate through the lens of continuity with Francis, describing Prevost as a man who had grasped the novelty of Francis’s approach and suggesting that Leo would continue his predecessor’s work, albeit with his own nuances. The presence of both Estrada and Bertomeu at the Cuzco ceremony therefore makes it considerably harder to dismiss what happened as the eccentric behaviour of an isolated local bishop. Two well-connected churchmen, both closely associated with the ecclesiastical world created by Francis and both personally known to his successor, participated in the ritual.

For anyone who followed the Amazon Synod controversy of 2019, there is an almost weary familiarity about all this. We have already had the arguments about terminology, inculturation and indigenous symbolism. We have already watched Catholic commentators tie themselves in theological knots attempting to explain why actions which appeared to be religious veneration of “Mother Earth” were actually nothing of the sort. We have already been assured that what looked like an act of worship could not possibly be an act of worship because those involved did not intend it to be one. There comes a point at which such distinctions cease to illuminate and begin to obscure.

The Vatican itself eventually referred to the controversial figures of 2019 as representing “life, fertility, mother earth”, while Pope Francis subsequently called them “the statues of the pachamama”, insisting that they had been present “without idolatrous intentions”. Whatever judgement one ultimately reached about subjective intention, the scandal produced by the spectacle was enormous and entirely foreseeable. The best you could say is it was extremely unwise, so it is reasonable to expect that that should have taught the Church something.

Even if one were to adopt the most generous possible interpretation of the 2019 episode, it was manifestly catastrophic pastoral judgement. The Pope of Rome had permitted a ceremony in the Vatican Gardens in which people prostrated themselves before objects associated with Mother Earth, and images of the event travelled around the Christian world. Catholics were scandalised, but they were hardly alone. Protestants and other Christians who still understood Rome as a great historic bulwark of Christian monotheism looked on bewildered as scenes emerged from the Vatican which appeared irreconcilable with the first commandment.

The theological problem was not particularly complicated. The Catholic Church can receive, purify and Christianise indigenous cultures; indeed, she has been doing precisely that for two thousand years. What she cannot do is blur the distinction between the Creator and creation, or participate in religious actions which objectively appear to render honour to created realities. That boundary should have been rendered painfully obvious by the controversy of 2019. Seven years later, therefore, the question is not whether Catholics should embark upon another interminable debate about what the word “Pachamama” really means, the question is why a Catholic bishop, with the entire experience of 2019 behind him, would place himself in this situation at all.

Lizardo Estrada is not an anthropologist observing an indigenous ritual for academic purposes. He is a successor of the Apostles. He is a man with advanced degrees in moral and pastoral theology. He has taught in a seminary. He has been involved in religious formation. He is Secretary General of CELAM. Whatever charitable interpretation one might construct around the ceremony itself, a bishop of his experience should have possessed sufficient theological and pastoral judgement to recognise what participation would communicate. He participated anyway. And that is why the response from Rome is so extraordinary. The appropriate question after 13 August should surely have been whether Estrada required correction. At the very least, one might have expected him to explain publicly why a Catholic bishop had participated in an offering addressed to “Mother Earth” and how he reconciled that action with the Church’s perennial prohibition of religious syncretism. You would have expected questions to have been asked about his judgement. Instead, just sixteen days later, he was promoted. Not corrected. Not required publicly to clarify his actions. Not apparently asked to reassure scandalised Catholics that he professes the uniqueness of Christian revelation and rejects every form of idolatry and religious syncretism. Promoted. And promoted to become the future Archbishop of Cuzco, of all places: the ancient capital of the Inca Empire, a city whose very Christian history embodies the encounter between the Gospel and the pre-Christian religions of the Andes.

That would constitute remarkably poor judgement from Rome even if Lizardo Estrada were simply another name passing across the Pope’s desk. But he isn’t — Robert Prevost knows Lizardo Estrada very well. This is not one of those tenuous Vatican connections in which two churchmen happened to occupy neighbouring seats at a conference twenty years ago. Estrada has described Prevost as his professor and his spiritual director. Vatican News itself describes Prevost as Estrada’s formator in the Order of Saint Augustine. Estrada studied under him at Trujillo, where Prevost taught Patristics and Canon Law and served in Augustinian formation.

The relationship therefore goes back to Estrada’s formative years as a young religious. Teacher and pupil. Formator and seminarian. Spiritual director and directee. Fellow Augustinians. Later, fellow bishops in Peru. And now Pope and archbishop-elect. Is there anything improper about a pope appointing somebody he knows? You might argue that personal knowledge may actually improve episcopal appointments. If Leo has known Estrada for decades and knows him to be a man of exceptional faith, wisdom, courage and administrative competence, that is valuable information unavailable to a Roman bureaucracy examining files. Yet precisely because Leo knows Estrada so well, the question becomes harder rather than easier. Estrada is one of his own. And that brings us to a question which I had hoped Catholics might no longer need to ask after the death of Pope Francis. Whose man is he?

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This time, there is quite a lot to catch up on.

Why did an interview we recently published suddenly disappear? We tell you the story of the phone call behind its removal, why there were co…

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Birmingham City Council has made a serious mistake. For more than a year, Union Flags and St George’s Crosses have been appearing in increasing numbers across Birmingham, part of a grassroots phenomenon which began in the south of the city before spreading across the country. Birmingham City Council has therefore had plenty of time to decide what these flags mean, what the people putting them up are trying to say, and how political leadership ought to respond. Its answer has been removal, enforcement and now an application to the High Court for an injunction against unauthorised flags attached to public infrastructure.

The council insists that it has not banned either flag, and strictly speaking that is true. The Union Flag still flies outside the Council House, nobody is being forbidden from flying St George’s Cross from his own home, and the proposed injunction concerns unauthorised attachments to lampposts and other highway infrastructure. Yet politics cannot be reduced to the drafting of an injunction, something can be legally defensible and politically disastrous at precisely the same time.

And you would hope someone at Birmingham Council would have the political intelligence to understand what ordinary people and what they see is much simpler. They see English and British flags going up and council employees taking them down. They hear their local authority talking about “increased tensions” and “community cohesion”, and they see the council going to the High Court to prevent those flags being put back. It should surprise nobody that the resulting photographs and videos race across social media accompanied by the considerably less nuanced message that Birmingham has banned the British flag.

That claim is not literally true, but neither is the official response that this is merely a neutral question of street furniture remotely adequate to the political reality. Birmingham itself has acknowledged that the controversy concerns flags, objections to their presence and community tensions. The nationality of the flags is therefore not an incidental detail which disappears simply because lawyers can formulate the injunction in neutral language.

This is where Birmingham has displayed an extraordinary failure of political imagination. The blindingly obvious response was not to fight the flags, but to embrace them. The council could have told its citizens that it understood what many of them were trying to say. Birmingham is an English city in the United Kingdom, the St George’s Cross and Union Flag are the inheritance of all its citizens, and the council is proud to see them flown. It could simultaneously have explained that climbing lampposts and attaching unauthorised objects to public infrastructure creates legitimate safety and maintenance problems and announced that the council itself would install national flags prominently and safely at suitable locations throughout the city.

Imagine the effect.

The council would have removed much of the grievance at a stroke. It would have deprived more extreme activists of the ability to present themselves as the sole defenders of English identity. It would have told Birmingham’s Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Jewish and secular citizens that the national flag belongs equally to every one of them. It would have asserted that nobody, whether an ethnic nationalist on the right or an identity politician on the left, possesses the right to appropriate the flag as the emblem of one racial or political faction. Above all, it would have listened.

Instead, Birmingham has treated a problem of national belonging as a problem of public-order management.

Birmingham’s response cannot be separated from the political atmosphere in which this dispute has unfolded, already poisoned by an increasingly destructive binary. On one side is a rapidly growing narrative according to which the British state has become actively hostile to its own people. Its proponents see asylum seekers being accommodated at public expense while British citizens struggle with housing, public services and taxation; they see minority identities celebrated while expressions of Englishness are regarded with suspicion; they hear continual official enthusiasm for diversity while being increasingly uncertain whether the country regards their own inherited culture as something worth preserving. Now, they say, the authorities are literally taking our flags down.

At the opposite pole lies an equally corrosive refusal to recognise that any legitimate grievance might lie beneath these perceptions. Britain has not banned its flag; asylum seekers do not simply receive preferential access to the ordinary benefits system; immigration has enriched the country; multiculturalism has succeeded in innumerable individual lives and communities. Anyone suggesting otherwise is immediately dismissed as ignorant, xenophobic, racist or “far right”.

Between these two narratives lies a vast territory in which most of the truth resides, but our political culture is rapidly losing the ability to inhabit it.

Social media rewards outrage rather than qualification. “Birmingham seeks a High Court injunction concerning unauthorised attachments to public infrastructure” will never travel as quickly as “BIRMINGHAM BANS THE ENGLISH FLAG”. Yet institutions make matters worse when they imagine that correcting the technical inaccuracy disposes of the grievance which made the exaggeration believable in the first place.

Tell a man who has waited years for social housing that asylum seekers accommodated in a hotel have not technically jumped the council-house queue, and you may have corrected his understanding of the administrative system without answering the political question troubling him. Tell somebody watching a council contractor remove a St George’s Cross that there is no ban because the action concerns an unauthorised attachment to highway infrastructure, and again you may be legally correct while completely failing to understand what he thinks he is witnessing.

He does not feel corrected. He feels that the political establishment is refusing to acknowledge what is in front of his eyes.

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One of the reasons we choose to attend the Traditional Latin Mass is because we recognise that the liturgy forms us, even when it is not immediately intelligible. Day after day, week after week, year after year, that which is both invisible and visible, its words, gestures, silences, postures and prayers teach us who God is, who we are, and how the creature ought to stand before his Creator. And formation matters because human beings are not merely stuff.

We are, of course, made of stuff. We are born, we eat, we move, we grow and eventually we die. But this is true of all living things. Our cats and dogs are born, eat, move, grow and die. So does the tortoise. Even the terrifying house spider lurking in the corner has a life proper to its kind. There are things we share with other living creatures, but that does not make us the same as them. A dog is not a cat, a cat is not a tortoise, and none of them is a human being.

So what makes the human creature different from the dopey dog lying at my feet?

This is where the idea of form becomes useful.

Think of building a house. To get a house, you need stuff: bricks, timber, glass, tiles. You also need someone to do something with that stuff. But a builder does not simply move bricks and bits of wood around hopefully, like a chimp typing randomly on a keyboard (who will not eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare). The builder works according to a plan. And the plan itself depends upon what the house is intended to become.

If I want a three-storey brick house with a glass roof, the architect draws plans accordingly. The materials are selected, ordered and shaped towards that end. The stuff alone is not enough. And neither is the stuff of us.

We are not merely collections of cells to be fed, exercised, entertained and eventually buried. We have a nature, and we have an end. And throughout our lives our intellects, appetites, habits, imaginations and desires are being formed towards something.

The important point is that formation is unavoidable. Nobody gets to opt out.

We have something different to other creatures in that we can choose the things that form us. We have a will. We can choose our friends, our books, our habits, our food, what we worship, our music and our entertainment. But if we make no deliberate choices about our formation, that does not leave us unformed. It simply means that other people and other forces will do the forming for us. The world is quite happy to oblige.

The great English convert G. K. Chesterton is said to have remarked “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”

We might likewise say that when men make no conscious decision to be formed by God, they will be formed by everything else around them.

There are those who believe that there is no intended end for the human person at all. We are, on this account, essentially accidental lumps of matter. But even the person who believes this cannot escape formation. He will still acquire habits. He will still learn what to admire and what to despise. His imagination will still be populated with images. His appetites will still be trained. His sense of what is normal, desirable, shameful, funny, beautiful or disgusting will still be shaped.

The only question is: by whom, and towards what?

The Christian has a very different starting point. The Christian believes that we were made deliberately, by a Creator who knows what we are because He made us, knows the end for which we were made: union with Him, and tells us how to get there (Jn 14:6)

If that is true, then surely the safest hands in which to place our formation are those of the One who knows both the material and the end. This is why the Church has always taken formation so seriously. It is why our prayers matter. Why our habits matter. Why beauty matters. Why the liturgy matters. Why what we repeatedly see, hear and do matters.

And this brings us to the screen.

Television and film are extraordinarily powerful instruments of formation, partly because they rarely announce themselves as such. We sit down believing that we are merely being entertained. But for an hour, or two hours, or perhaps several hours each day, someone else is supplying the images, telling the stories, creating the heroes, identifying the villains, deciding what is funny, presenting what is normal, and inviting us to sympathise with particular desires, choices and ways of life. There is always a mind behind the screen, and that mind is presenting some vision of man: of what he is, what he is for, what constitutes happiness, what love means, what sex means, what marriage means, what is good and what is evil.

Where that vision corresponds with reality (and ultimately with the mind of God) there may be much that is good, beautiful and worthwhile in what we watch. But where it does not, we should be extremely cautious.

We would be foolish to imagine that we are clever enough to recognise the message, or sufficiently Catholic to be unaffected by it. What happens when we repeatedly place our formation in the hands of people whose intention is to form us towards an end radically different from the one for which we were made?

Look around you.

There is a reason that many Catholics choose to homeschool and don’t own a television. If that puts them in Hillary Clinton’s basket of Deplorables, then so be it.

Another reason why we should take the screen particularly seriously is because a film does not approach us in quite the same way as a written argument. If somebody writes an article telling me that adultery is good, marriage is oppressive, motherhood is a waste of a woman’s potential and Christianity is ridiculous, I know what I am dealing with. The propositions are sitting there on the page. I can examine them, argue with them and reject them.

The screen works differently. It beckons us into a world; gives the beautiful music to one character and the sinister music to another. It decides whose suffering we see, whose motives we understand, whose jokes we laugh at and whose humiliation provides the punchline. It can make one way of life appear warm, courageous and attractive while another appears ridiculous, repressed or cruel, without ever making a single explicit argument for either.

That is part of the extraordinary power of the moving image.

Pope Pius XII understood this remarkably well. Writing about cinema in Miranda Prorsus 1957, he observed that dramatic action combined with moving images, voices and music reaches “not only the intelligence and other faculties, but the whole man”. He even recalled Pius XI’s description of cinemas as “schools”.

Schools.

It is worth dwelling on that word. When we watch something, we tend to think we are sitting down to be entertained, but the Church was warning us nearly seventy years ago that we were also sitting down to be taught. And the lessons do not necessarily arrive in the form of propositions, but through pictures and stories; the appetites through attraction and repulsion; our sympathies through the people with whom the storyteller teaches us to identify. Eventually we acquire instincts about what is normal, embarrassing, admirable, cruel, liberating, oppressive, beautiful or absurd.

We might be perfectly capable of articulating the correct Catholic teaching on marriage while having spent thirty years consuming stories in which marriage is almost invariably suffocating. We might intellectually believe that motherhood is a vocation while having absorbed a thousand images in which the successful woman is unencumbered by children. We might affirm the complementarity of the sexes on Sunday while spending the rest of the week laughing at stories in which fathers are idiots, husbands are lazy, women are perpetually constrained by men and liberation consists in escaping them.

This is why “But it’s only a film” is not a sufficient response. Whether we know it or not, we do more than spectate. We are swept into participation and media itself becomes a kind of liturgy. So instead of being called into THE story, not simply to read the word but to live the word, consume the word and let the word form us, we are called to participate in some other man manufactured story, asked to sing along to the lyrics he provides, buy the merch he has prepared, become like the character he has created, do the things he does.

This is why the liturgy we choose matters.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, coming from a very different intellectual tradition, was also fascinated by the power of images in modern society. His concern was that a culture saturated with images and representations could eventually lose its grip upon the distinction between representation and reality itself. The screen does not simply show reality; increasingly, it supplies the categories through which reality is interpreted.

What repeatedly enters the imagination does not remain neatly sealed off from the intellect, appetites and will. We learn to love certain things, fear certain things, laugh at certain things and sympathise with certain things. Long before we sit down to formulate a proposition about marriage, sex, authority, masculinity, femininity or family, we may already have absorbed a thousand stories telling us how we are supposed to feel about them.

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The remarks came on Wednesday, 26 August, in the final instalment of the Pope’s catechesis on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Leo began not with the Council itself but with a letter written in October 1962 by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, who argued that Catholics could no longer remain “silent and passive” at Mass, physically present while spiritually absent. Leo connected Montini’s argument directly with Sacrosanctum Concilium 48, which says that the faithful should not be present at the sacred mysteries “as strangers or silent spectators”, but should understand the rites and prayers and participate consciously, devoutly and fully.

From there the Pope made the argument which is likely to prove rather more controversial. The desire for reform, he said, arose from the need to make Scripture and the Church’s prayers more accessible and to “streamline the order of the celebration” found in the existing liturgical books. Since the liturgy is a living reality which has developed through history, the Magisterium has always adapted certain aspects of it according to the needs of different ages. Vatican II therefore acted, Leo said, “with the utmost respect for the heritage of tradition” when it considered the revision of the liturgical books necessary.

He pointed to earlier reforms under Pius XI, Pius XII and John XXIII as evidence that the conciliar reform did not emerge from nowhere, before reaching the conclusion around which much of the subsequent debate has centred: “The liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.”

The Pope was not, it should be said, defending everything that subsequently happened in the name of Vatican II, quite the contrary. He explicitly condemned the abuses that occurred after the Council, and which he acknowledged still occur, when principles of the reform were “taken to extremes or misunderstood”. He reminded priests and bishops of their responsibility to safeguard the liturgy and insisted that the liturgy must be celebrated according to the Church’s norms, with the “noble simplicity” called for by Sacrosanctum Concilium. That is an important qualification, but it does not resolve the central difficulty in the argument.

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The BBC has finally noticed that Pride is losing friends. BBC radio presenter Darren Milby has written a feature which lists the respectable reasons: commercialisation, corporate rainbow-washing, the cost of staging a street party, the trans debate, councils preferring potholes to parades. All of that is real, but it is also the version of the story that never has to mention a courtroom. His “In depth” article carefully avoids any mention of the many, deeply concerning connections to a shocking prevalence of sex crimes, including the rape of children, amongst Pride organisers. They are not identical crimes, but they are the same kind of scandal: men in or around Pride committees with convictions or findings involving the sexual abuse of children.

Stephen Ireland co-founded Pride in Surrey in 2018. He was a local fixture: community radio, school outreach, a helpline for teenagers, children’s books with titles about inclusion, appearances on BBC Radio Surrey. In June 2025, Guildford Crown Court sentenced him to 24 years in prison, with a further six on extended licence, for the rape of a 12-year-old boy he met on Grindr, and for a string of other child sex offences. His then-partner, David Sutton, a Pride in Surrey volunteer, was jailed for four and a half years. The judge, Patricia Lees, said Ireland had “prided [Freudian slip from the judge there perhaps?] himself on being versed in and highly alive to the vulnerabilities of young people linked to the Surrey Pride organisation he was at the time pivotal to.”

That is not some kind of vague rumour, the BBC reported the conviction itself in a seperate report. What it did not do, in a piece asking why the public and sponsors are backing away from Pride, is treat that case of child rape as part of the answer.

Ireland is the most serious recent example but certainly not the only one. Andrew Way, who tried to launch Welshpool Pride, was jailed in 2023 after a sting and had previous sex-offence convictions plus a sexual harm prevention order he had already breached. Lee Clarke became acting chair of Swindon and Wiltshire Pride after serving a sentence in Australia for possessing thousands of indecent images of children; the Charity Commission later opened a compliance case. Ashley Boyd later chaired the same organisation and was struck off as a nurse after a panel found he had carried out unnecessary intimate examinations of children for sexual gratification. In Southampton, Jake Radwell, a registered sex offender who claimed a role around People’s Pride, was later sentenced for breaching a sexual harm prevention order after attending a children’s party.

What does this prove? I think it is clear that it demonstrates that a movement which now markets (somewhat bizarrely in the circumstances) itself as family-friendly, youth-facing and morally unassailable has had repeated, documented safeguarding failures and that some of the men involved used the language of inclusion and vulnerability as cover. When brands and councils retreat, they are not only reacting to “online backlash” or Reform UK. Some are reacting to liability, reputational risk, and the sight of fetish and adult sexual content at events sold as suitable for children. A serious feature would have held both thoughts at once: Pride has become expensive, corporate and politically contested; and parts of it have a record of putting the wrong people near the young. Milby’s piece does the first half with care and leaves the second half on the cutting-room floor. That is why the comments under it are angrier than the article. The public can see the gap. The BBC, on this subject, still prefers not to.

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It is difficult to imagine a more extraordinary decision than that of the Catholic Biblical Association of America to elect as its president a scholar of the New Testament who does not herself believe its central proclamation: that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet the appointment is more than an institutional curiosity, I think it is a sign of a deeper malaise within contemporary Catholic scholarship: an increasing willingness to separate the sources of the faith from the dogmatic realities those sources proclaim, until “Catholic” risks becoming little more than an inherited institutional label rather than a confession of what is actually true.

The obvious problem is not simply that Professor Amy-Jill Levine is Jewish, although her adherence to Judaism is plainly relevant insofar as it entails her rejection of the Christian confession that Jesus is the Messiah and Lord. Nor should that observation be remotely controversial. Levine herself is admirably candid about what she believes. She is also a distinguished scholar whose work on the Jewish context of Jesus and the New Testament has been widely recognised. Catholics can and should learn from Jewish scholars, Protestant scholars, agnostic historians and anyone else whose research illuminates the languages, cultures, history and intellectual world in which the Scriptures emerged. Indeed, part of my own love of Sacred Scripture developed through studying Jewish sources on the Old Testament, precisely because they can illuminate so powerfully the world of the New and, from a Christian perspective, the extraordinary coherence between promise and fulfilment. Truth does not cease to be true because the person who discovers or elucidates it is not Catholic. No, the problem here is considerably more interesting than that. It is that an explicitly Catholic association has chosen to be led by someone who does not believe the central truth to which Catholic biblical scholarship ultimately bears witness: that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

The Catholic Biblical Association is not called the Society for the Historical Study of Biblical Literature, it is not a secular university department and it is not an inter-religious institute for the comparative study of ancient texts. It is the Catholic Biblical Association of America, founded in 1936, and its own constitution explains exactly what that adjective is supposed to mean. It proudly declares that, “in fidelity to Dei Verbum,” it devotes itself to the scholarly study of the Bible “in conformity with the teaching of the Magisterium.” It goes on to quote Dei Verbum 10, which teaches that the authentic interpretation of the Word of God has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority “is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.” The constitution further says that the Association offers its expertise to the Church to assist her in discerning the meaning of the Word of God for the faithful. This is not some dusty provision which everyone has quietly forgotten, as recently as August 2025, the Association formally reaffirmed its commitment to precisely these constitutional principles and to the Church’s “love and veneration” for the inspired Word of God. And now its president is Amy-Jill Levine.

The Association announced her election with considerable enthusiasm following its 88th annual meeting in July, describing the result as historic because Levine is the first Jewish president in its history. The conspicuous celebration of that ‘historic’ first should itself set certain alarm bells ringing, suggesting that the contemporary grammar of diversity, equity and inclusion may have begun to displace the more fundamental Catholic question: not who is represented, but whether the person chosen to lead an explicitly Catholic institution actually professes the truths that make it Catholic. Levine is undoubtedly accomplished, she has written or co-written more than twenty books, taught at Vanderbilt Divinity School, lectured at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, worked extensively in Jewish-Christian relations and had three audiences with Pope Francis (more alarm bells). She has also been involved with the CBA for decades and served as its vice-president before her election to the presidency so there is therefore no question about her academic credentials. There is, however, a rather more fundamental question about her theological credentials to preside over an organisation whose purpose is explicitly Catholic biblical scholarship.

Levine herself deserves credit for being perfectly candid, discussing her fascination with the parables of Jesus in an interview with Perkins School of Theology, she explained that she regarded them as profound Jewish stories addressing universal human concerns. Then she stated the decisive point with admirable simplicity: “I do not believe in Jesus as Lord.” There is no scandal in a Jewish woman saying this. It would be astonishing if she said otherwise while remaining Jewish. The scandal, if that is the right word, lies elsewhere; with a Catholic institution deciding that disbelief in the central claim of Christianity presents no apparent impediment to presiding over an organisation devoted to the Catholic interpretation of the Scriptures which reveal that claim.

This was the question raised recently on Raymond Arroyo’s Prayerful Posse. The discussion contained some sweeping criticism of the contemporary biblical guild, but Fr Gerald Murray put his finger on the essential difficulty. Catholics, he observed, should appreciate scholarship produced by people of different religions. Yet the Catholic Biblical Association carries a particular presumption: that Scripture is being approached according to what the Catholic Church understands Scripture actually to be - one would think this would be obvious and fundamental?

For the Catholic Church, the Bible is not simply an anthology of ancient religious literature whose meaning can be exhausted by philology, archaeology, textual criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism or historical reconstruction. All these disciplines have their legitimate place. Indeed, Catholic biblical scholarship has benefited enormously from them. Dei Verbum itself insists upon attention to literary forms, historical circumstances and the intentions of the human authors. But the Church makes an additional and radically consequential claim, Scripture has God as its author, the texts are inspired, they belong within a single economy of Revelation, they must be interpreted within the living Tradition of the Church, according to the analogy of faith, under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit by whom they were inspired, and the centre of this entire economy is not an academic hypothesis but a Person: Jesus Christ.

Benedict XVI addressed precisely the problem at issue in Verbum Domini. He strongly affirmed historical-critical scholarship while simultaneously warning of the danger of separating exegesis from theology. Catholic interpretation, he insisted, requires both methodological levels. Scripture must be approached historically because God truly spoke through human authors situated in history, but it must also be approached theologically because Catholics believe that it is God who speaks. Benedict called the separation of these levels a “sterile separation” capable of creating a barrier between exegesis and theology, something which, he observed with characteristic understatement, occurs “even at the highest academic levels.” That warning now seems remarkably prescient. For the peculiar thing about the Levine appointment is that it almost perfectly symbolises the separation Benedict feared, the historical object remains as does the texts, the languages and the literary forms. The reconstruction of first-century Judaism remains. The conferences, journals, academic apparatus and professional guild all remain, but does the confession of faith remain constitutive? I think that is the essential question.

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There is something both wonderful and profoundly uncomfortable about the possibility that the people Europe once evangelised may now have to evangelise us. For generations, European missionaries travelled to Africa carrying the Catholic faith to improve the lives of the people there. They built churches, schools, hospitals and seminaries, they baptised, catechised, educated and formed. Many endured extraordinary hardship and some even gave their lives. Today something remarkable is happening in the opposite direction.

African priests increasingly sustain parishes across Britain and Europe as our own vocations disappear. Churches in the West close or amalgamate while seminaries in parts of Africa remain full. Young African Catholics practise their faith in numbers about which most European bishops can only dream.

Against this background, a recent interview with Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto in Nigeria, published by Catholic World Report, deserves far more attention than I think it has received. Kukah is no provincial churchman looking at the West from a distance. His intellectual formation has taken him from philosophy and theology in Nigeria to peace studies at Bradford, a doctorate at SOAS in London, a Senior Rhodes Fellowship at Oxford and a master's in public policy at Harvard. He has spent much of his life thinking about precisely the questions at the heart of this interview: religion, political power, social conflict and the Church's place in public life.

The statistics nevertheless provide an extraordinary backdrop to what he says. Nigeria is estimated to have around 35 million Catholics, while research cited in the interview puts weekly Mass attendance at an astonishing 94 per cent. Whatever qualifications might be made about individual surveys, there is no serious dispute about the underlying contrast. Catholicism in Nigeria possesses a vitality which Western European Catholicism has largely lost. So Catholic World Report asks Kukah the obvious question: Why?

His answer begins with the missionaries, it was their sacrifices, he says, that laid the solid foundations. Catholic education and healthcare made an enormous contribution, the Church offered a life of virtue which attracted people. This was hugely aided by the first generation of great indigenous African churchmen who subsequently provided examples of extraordinary stature. Then he identifies something which particularly struck me: “the influence of the Church in public life.”

Bishop Kukah understands Catholicism as something which necessarily escapes the walls of the church building, he invokes Christ’s own images stating that the Church is supposed to be light, yeast and a city on a hill. The faith is supposed to change the society into which it is planted. Sadly, I think reading those words in Britain in 2026, they seem almost revolutionary! Why? Because one of the strangest characteristics of contemporary Western Catholicism is that the Church which once possessed sufficient confidence to convert entire cultures can now sometimes appear terrified of upsetting them. This is not to say that our bishops never speak publicly, they certainly do. Nor is it to suggest that the subjects on which they frequently intervene are unimportant. Immigration, poverty, climate change, refugees, war and economic justice are legitimate matters of Catholic social concern and the Church has a rich body of teaching about all of them. The problem is rather the extraordinary selectivity which can sometimes seem to govern episcopal interventions.

Our bishops often appear most comfortable speaking about issues on which the prevailing political and cultural establishment is already broadly sympathetic to what they have to say. They can speak confidently about climate change, migrants and poverty, but the episcopal voice becomes much harder to hear when Catholic teaching collides directly with the moral assumptions of the age. Marriage, sexual morality, the ideological confusion surrounding human identity, the formation of children, abortion and, most urgently at present, assisted suicide.

I have written repeatedly on Catholic Unscripted about the response of the bishops to assisted suicide and fairness requires an important qualification. The Bishops’ Conference has opposed assisted suicide. Cardinal Nichols and other bishops have encouraged Catholics to contact their MPs. Campaigning resources have been produced, the bishops have not literally been silent. But that has never really been my criticism. My question is whether they have spoken with a volume, unanimity and urgency commensurate with the gravity of what Britain is doing.

We are contemplating one of the most profound changes imaginable in the relationship between medicine, law and human life. The state is moving towards establishing circumstances in which intentionally helping someone to die becomes a legally sanctioned activity. This is not a marginal prudential question about tax rates or planning regulations, it touches the commandment against killing, the dignity of the sick and disabled, the vocation of medicine, the protection of the vulnerable and ultimately the Christian understanding of the human person. Where, then, are the pastoral letters from every bishop? Where is the sustained preaching? Where are the media appearances? The public debates? Where is the sense that the entire hierarchy has thrown itself into this battle because something of incalculable importance is at stake?

There have been courageous exceptions, and they deserve recognition, but too often one gets the impression that the institutional response consists of statements uploaded to websites which comparatively few Catholics will ever read. A bishop can technically have spoken while the Church remains culturally inaudible. What makes this particularly interesting is that the absence is increasingly noticed not merely by troublesome Catholics like me. A striking commentary in Scotland’s Herald complained about what it perceived as the Catholic Church’s “vow of silence”. Surely this extraordinary phenomenon itself should make bishops stop and think because it is clear, if it ever needed pointing out that even secular society looks to the Church for moral leadership and when that leadership is absent, it wonders why. Of course, that should not surprise us. Human beings do not cease to require moral truth simply because society becomes more secular. Politicians are constrained by elections, corporations are constrained by markets, journalists by audiences and Universities are increasingly constrained by ideological fashion. The Church is supposed to possess a peculiar freedom from all of this and a bishop should be capable of saying something is true even when saying it will cost him.

Indeed, that is part of the reason episcopal authority once carried such enormous cultural weight. Moral authority is not principally generated by possessing a title, sitting on a committee or issuing a press release. It is generated when people become convinced that you will tell them the truth even when they do not want to hear it and this is where Kukah’s analysis becomes particularly penetrating. Asked what went wrong in Europe, he looks back to the Apostles. These were frightened and largely uneducated men without money, political protection or institutional prestige. They entered a hostile empire armed with nothing except their experience of Christ and confidence in the Holy Spirit. They were persecuted, they hid in catacombs and many were killed, yet Christianity conquered Rome. Kukah then identifies what he believes subsequently weakened the Church’s moral authority: its “warm romance and embrace of secular power.” His conclusion is devastating:

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Until 2023, I had been to America precisely once, to New York in 1999, and I was completely in awe of it. The buildings seemed impossibly tall, the streets impossibly busy, and there was chatter everywhere. People were friendly, everything was enormous, and I had that unmistakable feeling of being somewhere vibrant and exciting.

Then I went home and, for more than twenty years, America returned to being what it is for most British people: a place largely encountered through television and film.

Since establishing Catholic Unscripted in 2022, however, I have been blessed to return many times. We have travelled to Chicago, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee and, wherever we have gone, we’ve received the most extraordinarily warm welcome.

Our American friends have collected us, fed us, driven us for distances that they regard as entirely normal but that we would baulk at, and taken us to places we would never otherwise have seen.

This summer we were fortunate enough to return again, this time with the Bennett and Lambert families in tow! The trip was partly for work (although when your work consists of talking to interesting people about things you care deeply about, it feels fraudulent to describe it as such) and partly to tag on a family holiday in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

The America we think we know

The curious thing about visiting America as a Briton is that it feels simultaneously foreign and familiar.

We think we know it before we arrive. We have watched American films and television all our lives. We know what a diner looks like. We know the yellow school buses, the enormous trucks, the clapboard houses, the police cars, the flags and the highways. Even the road signs somehow seem familiar.

There is, of course, some truth in the America we see on screen. But like any artificial depiction, it misses so much.

One of the things that strikes me every time I visit is the human interaction.

Though we Britons may sneer a little, as we are wont to do, when the Americans say 'Have a nice day', there is a sincerity to this which we fail to appreciate when seen in films. When somebody says hello as you pass them, they look at you. Anyone wearing a hat, tips it. When you order something and hear, “I got ya!”, there is a little moment of genuine acknowledgement. This is striking for us Britons who have lived through the degradation of service. Foreign speakers, bad attitudes and a general sense that you are at fault for disturbing them.

These are tiny things, of course, but civilisation is largely constructed from tiny things.

The cynic might point out that a service industry reliant upon tips has a fairly strong financial incentive to produce cheerful waiters. Fair enough. But that does not entirely explain it. We have encountered the same warmth in places where nobody stood to earn a cent from us.

There remains, at least in the parts of America we have visited, a habit of politeness and courtesy that I fear we have lost to some extent in Britain, but it would be false to reduce a great contient to a Norman Rockwell painting.

Our American friends themselves speak about the deterioration of some cities, the devastation caused by fentanyl and other drugs, crime, family breakdown and all the other problems with which the country is wrestling. No nation is problem-free, and certainly not one as enormous and varied as the United States. Our experience is necessarily limited to the places we have visited and the people we have met. But acknowledging what is bad should not require us to pretend that what is good does not exist.

And we have seen a great deal that is good.

Does everything really have to be this big?

There is also the sheer size of America.

Everything seems to have been constructed by people who were never introduced to the concept of insufficient space!

The highways are enormous. The cars are enormous. The hotel rooms are enormous. The pavements are wide. Even the elevators are large. And yes, we Britons always sneered that the people were too, but we didn’t notice that at all. Either because we have caught up with them, or they have slimmed down!

Coming from a country where two cars meeting on a rural lane can result in a tense diplomatic negotiation involving hedgerows, reverse gear and questions of personal honour, there is something slightly overwhelming about it all.

We have roads laid out centuries before anyone imagined the motor car, houses squeezed into spaces determined by medieval boundaries, lifts roughly the dimensions of a standing coffin and parking spaces seemingly designed for vehicles no larger than a wheelbarrow.

America simply spreads out, and allowed us to breath out a little of the tension we had built up over the year.

The more I travel through the USA, the more extraordinary I find the scale of everything, and how much has been achieved in such a short time.

In little more than two centuries, an immense country has been crossed by roads and railways, towns and cities built, industries established and communities formed across distances that are difficult for a European mind properly to comprehend.

There are complicated chapters in that story, as there are in the history of every nation. But there is also something undeniably impressive about the energy behind it. You begin to understand something of what is meant by the American spirit, and perhaps even that much-mocked idea of the American Dream.

There is a confidence embedded in the landscape which starts to seep into your veins: We can build this. We can go there. We can make something. It is a hopeful nation.

For a Briton accustomed to interminable roadworks, it is very refreshing. I think the gap between the Wright Brothers first flight and the manned mission to the moon, was shorter than the time it took to clear the traffic cones from the northbound carriageway on Streatham High Street.

And then there was the Outer Banks

The final part of our trip took us to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, somewhere I had never even heard of until Mark Lambert suggested we spend the family-holiday portion of our trip there.

I am very glad he did.

I am not enormously well travelled. Until my late teens, the only country I had visited outside Britain was Ireland, where I spent summers with family. At nineteen I travelled to the Holy Land, and during my twenties managed a number of trips around Europe, including much of my beloved France, as well as Croatia, Vienna, Hungary, Malta and Belgium.

So I have seen enough of the world to have some points of comparison, but not so much that I have become blasé about beautiful places.

Nothing prepared me for the Outer Banks.

There is a wildness about it that photographs struggle to capture.

On one side is the Atlantic Ocean; on the other, the great stretches of water known as the Sound. The land between them sometimes seems almost impossibly thin, as though the sea might at any moment remember that it was there first.

The sunsets across the Sound were the most beautiful I have ever seen.

Dolphins leapt from the Atlantic. Wild horses ran along the beaches. Houses perched high upon wooden stilts, looking less as though they had conquered the landscape than negotiated temporary permission to remain there.

The heat was phenomenal and the humidity almost unbearable at times.

Fortunately, being America, they have thought of this. Air conditioning is not regarded as an optional luxury but an essential component of human survival. You move from air conditioned house, to car, to shop, occasionally making brief expeditions into the tropical exterior.

My Irish genes are simply not designed for it.

I am much more at home with a storm, great waves and a wild sea; and we got some of that too. A great storm whipped up across the sound a few nights while we were there and lit up the sky.

Things worth keeping

On our last day in the Outer Banks we visited a small museum showing what life had been like for a family living there in the 1920s.

For Americans, this was history.

For a group of English people whose grannies had lived in houses older than the exhibits, it was rather charming.

But the more I thought about it, the less amusing the comparison became.

There was something rather moving about the care with which this relatively recent past had been preserved. Here were ordinary household objects, buildings and memories treated as things worthy of being handed on because they told the story of the people who had lived there.

America is a young country. Its history, at least in the form of the nation we recognise today, is comparatively short. Perhaps that is why Americans can sometimes seem more conscious of preserving the pieces of it they possess.

We Europeans have the opposite problem.

We have so much history that we can become careless with it.

We walk past buildings older than the United States without giving them a second glance. We once worshipped in churches where generations prayed for centuries before our grandparents were born. Ancient villages, monasteries, cathedrals, wayside shrines and traditions surround us. And because they have always been there, we can begin to imagine that they always will be.

Perhaps there is a lesson for us in watching Americans carefully preserve a family home from the 1920s. We should be much more reluctant to discard what we have inherited.

We should think very carefully before ancient churches are stripped of their purpose, before sacred buildings become entertainment venues, before cathedrals become backdrops for discos, and before things which survived centuries are sacrificed to the fashions of a single generation.

There is a great difference between possessing an inheritance and cherishing one. Sometimes it takes visiting a young country to realise quite how old your own is.

The things that matter

And in true Oscar Win American Style, here comes the Schmaltz!

I am so grateful for all that God has given to me. Most especially my family, not all of whom made the trip with us, but who remained always in our prayers as we travelled. I am thankful for Mark and his family in my life. Whether traveing around, or sitting around a table, our families prayed together, talked toegther and laughed together. The older I get, the more I treasure true friendship, and realise what a precious commodity it is! This includes the many American friends we have made along the way, whose extraordinary generosity and kindness have made so many of these experiences possible. Friends who have opened up their homes to us, introduced us to their families, shared their lives with us and shown us a country very different from the one we thought we knew through television.

Those are the moments that remain when the flights, hotels and itineraries have begun to blur.

We are British enough that excessive enthusiasm still makes us slightly uncomfortable. We shall not be purchasing matching stars and stripes outfits, MAGA hats or saying “Y’all”. There are limits.

Nor do I imagine America to be perfect. Americans themselves certainly don’t. They worry about their country, argue about it and lament what has been lost in much the same way that we do about Britain.

But I do love America.

We know that we can love a country without believing it flawless. In fact, that may be the only way really to love one. Just as we love flawed people.

And travelling there has made me think rather more about my relationship with my own country.

America’s vastness makes me appreciate the intimacy of Britain. Its newness makes me appreciate our age. The care with which Americans preserve fragments of their past makes me wonder whether we sufficiently value the enormous inheritance beneath our own feet.

We went to America because of Catholic Unscripted, and now, inspired by our visits and formed by our friendships, we are about to embark on a big change. A new chapter is about to begin.

Watch this space!

Catholic Education Leaders Unite Around Seven Principles for the Renewal of Catholic Schools

A significant new initiative calling for the renewal of authentically Catholic education has emerged from a gathering of bishops, academics and educational leaders in the United States earlier this summer.

The inaugural Front Royal Education Summit, held at Christendom College in Virginia on 27–28 May, brought together Catholic bishops, school leaders, university academics, diocesan superintendents and representatives of Catholic educational organisations to consider how Catholic schools can recover a clearer understanding of their purpose and identity.

The result was the Front Royal Statement: Seven Cardinal Principles of Catholic Elementary and Secondary Education — a document intended to provide a common foundation for the growing movement seeking to renew Catholic education.

At the heart of the statement is a proposition which would once have been considered self-evident in Catholic education but which has become increasingly counter-cultural: the ultimate purpose of education is supernatural.

Catholic education, the statement argues, cannot simply be a secular education with religious studies, Mass and prayer added to it. Its purpose is the formation of the whole human person — mind, body and soul — ultimately ordered towards God.

That distinction has considerable implications for what happens inside a Catholic school.

Rather than judging education primarily by examination results, university admissions, employability or other measurable outcomes, the Front Royal Statement places intellectual formation within a much larger understanding of the human person. Academic excellence remains important, but it is not the final end of education.

The question is not simply, What will this child achieve? but What kind of person is this child becoming?

Recovering a Catholic vision of education

The statement draws upon the Church’s long intellectual and educational tradition while addressing practical questions facing Catholic schools today.

These include the proper roles and responsibilities of parents, teachers, priests and bishops; the formation and retention of teachers; the development of curricula; and the creation of a genuinely Catholic culture within schools.

This last point is particularly significant.

For decades, Catholic schools in much of the Western world have faced the danger of becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from their secular counterparts. A school may retain a Catholic name, religious symbols and occasional liturgical celebrations while adopting essentially the same assumptions about the human person, morality and the purpose of education as the surrounding culture.

The Front Royal initiative represents an attempt to reverse that trajectory by returning to first principles.

Elisabeth Sullivan of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education warned that contemporary education can easily become dominated by practical considerations and measurable outcomes. The Christian understanding of education, by contrast, begins with the child’s relationship with God and seeks the formation of the entire person.

That conviction shaped the summit itself.

Rather than functioning simply as another academic conference, organisers conceived the gathering as a working meeting in which those involved in Catholic educational renewal could establish greater cooperation and a clearer common vision.

Discussions ranged across theology, philosophy, curriculum, teacher formation, institutional identity and the relationship between faith and reason.

Bishops and educators come together

Among those taking part were Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane, Bishop Earl Fernandes of Columbus and Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois.

They were joined by representatives from a number of prominent Catholic institutions, including Christendom College, The Catholic University of America, Benedictine College, Belmont Abbey College, the University of Dallas and the Augustine Institute.

Educational organisations represented included the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, the Chesterton Schools Network and Catholic Education Partners.

Christendom College President George Harne described the present moment as one of considerable cultural and educational confusion, arguing that the renewal of Catholic schooling requires more than isolated examples of excellent institutions. What is needed, he suggested, is a shared vision grounded in the Church’s intellectual, spiritual and educational inheritance.

That may prove to be the most important aspect of the Front Royal Statement.

Sixty years after Land O’ Lakes

The timing is particularly striking.

The summit took place almost sixty years after the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Statement, a document which became highly influential in discussions surrounding the identity and direction of Catholic higher education in the United States.

The new Front Royal Statement emerges in a very different cultural moment — one in which questions about the nature of the human person, the authority of parents, sexual morality, religious freedom and the purpose of education have become increasingly contested.

Against that background, the Front Royal Statement is not merely a proposal for improving Catholic schools.

It represents an attempt to recover a fundamentally Catholic answer to the question: What is education for?

For the Catholic tradition, education cannot ultimately be separated from truth, virtue or man’s final end. A child is not merely a future worker, consumer or university applicant, but a person created in the image of God and called to eternal life.

If the movement represented at Front Royal succeeds in placing that conviction once again at the heart of Catholic schooling, the consequences could extend far beyond the classrooms of the United States.

The renewal of Catholic education may depend less upon inventing something new than upon recovering something the Church already knew.

There is no doubt that there is something profoundly attractive about the language of ecumenism, it certainly speaks to much of the sentiment of the modern age. Also, Christians ought to desire unity, the spectacle of those who confess Jesus Christ divided from one another is undoubtedly a horrendous wound in the Christian witness to the world. And let’s not forget that Christ Himself prayed that His disciples might be one (John 17) a theme taken up in Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Ut Unum Sint (1995), “On Commitment to Ecumenism” which, essentially recognises the presence outside visible Catholic communion of genuine Christian realities, but immediately explains:

“All of these, which come from Christ and lead back to him, belong by right to the one Church of Christ.” (§13).

Pope St. John Paul II is quite explicit that the destination is full communion, not indefinitely increasing fraternity. His later explanation of Ut Unum Sint describes ecumenism as making the existing “partial communion” grow towards “full communion in truth and charity.” The Second Vatican Council therefore did not invent the desire for Christian unity, but acknowledged am existential and developing reality and gave renewed urgency to something which belongs to the nature of the Church herself. The preconciliar expression shows this was the direction of travel. In 1928, Pope Pius XI’s Mortalium Animos (1928) is explicitly “On Religious Unity” and was written partly in response to the emerging ecumenical movement. Pius XI's central concern is remarkably relevant to the utter nonsense we see being currently pushed out by the Synod Secretariat: he rejects the idea that Christ's Church should be imagined as presently divided into several roughly equivalent Christian bodies which must somehow come together to create the unity Christ intended. The particularly striking passage is §7. Pius XI identifies as erroneous the belief that the unity of Christ’s Church:

“does not to-day exist”

and the related conception that the Church is composed of various separate Christian communities which must eventually be reunited. Unity really matters and it is precisely because unity matters, that we have to be rather careful about what we mean by it.

The General Secretariat of the Synod recently published a striking claim on its social media account: “There can be no synodality without ecumenism, and there is no ecumenism without synodality.”

You might argue that, at first sight at least, it seems characteristically harmless. Who could object to Christians walking together? Who could object to listening, dialogue, fraternity and the search for reconciliation? The difficulty begins when we ask a very Catholic question: the question we seem to have to repeatedly ask when it comes to this whole synodality project - walking together towards what?

The Secretariat’s post is not an isolated piece of enthusiastic social media. It reflects an ecclesiological idea which has been developing throughout the Synodal Process. Back in 2021 the General Secretariat and the then Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity explained that synodality and ecumenism are both processes of “walking together”. More revealingly, they described ecumenism as an “exchange of gifts” in which Catholics might receive from other Christians their “experience and understanding of synodality”. The Instrumentum Laboris subsequently developed this considerably further. It declared that through the one Baptism “all Christians participate in the sensus fidei”, proposed the ecumenical movement as a “laboratory of synodality”, suggested that Catholic synodality could learn from ecumenical methods of dialogue and consensus building, and spoke of Christians participating in one another’s synodal processes. More recently, the Secretariat has gone so far as to say of participation by other Christians in the Catholic synodal process: “They can, and they must.”

There is, of course, just enough recognisably Catholic language here to permit those arguing for an orthodox interpretation to gain a tenuous foothold, that is precisely what makes the formulation so troubling. Compare the Secretariat’s nebulous language of “walking together”, “exchange of gifts” and reciprocal learning with the almost forensic theological precision of Unitatis Redintegratio, Ut Unum Sint and Dominus Iesus. The older Magisterial texts carefully distinguish the Church of Christ from ecclesial communities separated from her, Churches from ecclesial communities, full communion from imperfect communion, genuine elements of sanctification from the fullness of the means of salvation and the legitimate reception of what is authentically Christian in separated communities from any suggestion that the Church herself remains to be constructed through their convergence. Pope John Paul II could hardly have been clearer: ecumenism is “not a matter of adding together all the riches scattered throughout the various Christian Communities in order to arrive at a Church which God has in mind for the future.” The Church is, he insists, “something already given”, and ecumenism therefore seeks to bring an existing but imperfect communion towards “full communion in truth and charity”. The contrast with the Secretariat’s language is striking. The old precision has been replaced by formulations sufficiently Catholic-sounding to escape immediate censure, yet sufficiently indeterminate to leave unanswered precisely those ecclesiological questions the Magisterium once considered essential. What Church are we walking towards? Where does the fullness of that Church presently subsist? What distinguishes a “gift” to be received from an error to be rejected? What is the relationship between separated Christians and the visible Catholic Church? These are not pedantic qualifications, they foundationally constitute the Catholic theology of ecumenism and their disappearance into the therapeutic vocabulary of listening, reciprocity and journeying is therefore not theological development but theological impoverishment. It is difficult not to see here another consequence of the extraordinary ecclesiastical ascendancy, particularly under Pope Francis, of figures for whom doctrinal precision appears less an indispensable servant of communion than an inconvenience to be negotiated around. It is increasingly difficult to pretend that that tendency was not consciously intended to subvert settled Catholic teaching. What we can say is that its effect has been increasingly to obscure distinctions which previous Popes and the Magisterium went to considerable lengths to define and defend.

Vatican II unquestionably teaches that Christians who have received valid baptism possess a real relationship with the Catholic Church. They are not simply outsiders. They are in an imperfect communion with her. The Council also teaches that elements of sanctification and truth exist beyond the Church’s visible boundaries and that Catholics can genuinely learn from the holiness, witness and Christian experience of separated brethren. Indeed, this was precisely the subject of an essay I wrote many years ago while studying theology. What fascinated me then, and continues to fascinate me now, was the theological sophistication of the Council’s idea of degrees of communion.

Communion is not binary in quite the simplistic way we sometimes imagine it to be. A validly baptised Protestant has a genuine bond with the Catholic Church. An Orthodox Christian possesses more visible elements of ecclesial communion because the Orthodox Churches retain apostolic succession, a valid priesthood and the Eucharist. The Council consequently speaks of them as true particular Churches. Protestant communities which have not preserved apostolic succession and the Eucharistic mystery do not possess the same degree of ecclesial reality and therefore, in precise Catholic terminology, are not “Churches” in the same sense. This is not an exercise in ecclesiastical point scoring, it is important because it tells us something extraordinarily important about what ecumenism actually is.

The elements of sanctification and truth found outside the visible boundaries of Catholicism are not fragments of Christianity which the Catholic Church herself has lost and must retrieve from other denominations. Lumen Gentium describes them as forces tending towards Catholic unity. They belong, in other words, to the patrimony of Christ’s Church and derive their salvific efficacy from the fullness entrusted to the Catholic Church. They attract those separated brethren to the One True Church and, when we abandon them, in truth, we also abandon true ecumenism for the sake of a “niceness” which has no real value or meaning beyond platitude.

This is why the apparently innocuous language employed by the Synod Secretariat begins to trouble me. The impression increasingly given is not of separated Christians possessing different degrees of communion with the one Church founded by Christ, but of different Christian traditions walking alongside one another, exchanging gifts, mutually correcting and enriching one another as they journey towards a unity which lies somewhere ahead of all of them, but that is not Catholic ecclesiology. As we have seen from our extremely peripheral analysis of the Magisterial texts, the Catholic Church does not believe that the Church of Christ is a future construction. She does not believe that Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Lutheranism and Methodism are fragments from which the Church of Christ must eventually be reassembled. She does not believe that the unity for which Christ prayed disappeared and now awaits rediscovery through an ecclesiastical process of synthesis.

This was precisely the ambiguity which Dominus Iesus sought to eliminate. It stated that Christians may not imagine the Church of Christ as a collection of divided Churches and ecclesial communities, nor suppose that the Church of Christ does not presently exist and remains merely a goal towards which the denominations must journey. There is one Church of Christ and that Church “continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church”. Not triumphalism, this is Catholicism! And it establishes the essential grammar without which ecumenism becomes unintelligible.

The destination of authentic ecumenism cannot simply be a vague and meaningless “unity”. The destination is full communion in the one Church Christ founded. The Catholic Church certainly needs purification and Catholics need conversion, indeed, Bishops need conversion, Popes need conversion and in this we can learn from the missionary fervour of Evangelicals, the liturgical seriousness of the Orthodox, the scriptural devotion of Protestants and even from institutional practices developed outside Catholicism. To dismiss them is unwise and ignores reality and Christ’s words in Sacred Scripture. But the Church cannot learn from another community a different answer to something Christ has definitively revealed. Truth cannot be received as an “ecumenical gift” when it contradicts the deposit of faith.

That distinction became painfully obvious during the recent Vatican visit of Sarah Mullally. The official language spoke warmly of dialogue in “truth and love”. Yet what does truth require us to say about Anglicanism? Leo XIII definitively judged Anglican orders to be null. John Paul II taught that the Church has no authority whatsoever to ordain women. The Anglican Communion has nevertheless proceeded not only to ordain women as priests, but to consecrate them as bishops and now presents a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury. As I stated at the time, the problem is not that Pope Leo met Sarah Mullally, of course he should meet her. Courtesy is not in any way objectionable, Christian charity demands courtesy. The question is whether our ecumenical language still possesses sufficient theological content to describe reality.

As I argued at the time of that meeting, unity in Catholic thought is theological before it is relational. It is grounded in truth and expressed sacramentally. If the language of unity quietly brackets the very doctrinal differences which prevent unity, what remains may be excellent diplomacy, but it is difficult to see how it remains ecumenism in the properly Catholic sense. And then we encounter the elephant sitting rather awkwardly in the ecumenical room: the Society of Saint Pius X. I want to be careful here because I do not accept the SSPX’s justification for its decision to consecrate bishops against the explicit prohibition of Pope Leo XIV. Whatever one thinks of the post-conciliar crisis, episcopal consecration is not merely a private act of sacramental devotion, it is an intrinsically ecclesial act. The Holy See consequently declared the bishops involved excommunicated following the consecrations of 1 July. But precisely because I believe communion with Peter matters, the contrast is becoming impossible to ignore. Consider the strange ecclesiastical landscape before us:

The Vatican can speak enthusiastically about receiving “gifts” from Christian communities which reject Catholic doctrines concerning the Eucharist, Holy Orders, ecclesiastical authority, sexual morality and, in some cases, the sacramental nature of the Church itself. Christians belonging to these communities are invited into Catholic synodal processes because, we are told, “all Christians participate in the sensus fidei”. Their experience may even help Catholics discover how the Catholic Church herself ought to become more synodal.

Yet Catholics attached to the SSPX profess the Nicene Creed, accept the seven sacraments, possess valid priests and bishops, celebrate a valid Eucharist, profess belief in the Real Presence, invoke the Blessed Virgin and the saints, accept the sacrificial nature of the Mass, adhere to the Catholic moral tradition and profess, however inconsistently their actions may sometimes seem to demonstrate it, the primacy of the Roman Pontiff.

Why is it that the Vatican’s language suddenly changes? Walking together gives way to rupture, dialogue gives way to canonical penalties, the “exchange of gifts” becomes an excommunication decree. Vatican News described the SSPX consecrations as a “schismatic” act and emphasised that, although the Society claimed to recognise Pope Leo’s authority, its actions disregarded his explicitly expressed will. That criticism is not unreasonable. Authority has consequences and communion with Peter cannot merely be theoretical, but surely communion has consequences in the other direction too? If Catholic ecclesiology genuinely recognises degrees of communion, then one has to ask an uncomfortable question. On almost every objective sacramental and doctrinal criterion identified by Vatican II, is the SSPX not substantially closer to full Catholic communion than the Church of England?

This is not an argument for ignoring the canonical situation of the Society. It is an argument for applying our ecclesiology consistently, and it exposes the extraordinary incompetence which is all too easy to recognise at the top echelons of the Catholic Church at present.

There is something profoundly strange about an ecclesiastical culture capable of displaying almost inexhaustible creativity when describing the communion enjoyed with Christians who reject substantial portions of Catholic doctrine, while speaking almost exclusively in juridical categories about traditional Catholics whose rupture concerns precisely their relationship with ecclesiastical authority. One group may deny Catholic teaching and nevertheless be approached principally through the language of gifts. The other may affirm almost the entire Catholic doctrinal and sacramental system but resist papal authority and be approached principally through the language of rupture, of course, both of these realities matter.

This is where “degrees of communion” becomes much more than an interesting theological abstraction. The SSPX crisis actually demonstrates why Vatican II’s ecclesiology is useful: communion possesses doctrinal, sacramental and juridical dimensions. The Society’s wound is overwhelmingly located in the last of these, although its underlying doctrinal disputes cannot simply be dismissed. Anglicanism, by contrast, suffers profound ruptures in sacramental, doctrinal and juridical communion. To recognise this fact does not excuse the SSPX, rather it locates the problem accurately and accurate diagnosis is surely a prerequisite for genuine reconciliation.

There is another irony here. The Synod’s Final Document proposes “mutual accountability for who we are, what we do, and what we teach” between Christian communities, that is an extraordinary phrase. If it means that Christians should lovingly challenge one another to greater fidelity to Christ, it could be tremendously fruitful. But Catholicism must surely bring something distinctive to that conversation. It cannot enter the room pretending that the Catholic Church and the ecclesial communities created by the Reformation stand in symmetrical relationships to the Church of Christ, they do not! Catholic ecumenism begins with an apparent paradox. We can acknowledge genuine Christian holiness outside visible Catholic communion precisely because we believe so strongly in the objective reality of the Church. Baptism really does something, the Eucharist really is something, Apostolic succession really matters, Holy Orders really matter, doctrine really matters, Communion with Peter really matters. Without these fundamentals, the whole of Christ’s revealed truth begins to fall apart. I have seen this first hand by working with and in Protestant communities. These realities allow us to speak of degrees of communion because communion has an objective content. Remove that content and “communion” becomes little more than friendliness.

Perhaps this is the deeper danger in the Secretariat’s formulation. The problem is not that it speaks too warmly about other Christians, Catholics should speak warmly about them. Nor is the problem that we might learn from them, humility requires us to recognise goodness wherever the Holy Spirit has brought it forth. The danger arises when ecumenism ceases to have a discernible direction. If everyone is simply walking together, the obvious question remains: where are we walking? If everyone is exchanging gifts, we must ask: according to what criterion do we distinguish a gift from an error?

If everyone possesses the sensus fidei by virtue of baptism, how does that claim relate to separation from the Church’s sacramental and teaching authority? It just becomes meaningless! If the Church must listen to the ecclesial experience of communities which have abandoned apostolic succession, rejected Catholic teaching and reconstructed Christian morality according to contemporary culture, what exactly is the theological status of what she hears? And if synodality requires us to listen attentively to Christians separated from Rome by five hundred or a thousand years, ought it not also compel an extraordinarily patient effort to listen to Catholics whose estrangement from Rome is measured in decades and whose churches still contain the same altar, the same tabernacle, the same priesthood, the same sacraments, the same Creed and the same sacrifice of the Mass?

There’s an inherent irony in the fact that these two realities exist at the same time in the Church: the Church’s contemporary vocabulary of inclusion is being tested by one of the most difficult cases imaginable. Perhaps the great challenge facing Catholic ecumenism is therefore not choosing between truth and charity, that is a false dichotomy. Charity without truth becomes sentimentality, while truth without charity becomes a weapon. The challenge is to recover the profoundly Catholic idea that truth itself creates communion.

This is why the Council’s teaching about degrees of communion is so much richer than the vague assertion that we are all “walking together”. It tells us both why we are already related and why we are still divided. It allows Catholics to embrace separated Christians without pretending that separation does not matter. It allows us to recognise sanctification outside the visible boundaries of the Church without pretending that all ecclesial communities are equivalent…And it gives ecumenism a destination. The purpose of ecumenism cannot ultimately be to make separation more comfortable. It must be to overcome separation. Otherwise we risk arriving at a curious inversion of the Gospel imperative: endless dialogue with those moving progressively further from Catholic faith and progressively sterner discipline for those who, whatever their grave errors of judgement, insist that they are trying to preserve it.

The Secretariat tells us that there can be no synodality without ecumenism and no ecumenism without synodality. One has to wonder why not? Would synodality cease to exist because there was no longer an ecumenical problem? Obviously the answer is that it wouldn’t. Or go backwards, was the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 not synodal because there was no Anglican Communion, Lutheran Church or Eastern Orthodox communion with which the Apostles were engaged ecumenically? Was Nicaea not an exercise of synodality? The proposition therefore cannot literally be true.

It is certainly the case that there can certainly be neither authentic synodality nor authentic ecumenism without truth. And the truth is not something we shall eventually discover at the end of the journey.

The Truth is the One who called us to walk in the first place.