I do wonder if the echo chamber of the internet sometimes makes problems appear larger than they really are and there does seem to be a disproportionate number of sedevacantists/ SSPXers online arguing about the perceived depravity of the Church and the rectitude of their own subjective position (whatever that may be). These positions are often conflicting and based on false premises but I do get regular contact and I think the theology is worth tackling and discussing because there is a crisis, no one is denying that and perhaps these polemics will serve the Church in the long run.

What really saddens me is the division which has so obviously arisen. One lady in particular on X consistently messages me irrespective of what I am posting about to basically tell me I am going to hell if I don’t reject the Catholic Church — the insanity of this position is most unsettling!

I think there is a peculiar irony at the heart of the present crisis surrounding the Society of St Pius X in that much of the debate has been conducted as though Catholics are faced with a stark choice between two opposing visions of the papacy. On the one hand lies an exaggerated form of papal maximalism in which every papal decision is treated as though it carries something approaching divine certainty. On the other lies an increasingly common argument that the Pope’s jurisdiction ceases to bind whenever a sufficiently serious prudential disagreement arises. Neither position represents the Catholic tradition. Yet it is a reality that confidence in ecclesiastical governance has diminished over recent years and as a result, many Catholics have found themselves drifting from one error towards the other, often without recognising that they have done so.

The controversy surrounding the recent episcopal consecrations carried out by the Society of St Pius X illustrates this danger with remarkable clarity. Defenders of the Society frequently begin by rehearsing a series of propositions with which every orthodox Catholic should readily agree. The Pope is not an absolute monarch. He cannot invent doctrine. He cannot contradict divine revelation. He cannot command sin. He is the servant of the deposit of faith rather than its master. Every one of these statements is true. Indeed, they are explicitly taught by the Church herself. Thus the difficulty lies not in these premises themselves but in the conclusion that is subsequently drawn from them. Having demonstrated that papal authority possesses limits, it is then asserted that Pope Leo XIV’s prohibition of episcopal consecrations without pontifical mandate must therefore fall outside those legitimate limits, however this is not an argument, it is a logical leap wherein the conclusion simply does not follow from the premise.

The Catholic tradition has never taught that because papal authority is limited, every individual Catholic acquires the competence to determine independently when those limits have been exceeded. On the contrary, the First Vatican Council simultaneously rejected papal absolutism and affirmed one of the strongest doctrines of papal jurisdiction in the history of the Church. Pastor Aeternus teaches that the Roman Pontiff possesses ordinary, supreme and immediate jurisdiction throughout the universal Church and that all the faithful owe him hierarchical subordination and true obedience not merely in matters concerning faith and morals but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church. That final clause is frequently overlooked but it is also decisive.

The appointment of bishops and the regulation of episcopal consecrations belong precisely to the government of the Church. They are not accidental administrative conveniences but essential expressions of the visible unity which Christ entrusted to Peter and his successors. Vatican II reaffirmed the same principle in Lumen Gentium, while the Code of Canon Law continues to recognise the Supreme Pontiff’s ordinary authority in precisely these matters. None of this transforms the Pope into an autocrat, it simply acknowledges that jurisdiction has real content. Authority that binds only when its subjects happen to agree with its prudence ceases to be authority in any meaningful way at all.

The distinction between potestas ordinis ("the power of orders") and potestas jurisdictionis ("the power of jurisdiction") is often invoked in these discussions, but frequently in a manner that undermines the very point it is intended to establish. Episcopal consecration undoubtedly belongs to the sacramental power of orders. Yet whether that sacramental power may be lawfully exercised within the communion of the Church belongs to jurisdiction. A bishop may validly consecrate another bishop, but the Church has always distinguished validity from legitimacy. The sacramental act cannot simply be detached from the juridical communion within which Christ established His Church. The visible constitution of the Church is not an unfortunate bureaucratic appendage to the Gospel but part of the divine economy itself.

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Liechtenstein’s Hereditary Prince Alois has pledged to prevent the legalisation of abortion in the principality, saying he would use his veto should a proposal permitting abortion during the first trimester win public approval.

Prince Alois, who serves as Liechtenstein’s regent, made his position clear in a June 17 interview with the Liechtenstein newspaper Vaterland, as the campaign to liberalise the country’s abortion laws gathers support.

There is something particularly striking about looking at Liechtenstein from Britain. While its hereditary prince is prepared to say publicly that he would use his constitutional authority to prevent the legalisation of abortion, the British Crown has long since retreated from any comparable intervention in the moral legislation of the nation.

Britain was among the earlier Western European countries to liberalise its abortion laws with the Abortion Act 1967. What was presented at the time as a limited reform has developed into a regime under which abortion is permitted in Great Britain in most circumstances up to 24 weeks, with later abortions lawful on certain specified grounds. In practice this has become abortion on demand. Hundreds of thousands of abortions now take place each year in England and Wales, and many people are pushing for Abortion up to birth.

And now Parliament has been considering another profound change: the legalisation of assisted dying for terminally ill adults. Once again, legislators are being asked to cross a boundary that previous generations regarded as fundamental, this time concerning the deliberate assistance of a person in ending his or her own life.

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The Lamberts and the Bennetts arrived in Washington, D.C. last Saturday evening, and perhaps appropriately for a group of Catholics coming to America, one of our first stops was the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It is an extraordinary place: the largest Catholic church in North America, with more than 80 chapels and oratories and an astonishing collection of contemporary ecclesiastical art. There is something almost defiantly Catholic about its scale. In the capital city of a nation whose founding fathers loom large, here stands this enormous shrine to our Our Lady. Reminding us, should hubris take hold, of the right response to God.

From Washington we travelled into Maryland and visited the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes before spending several wonderful days on a nearby farm with a number of Catholic families whom we have come to know well over the years

.Those few days provided a rather different picture of America.

Each morning began with Mass. As the sun went down, one of the three priests staying with us would lead the Rosary as we walked around the grounds. There were twelve young people, ranging in age from two to twenty-two. They produced a remarkably clever political skit for the adults, entertained us with musical instruments and spent hours running around outside, looking at one another, immersed in God’s playground, rather than artificial screens.

There was something wonderfully countercultural about it all: families, Mass, children, music, conversation, prayer and the natural world. If this was America, there was a great deal to love.

Then it was back to Washington.

Through a Catholic connection in the States, we were fortunate enough to be given a private tour of Capitol Hill. It is undeniably impressive. But walking through the Capitol also brought home something that is easy for a British Catholic visitor to forget. America may now have a substantial and influential Catholic population, but it was not born Catholic.

The religious culture of colonial America was overwhelmingly shaped by British, Dutch and German Protestant settlers, with Anglican, Puritan and other Reformed traditions playing a formative role. Protestant assumptions influenced education, civic organisations and ideas about the relationship between the individual, Scripture and authority.

Before our trip, as a devoted listener to The Rest Is History, I had listened to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discussing America’s Founding Fathers. What struck me once I was actually in Washington was the extraordinary reverence in which these men continue to be held - by American Catholics as well as Protestants.

For a Catholic, that relationship with the founding story is not entirely straightforward.

Catholics faced serious legal disabilities and hostility in parts of colonial America, although Maryland had a distinctive Catholic foundation and periods of toleration. The position changed dramatically with the great waves of Catholic immigration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Millions of Irish, Italian, Polish and other Catholic immigrants arrived, building churches, schools, hospitals and charitable institutions.

They also encountered fierce opposition.

The nineteenth-century ‘Know-Nothing’ movement portrayed Catholic immigrants as fundamentally un-American. Later, the Ku Klux Klan directed its hatred not only towards black Americans and Jews but also towards Catholics. Again and again the accusation was the same: Catholics could not really be loyal Americans because their ultimate religious allegiance lay with the Pope in Rome.

Over time, Catholics moved from a persecuted immigrant minority into the American mainstream. John F. Kennedy’s election as America’s first Catholic president in 1960 represented an extraordinary breakthrough. He didn’t last long. Joe Biden became the second. Some might say he’s lasted too long!

Today Catholics make up roughly a fifth of the American population and have reached the highest levels of American political and judicial life. But assimilation raises a question of its own.

At what point does successful integration become accommodation?

This question is much older than the United States.

When Catholic missionaries travelled into the great non-Christian civilisations of Asia, they confronted a problem which has never entirely disappeared: how much of the surrounding culture can Christianity accommodate in the interests of evangelisation before Christianity itself begins to be changed?

Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili in India attempted remarkable forms of cultural accommodation. They believed that certain indigenous customs could be distinguished from religion and incorporated into Christian life. Their Dominican and Franciscan critics were considerably less convinced.

What one side regarded as intelligent evangelisation, the other feared was syncretism.

The dispute eventually reached Rome. During the Chinese and Malabar Rites controversies, successive papal interventions placed increasingly strict limits upon accommodation of practices judged incompatible with the Catholic faith. The underlying principle was important: Christianity could enter a civilisation, adopt what was genuinely compatible with the faith and baptise what was good, but it could not simply absorb religious practices or philosophies which contradicted what Christianity claimed to be true.

And that brings us back to America. It’s one thing to respond to demonstrably Pagan nations, but how does the Church respond to an ostensibly Christian nation that nevertheless established itself upon principles of protest?

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On August 5th, Pope Leo returned to his weekly audiences after a monthlong summer break at Castello Gondolfo. This time is traditionally a month of prayer, reading and reduced public activity. One can only begin to imagine how much stress and public pressure there must constantly be on the Pope, so this seems a very sensible thing to me. The Pope’s schedule for most of the year is relentless. General audiences, daily Angelus appearances, ad limina bishops visits, heads of state, curial meetings, consistories, liturgical celebrations and diplomatic receptions. I really do wonder how it is possible for one man to keep up the pace. So July provides a much needed space. Leo himself said on arriving in Castel Gandolfo that he hoped to spend the weeks with "a little rest, a little prayer, a little reading and, hopefully, a little sport." Even then I imagine that reading probably means reading dossiers, theological works and reports that cannot be digested between meetings.

However, seasoned Vatican-watchers have long recognised that these quieter weeks are often when important decisions mature away from the daily pressures. In previous pontificates many significant appointments were signed immediately after the summer recess because the discussions had largely taken place during July. And of course, the Curia continues working. Dicasteries continue preparing appointments, draft documents, policy papers, disciplinary cases, travel planning, financial decisions and all these reports reach the Pope.

Both Pope St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI frequently used Castel Gandolfo as a place for reflection. Major encyclicals and speeches were often drafted or substantially revised during summer residence there and Pope Leo appears to be reviving something of that tradition after Francis largely abandoned the papal summer residence.

Matteo Matzuzzi in Il Foglio described Pope Leo’s retreat as less of a holiday and more of a pause before tackling several unresolved questions, one of which, Matzuzzi notes, is the current unresolved liturgical drama. This doesn’t mean a decision has been reached, but it does demonstrate that knowledgeable Vatican journalists regard it as one of the significant unresolved matters.

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A report in a Spanish news outlet today has caused widespread speculation by suggesting that Pope Leo XIV is completely in sync with Cardinal Arthur Roche’s recent interview in The Tablet, in which the Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship confidently declared that the Holy Father would neither reverse Traditionis Custodes nor return to Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum (see my analysis here).

The latest report, published by La Razón, goes considerably further. Citing anonymous Vatican sources, it claims that the liturgical paper Cardinal Roche distributed to members of the College of Cardinals during January’s extraordinary consistory was not simply his own initiative but had been commissioned by Pope Leo himself, personally reviewed by the Pope, and approved without “changing a single comma.” If true, that would appear to place the Pope firmly behind Cardinal Roche’s theological interpretation of the post-conciliar liturgical reform and at odds with many of his recent personal initiatives. Needless to say, this has caused a great deal of dismay among those who consider Traditionis Custodes a total travesty (as I do) and nothing short of harmful to the faith.

The article however draws a very large conclusion from anonymous sourcing and it is important to distinguish between what has actually been established and what remains assertion. There is little doubt that Cardinal Roche’s document was prepared at the request of the Pope for distribution before the consistory. That much has been widely reported. It is also true that the document was circulated to the cardinals.

What has never been publicly confirmed by the Holy See, however, is that Pope Leo endorsed every argument contained within it, adopted Cardinal Roche’s conclusions as his own, or intended it to become the settled policy of his pontificate.

Indeed, the cardinals themselves reportedly declined to devote time to discussing the liturgical question during the consistory, meaning Roche’s paper was distributed but never became the subject of substantive debate.

Veteran Vatican journalist Diane Montagna has responded to the growing narrative with a measured analysis on her Substack. Rather than accepting the claims at face value, she notes that La Razón relies entirely upon unnamed Vatican sources while Pope Leo himself has remained publicly silent on the specific claims now being attributed to him. Montagna also places this latest report within the wider context of Cardinal Roche’s recent Tablet interview, in which the cardinal repeatedly spoke with remarkable confidence about the Pope’s intentions despite Leo never having publicly made such declarations himself. Her argument is not that the Spanish report must necessarily be false, rather, it is that anonymous briefings should not be confused with papal teaching.

Readers can find Diane Montagna’s full analysis here:

There are reasons for prudence: the timing is noteworthy. Within the space of a few days, two separate publications have advanced essentially the same message: that Cardinal Roche’s liturgical vision is, in reality, Pope Leo’s own vision. First came The Tablet interview, now comes La Razón, apparently strengthening that same narrative by appealing to anonymous Vatican sources. Whether this represents coordinated communication, officials independently briefing journalists, or simply accurate reporting of genuine conversations inside the Vatican is impossible to establish from the evidence presently available and it seems to me it will remain so until Pope Leo actually speaks definitively on this issue.

Equally, there are reports from Spanish commentators suggesting that La Razón itself has long taken a particular editorial line on ecclesiastical affairs and should therefore be read with appropriate caution. Those observations, however, concern the publication’s perceived editorial stance rather than constituting evidence that this particular report is inaccurate. They should therefore be treated as context, not proof.

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Cardinal Arthur Roche has given what is arguably the most significant interview on the future of the Traditional Latin Mass since Pope Leo XIV was elected. Speaking to The Tablet, Roche confidently declared that Pope Leo “is not going to change Traditionis Custodes“ and that there will be no return to Summorum Pontificum. If those words genuinely reflect the settled mind of the Holy Father, then they are quite devastating for many. But before we accept them at face value, we should ask a rather obvious question: On whose authority is Cardinal Roche speaking?

There is an important distinction between a prefect announcing a papal decision and a prefect expressing his own expectation of what the Pope will do. The interview, at least as published, does not clearly establish that distinction. Roche does not say that Pope Leo has instructed him to announce a decision, nor does he point to any formal papal act. Instead, he simply asserts that Leo will not reverse the restrictions imposed by Pope Francis. The confidence with which he makes that statement is striking, yet it also sits rather awkwardly alongside everything else we know about Pope Leo’s approach to the liturgy.

So, what do we actually know?

The truth her is that since his election, Pope Leo has been remarkably careful not to make any public statements about the Traditional Latin Mass. Unlike his predecessor, he has not chosen to fight the liturgy wars through interviews or public rhetoric. His actions, however, tell a more nuanced story. Last year, as regular readers will know, the bishops of England and Wales were informed through the Apostolic Nuncio that Pope Leo wished to grant generous exemptions to Traditionis Custodes. According to reports, the nuncio explained that the Holy Father intended to ask Cardinal Roche himself to administer the legislation generously.

Earlier this year, Pope Leo wrote to the bishops of France encouraging “concrete solutions” that would permit the generous inclusion of Catholics sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo. The letter was communicated through Cardinal Parolin and the Secretariat of State rather than through the Dicastery for Divine Worship.

He also permitted Cardinal Raymond Burke to celebrate a solemn pontifical Mass according to the 1962 Missal in St Peter’s Basilica.

None of these actions amount to a restoration of Summorum Pontificum. None repeal Traditionis Custodes. But neither do they resemble the policy Cardinal Roche has consistently advocated over the past five years. The contrast between what Cardinal Roche has said and what the Pope has done is difficult to ignore.

An intriguing pattern

One feature of these developments deserves more attention than it has received. The Pope’s conciliatory messages have not principally been communicated through the Dicastery for Divine Worship. Instead, they have come through the Secretariat of State and through the apostolic nuncios. That may simply be administrative convenience, but equally, it may indicate that Pope Leo preferred to communicate directly with bishops rather than have his intentions filtered through a dicastery whose prefect has become closely identified with the previous pontificate’s restrictive liturgical policy. I should be clear that that is an inference, not a fact, but it is an inference that naturally arises from the available evidence.

The timing is curious

Cardinal Roche’s interview also comes at an interesting moment.

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You may well be scratching your head reading this and wondering what on earth I am talking about. If that’s you - great! You probably don’t need to read any further, good on you! Keep up the good work, stay close to Jesus! But if you are one of our readers whose timeline is full of voices shouting that the end of the Catholic Church is now, you might find this helpful.

For some the evidence appears overwhelming. We have witnessed the sexual abuse crisis expose profound moral corruption within the clergy and episcopate on a scale that has shattered confidence in the Church’s leadership. We have seen bishops and even cardinals publicly contradict settled Catholic teaching on questions of marriage, sexuality and the uniqueness of Christ. Under Pope Francis, the Pachamama ceremony in the Vatican Gardens became, for many, a symbol of theological confusion and ecclesial disorientation. Even now, bishops continue to be appointed who have openly questioned or undermined elements of Catholic doctrine while faithful clergy often appear to be overlooked or marginalised. To many observers, these are not isolated failures but symptoms of a Church in terminal decline.

It is therefore unsurprising that many have turned to the great Marian apparitions for confirmation. The messages of Fatima, Akita and La Salette are frequently cited as prophetic explanations of the crisis before our eyes. Particular emphasis is placed upon the words attributed to Our Lady of Akita that “the work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals and bishops against other bishops.” Faced with such an extraordinarily accurate description of the present ecclesiastical division, it is understandable why many conclude that these prophecies are being fulfilled in our own day. Combine this with St Paul’s warning that there will be a great falling away before the return of Christ, the conclusion can appear almost irresistible. Yet this is precisely the point at which Catholic theology demands the greatest discipline.

Private revelation, however worthy of belief, can never become the lens through which the definitive revelation of Christ is interpreted. The Church has always taught that approved apparitions may assist the faithful but add nothing to the Deposit of Faith. Their purpose is not to revise the Gospel nor to supersede the promises of Christ. What this means is that public revelation judges private revelation, never the reverse. To put it another way, we must read the apparitions through the lens of the Gospel, never the other way around.

One striking feature of every approved Marian apparition is the consistency of Our Lady’s response to ecclesial crisis. She warns of sin, infidelity and the need for conversion with extraordinary seriousness. She speaks of suffering within the Church, of persecution and even of grave failures among her shepherds, yet nowhere in any approved apparition does she instruct the faithful to abandon communion with Peter, to establish a parallel ecclesial structure or to seek refuge outside the visible Church. Her appeal is always the same. Pray, do penance, return to Christ, remain faithful. This isn’t simply an incidental observation but one entirely consistent with Catholic theology. Since private revelation cannot add to, correct or supersede the definitive revelation entrusted to the Church, it could hardly authenticate itself by encouraging separation from the very Church that Christ promised the gates of hell would never overcome. Even when she warns of corruption within the hierarchy, the response she asks for is ALWAYS fidelity rather than separation.

There is another element to this that I think deserves equal attention. It strikes me as blindingly obvious (and yet consistently overlooked) that we human beings naturally compress history into the brief span of their own lives. We instinctively assume that the crises we witness must be uniquely decisive because they fill the horizon of our experience, yet the reality is that the Church has endured two thousand years of upheaval. Christians living through Nero’s persecutions, the Arian crisis, the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Great Western Schism and the Protestant Reformation all had compelling reasons to believe they were witnessing the final collapse of the Church. Many undoubtedly believed they were living through the Great Apostasy itself. They were sincere, they were frightened…They were wrong.

Looking back over sixteen centuries we can see that St. Augustine recognised this tendency. Preaching as the Vandals closed in on Hippo and the Roman world appeared to be disintegrating around him, he rebuked those who lamented that they lived in uniquely terrible times. “We are the times,” he declared. “Such as we are, such are the times.” His point was not that the age was unimportant but that Christians are called to sanctify their own generation rather than speculate endlessly about its place in salvation history.

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Rumours were swirling at the weekend that the Prefect for the Dicastery of Divine Worship, Cardinal Arthur Roche would soon be replaced with the Trappist monk Erik Varden who has served as Bishop of Trondheim since 2020. Bishop Varden is a highly respected academic who was, in 2002, admitted to Mount St Bernard Abbey, a Trappist monastery near Coalville in Leicestershire. The Trappists (officially the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, OCSO) spirituality is centred on the radical pursuit of God through silence, prayer, simplicity and conversion of life. Their vocation is not primarily to do things for the Church, but to be before God. The monastery is therefore not an escape from the world, but a place where the search for God becomes absolute. Varden's standing in Rome appears to be on the rise, reflected most clearly in Pope Leo's decision to entrust him with preaching the Lenten Spiritual Exercises to the Roman Curia this year.

I first brought Roche’s potential move to your attention at the end of March, when it emerged that he was rumoured to become the patron of the Order of Malta. We know Roche has not been happy with Pope Leo’s failure to enforce the trajectory of Traditiones Custodes to eliminate the Traditional Latin Mass completely. This most forcefully came after Pope Leo’s letter to the French Bishops in which he spoke of a “painful wound” and asked for concrete ways of ensuring a generous inclusion of those attached to the Vetus Ordo (literally, the old rite). The language is measured, but it is not casual. It recognises that these communities are not diminishing into irrelevance, on the contrary, their continued presence and in some places their growth, has become part of the pastoral landscape that bishops must reckon with. The request for concrete solutions carried weight because it assumed that the existing arrangements (i.e. Traditiones Custodes) have not resolved the difficulty. Obviously this pretty much repudiated — or at least seriously undermined Traditiones Custodes and there were a number of unconfirmed reports that Cardinal Roche was privately angered by the letter and felt that the Pope had made him look like an idiot (if I’m honest, I don’t think he needed Pope Leo’s help for that).

The point is that it is possible trace a gradual change of direction. Pope Leo’s moving at a glacial pace and that has discouraged a lot of us. But if Varden was appointed as Prefect of the DDW, this would mark a real improvement and give faithful Catholics everywhere something to celebrate. I must stress that this is just rumour at the moment however. The current rumours appear to originate with French and Spanish Catholic media, principally Tribune Chrétienne, with InfoVaticana subsequently amplifying them. Both report that Varden's name is circulating in Roman circles in connection with the Dicastery for Divine Worship, but neither cites named Vatican officials or documentary evidence. They are explicitly describing curial speculation, not reporting a confirmed decision.

I do think that appointing Varden would mean Pope Leo wants someone with more theological depth and pastoral seriousness than an aptitude for Vatican politics. If Leo wanted Divine Worship to move away from the highly legalistic and often polarising style associated with Roche, Varden would represent a very different kind of prefect, less of an administrator and more of a theologian and spiritual father.

But at this stage this is just speculation. Something good and concrete that did happen this weekend was that the five-year terms of the Members appointed in June 2021 have now concluded for The Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.

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So why are young men in Plymouth not putting themselves forward for the priesthood? You could say that in his address, Bishop Hudson sees the problem as one of “supply”, but I think this is a crucial misdiagnosis and the problem is much deeper, it is a growing loss of faith, not necessarily in Jesus (although I do have huge issues with the ineffectiveness of traditional structures to preach the Gospel) but in the formation on offer and the institutional credibility.

Think about it - if you are a young man who has managed to avoid being inoculated against the faith by the weak strain of Catholicism on offer in the UK’s Catholic Schools, are you really going to be willing to commit your life to bishops who seem so preoccupied with issues which seem so at variance with settled Catholic teaching?

Which brings me to my second piece of news.

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This time last year, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh clashed with Andrew Tate over marriage. Walsh thinks that Marriage is for keeps, and Tate thinks that Marriage is for wimps.

“The smartest move on the chessboard for a man now” Tate says “is to get rich and have as many children as he wants with as many women as he wants”

I have no doubt that Andrew Tate devotees are struck by what they see as an original voice crying heroically in a wasteland destroyed by feminists. But as Mr Ecclesiastes said:

“What has been, is what will be,
and what has been done, is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9

And so it is that Mr Tate is simply a modern day Machiavelli with muscles. While the ancients; Plato, Aristotle and then Aquinas saw a connection between being good and being successful, Machiavelli saw a contradiction between the two.

It is hard to find a thinker as influential as Machiavelli, who has been so despised, and yet Tate channels him. Don’t underestimate Tate, he is a thinker “You’re gonna love apples” he opines “if you can’t buy bananas”. That one he gives for free! For a deeper insight into his philosophy it would be a lot cheaper to purchase Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ (available from all good bookshops and Waterstones) than to sign up for Tate’s online coaching.

Peter Kreeft reminds us that Machiavelli teaches how to be successful rather than moral. Powerful rather than good. Everything he says in The Prince follows logically from 3 assumptions. Firstly, He assumes that reality doesn’t include ideals, goods or values. Reality consists only of material facts. He was implicitly a materialist.

Secondly, man is by nature wicked, selfish, competitive and immoral. For it follows that if only matter is real, then what is real in man is only matter, and matter is essentially competitive. The more food you eat, the less food there is for me to eat, the more money I give to you, the less I have for myself. Only spirit transcends this law.

If spiritual things like love, truth and beauty are real, they can be given away without losing anything. Money, power, territory, and fame diminish when shared, while spiritual goods multiply when shared. But if spiritual goods are not objectively real, if all that’s objectively real in man is matter, then any two men are always fundamentally competitive, and life becomes a chessboard.

Thirdly, there can be a formula for success because there are only two variables – virtu (power – the ability to compel objective reality to obey your will) and fortuna (luck, chance – things that cannot be controlled). His formula for success is the maximisation of Virtu and the minimisation of Fortuna. This is implicitly the metaphysics of atheism. Tate claims he is a Muslim. Either way, it ain’t Christian.

‘Politics’ Machiavelli said, ‘is the art of the possible’. When the gap between the ideal and the real is too great, lower your ideals! For Machiavelli, ideals are to be judged by how practical they are, how they have worked in the past, and according to him;

‘All unarmed prophets have failed, and all armed prophets have succeeded’.

For the ancients, ideals were the standards for the real, but Machiavelli reverses this – ideals are to be judged by how practical they are. Honour is not an objective ideal to attain, but a thing to attain only to the extent that it furthers earthly success.

“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way, necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous, therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule, he must learn how not to be virtuous” (The Prince)

Machiavelli instructs a man in vice, emphasising the maintainance of rule over the practive of virtue. Princes, he claims, should only honour their word when it works, and by works he means leads to earthly success;

“everyone realises how praiseworthy it is for a prince to honour his word…nevertheless, contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and have overcome those abiding by honest principles, therefore a prudent ruler should not honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage”

In other words, because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them. Like Milton’s Satan he concludes ‘evil be thou my good’.

Similarly, Tate whines about the state of the world and the people in it;

“Any man with a brain doesn’t hand over keys to his castle to…over emotional unchecked females. The world’s changed…telling men to just get married, and just be loyal, gets men wrecked. Own your empire and women will respect you…no woman can steal my hundreds of millions…marriage is suicide. If you can’t change the game, WIN the game”.

This philosophy, like Machiavelli’s 500 years before him, makes morality dependent on other people’s morality. How good or evil other people are becomes your standard. No matter how high and hard Tate can kick that sounds pretty wimpy to me.

Both Tate and Machiavelli advise their audience that if they want to be successful, they need to wimp out of ideals and let others set the standard, be Pontius Pilate instead of Jesus. And why? To survive, to attain success.

One of these two had more influence on history than any man who ever lived (despite being unarmed, tortured, then killed) and one became a byword for ‘cop-out’. One lived and died in obedience to rightful authority, to high ideals, the other blew in the wind. Who was more powerful?

Well that depends.

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The excellent team at SPUC has produced this short video answering some of the most common questions about the legislation and, crucially, explaining why it is so important that every one of us contacts our Member of Parliament. Personal letters and emails really do make a difference.

Please take a few minutes to watch it, and then act.

At Catholic Unscripted, however, we believe there is another vital part of this campaign.

As Catholics, we have been entrusted with an extraordinary moral witness on the dignity of every human life. At a moment like this, our bishops have a unique opportunity to lead the faithful in prayer, teaching and public action. That is why, alongside contacting our MPs, we are encouraging Catholics to write respectfully to their own bishop, asking him to lead a coordinated diocesan response.

Imagine if every parish was encouraged to pray for the defeat of this legislation. Imagine if parishioners were equipped to write thoughtful personal letters to their MPs. Imagine if Holy Hours, Rosaries and parish initiatives sprang up across the country in defence of the sanctity of life.

This is not about criticising our bishops. It is about asking them, respectfully and prayerfully, to lead us at this crucial moment.

Pope St John Paul II called for “a general mobilisation of consciences and a united ethical effort to activate a great campaign in support of life” (Evangelium Vitae, 95). We believe that time is now.

Please watch the video, write to your MP, and if you would be willing to support this initiative by contacting your bishop, let us know in the comments which diocese you belong to. Over the coming weeks we hope to provide practical resources to help Catholics engage both prayerfully and effectively in this great cause.

Every life is precious. Every voice matters. And every prayer counts.

Today the Gospel reading is Matthew 12:46-50, the Gospel acclamation is John 14:23, the Responsorial Psalm is PS 85 (84):2-4. 5-6. 7-8. Response 8a, and the first reading is Micah 7:14-15, 18-20.

I always find this Gospel quite difficult to stand alone - it is one of those challenging Gospels that could easily be taken the wrong way which means I find it particularly fascinating! The plain sense of the text seems to that Jesus is somehow denegrating His family. Indeed, many Protestant denominations do take it exactly that way and see it as Jesus rejecting His own Mother! Since the Reformers rejected doctrines such as the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, Marian intercession and devotion to Mary (although Luther himself retained a much higher Marian theology than many later Protestants), Protestants have developed a hermeneutic of suspicion and subsequently developed a tendency to look for texts that appear to "put Mary in her place." Matthew 12 and Luke 11 naturally become favourite proof texts.

Why does the Church give us this Gospel to reflect on today and is it really, as it seems, in isolation?

This is one of those passages that certainly is easy to misunderstand, if read on its own, but once you read the passage in the context of the whole of Scripture, the Fathers, and the Church’s theological reflection, you realise that Jesus is not denigrating His Mother, in fact, you arrive at something almost opposite. Jesus is explaining the true reason why His mother is blessed. The Catholic understanding isn’t an attempt to “explain away” an embarrassing text. Rather, it asks the question that the Ethiopian eunuch asks Philip in Acts 8:

“How can I [understand], unless someone guides me?”

That beautifully illustrates the Catholic claim about the Church’s teaching office. Scripture is inspired, but it was entrusted to the Church. The same Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures also guides the Church in their authentic interpretation. This is reflected in the Church’s understanding of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. The Second Vatican Council teaches in Dei Verbum (§10) that:

“The task of authentically interpreting the word of God... has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church.”

That doesn’t mean individual Christians cannot read Scripture, they absolutely should. It means that no Christian reads in isolation from the Church that preserved, canonised, proclaimed and reflected on these texts over two millennia. It is for this reason that the Church has not presented this Gospel story to us in isolation today. The key to today’s liturgy is that the Church expects us to interpret the Gospel through the lens of the other readings. The lectionary is almost always thematic during Ordinary Time.

The apparent harshness of Matthew 12:46-50 dissolves when you read it alongside Micah and Psalm 85. The first reading from Micah ends one of the most beautiful prophecies in the Old Testament:

“Who is a God like you, taking fault away, pardoning crime... You will again have compassion on us... You will show faithfulness to Jacob and mercy to Abraham.”

The emphasis is on God’s covenant faithfulness. God has chosen a family —Israel, not because of blood alone but because of covenant fidelity. Membership of God’s people is not a privilege of blood, ultimately determined by faithfulness to God. Jesus is now revealing the fulfilment of that covenant. When He says,

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?... Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother,”

He is not rejecting His natural family. He is redefining the boundaries of God’s covenant family. That is exactly what Micah had been anticipating. God’s mercy was never meant to terminate in ethnic descent but to create a people bound together by obedience and faith. The Responsorial Psalm reinforces this beautifully:

“Lord, let us see your kindness,
and grant us your salvation.”

The Psalm speaks repeatedly of God restoring His people, forgiving their sins, and bringing peace. Again, the emphasis is covenant restoration rather than biology. This also explains why the Gospel Acclamation is John 14:23:

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him.”

Notice the connection. Matthew says:

“Whoever does the will of my Father...”

John says:

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word...”

Doing the Father’s will is what makes someone part of Christ’s family. The Church is inviting us to see these readings as one continuous revelation. And there is another layer that is often missed: Matthew has already carefully established that Jesus perfectly fulfils the commandment to honour His father and mother. He has defended the Fourth Commandment against the Pharisees (Matthew 15), He obeyed Mary and Joseph at Nazareth, and from the Cross He entrusted Mary to John. So today’s Gospel cannot possibly mean that family relationships no longer matter, instead, Jesus is teaching something profoundly Jewish. In the Old Testament, belonging to Israel was principally a matter of birth, in the New Covenant, belonging to God’s people is principally a matter of grace and obedience; the Church becomes the new family of God. This is one of Matthew’s major themes. Earlier Jesus had already said:

“Many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham...” (Matthew 8:11)

The family is expanding beyond natural descent, but there is also a Marian dimension. Ironically, no one fulfils today’s Gospel better than Mary herself. Incredibly and counter intuitively in many ways, Protestants have historically thought Jesus is somehow diminishing Mary here. I was surprised, when I was part of the Baptist Bible Study Group that they literally had no developed Christology because of the dominance of this hermeneutic of suspicion. The Catholic tradition has always read it in precisely the opposite way. Why is Mary His mother? Certainly because she gave Him birth. But even more fundamentally because she perfectly did the will of the Father. St Augustine famously wrote:

“Mary was more blessed in receiving the faith of Christ than in conceiving the flesh of Christ.”

Likewise, St Luke records Jesus responding to a woman who cried:

“Blessed is the womb that bore you!”

He replies:

“Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” (Luke 11:27-28)

Again, this is not a correction of Mary—it is a description of exactly why Mary is blessed; she is the first and greatest disciple. So in today’s Gospel, Mary is not excluded from the circle Jesus draws with His hand, she stands at its very centre.

So why does the Church give us this reading today? I think the answer is that today’s liturgy is about identity. Micah asks: Who belongs to God’s merciful covenant? The Psalm asks: Who will receive God’s salvation? The Gospel answers: Those who do the Father’s will. Jesus is not saying, “My earthly family means nothing.” He is saying, “Through me, everyone who obeys the Father can become part of my family.” When you think about it, that would have been a breath-taking claim to His first hearers. It means that the intimacy with God enjoyed by Mary, Joseph, the Apostles, and Israel itself is now offered to every believer. The covenant family has become universal…not by bloodline, but by grace, faith, and obedience.

https://www.friendsoftheholyland.org....

For many Christians, the Holy Land is a place of pilgrimage. Yet it is also home to ancient Christian communities who continue to live, worship and bear witness to Christ amid extraordinary hardship.

In this powerful conversation, we speak with Fr Bashar Fawadleh, parish…

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In a new interview with Cardinal Raymond Burke he comments extensively on synodality and I feel very strongly that what he says deserves to be treated as a very serious intervention. Cardinal Burke is asking a question so elementary that its continued lack of a satisfactory answer is itself revealing: what exactly is synodality?

It is important to make clear that his concern is not with synods as such. The Catholic Church has always held councils and synods. Bishops have always consulted priests, religious and the faithful. Nor is Burke objecting to the Christian duties of listening, prayer, discernment or mutual cooperation. His criticism is directed towards the elevation of “synodality” into a defining ecclesiological principle without any sufficiently precise account of what it is, where its authority comes from, what its limits are, or how it relates to the deposit of faith. A synod is an identifiable ecclesial institution. Synodality is an abstraction and, as we have seen over the last decade or so, a remarkably elastic one.

Its elasticity stands in contrast to the precision of Catholic theology and this has enabled the word to acquire an almost talismanic status. It can describe consultation, episcopal collegiality, parish participation, decentralisation, listening to marginalised groups, spiritual discernment, institutional reform and the exercise of papal authority. It can mean the Church listening to the Holy Spirit, the bishops listening to the laity, the laity listening to one another, or Rome devolving decisions to local Churches. At times it appears to mean all these things simultaneously. The more synodality is invoked, the less clearly it seems to be defined.

This was not how Pope Francis originally presented it: In his important address marking the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Synod of Bishops in October 2015, Francis offered what remains perhaps his clearest theological account of the concept. “It is precisely this path of synodality,” he declared, “which God expects of the Church of the third millennium.” (that’s quite a claim!).

He described the synodal Church as a listening Church in which the faithful, the bishops and the Bishop of Rome listen to one another and together listen to the Holy Spirit. He insisted that the process culminates in the Pope, not as the expression of his private convictions, but as the guarantor of the Church’s obedience to God, the Gospel and Tradition. He also affirmed that a synod must always act cum Petro et sub Petro, with Peter and under Peter, precisely as a guarantee of unity.

Taken at face value, much of this is unobjectionable and even attractive. The Church should listen. Bishops should know the lives, sufferings and questions of the people entrusted to them. The Pope should confirm his brethren in the faith rather than rule according to personal preference. Pastoral authority should be exercised as service rather than domination. Consultation should be extensive, prayerful and attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

The problem lies not principally in this description, but in what synodality has repeatedly produced in practice. Francis went considerably further than advocating consultation. In the same address he called synodality a “constitutive element of the Church” and “the most appropriate interpretive framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself”. He spoke of an “entirely synodal Church”, of greater decentralisation, and of a synodal dynamism inspiring “all ecclesial decisions”. These are massive claims. Synodality is no longer merely a method by which bishops consult the faithful, it becomes an interpretive framework through which the Church understands her own constitution, authority and decision-making.

Yet the practical difficulty…Some might say obvious internal incoherence…immediately presents itself. If synodality means listening, to whom is the Church listening and by what criterion are the voices being discerned? Public opinion is not the sensus fidei. The demands most insistently repeated by activists, theologians, lobby groups and professionally selected delegates do not necessarily represent the faith of the baptised. Nor can the Holy Spirit be invoked as an explanation for conclusions that contradict what the Church has consistently taught.

Francis himself acknowledged this danger in 2015. The bishops, he said, must distinguish the authentic faith of the Church from the “changing currents of public opinion”. But it cannot be denied that the subsequent synodal process has repeatedly elevated precisely those currents into the Church’s deliberations.

Questions concerning homosexuality, sexual morality, the ordination of women, gender identity, ecclesial authority and sacramental discipline have been returned to the table as though the Church had never spoken definitively about them. The stated justification is that no one should be afraid of dialogue, that the Spirit may speak through unexpected voices, and that the Church must listen to lived experience. But listening is never presented as a neutral exercise. The issues admitted for reconsideration move overwhelmingly in one direction and synodality rarely seems to reopen questions in order to recover a stricter understanding of Catholic doctrine or discipline. It does not ordinarily invite reconsideration of Communion in the hand, contraception, no-fault annulments, liturgical experimentation, the collapse of clerical discipline or the loss of a clear teaching on the last things. It never speaks of the call to holiness, the importance of devotions or the need for solid catechesis. Instead, it repeatedly generates pressure for accommodation to the moral assumptions of the contemporary West.

Perhaps you could argue that this does not necessarily prove that Pope Francis consciously devised synodality as a dishonest instrument. Motive is difficult to establish and should not be asserted beyond the evidence. Nevertheless, after more than a decade, I think it is reasonable to judge a governing method by its consistent effects. Those effects suggest that synodality has functioned as a mechanism through which settled teaching can be circumvented without being formally denied.

The genius (?!?) of the mechanism is that doctrine need not be changed. It can be repeatedly affirmed even while pastoral practices are authorised that appear to contradict it. This pattern first became unmistakable in Amoris Laetitia. The apostolic exhortation followed two highly contested synods on the family. Catholic doctrine on marriage was formally preserved. Marriage remained indissoluble. Sexual relations outside a valid marriage remained objectively contrary to the moral law. No doctrinal proposition was openly reversed. Yet Chapter Eight introduced a new emphasis upon accompaniment, discernment, mitigating circumstances and gradual integration into the sacramental life of the Church. Francis cautioned against applying general rules mechanically to every concrete situation and stated that discernment could recognise that a person, while living in an objectively sinful situation, might not be subjectively guilty of mortal sin.

Considered in isolation, this reflects established Catholic moral theology. The Church has always distinguished the objective character of an act from the subjective culpability of the person committing it. The innovation lay in the use to which that distinction was put.

Footnote 351 stated that in certain cases the Church’s help could include the sacraments. The document did not define those cases with precision. It did not clearly state whether it referred to divorced and civilly remarried persons continuing sexual relations while receiving Holy Communion. Nor did it restate the discipline articulated by St John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio, according to which those unable to separate for serious reasons could receive the sacraments provided they lived as brother and sister. Instead, the ambiguity was left unresolved and what resulted was different pastoral practices in different jurisdictions.

Different bishops adopted contradictory policies. Some maintained the previous discipline. Others allowed admission to Holy Communion after a process of personal discernment, even where the couple did not undertake to live in continence. In 2023 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith explicitly stated that Amoris Laetitia had opened the possibility of access to Reconciliation and the Eucharist in particular cases where responsibility and culpability were diminished. The doctrine of indissolubility had not changed. The doctrine concerning adultery had not changed. The Church’s teaching on the worthy reception of Holy Communion had not formally changed. But the discipline which gave those teachings concrete expression had changed.

This is the distinction upon which the entire Francis project repeatedly depends. Doctrine remains verbally intact while pastoral practice is detached from its necessary doctrinal consequences. The result is not merely pastoral flexibility. It is a condition in which the same objective relationship may be treated as an obstacle to Communion in one diocese and no obstacle in another. The supposedly universal moral and sacramental order becomes dependent upon geography, episcopal interpretation and the outcome of an individual discernment process. At that point one must ask what it means to say that the doctrine has remained unchanged. A doctrine whose practical implications may be indefinitely suspended has not been explicitly denied, but neither is it governing the Church’s life.

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Yet Christian compassion does not relieve us of the obligation to think, as G.K. Chesterton put it, “The church asks us to remove our hats, not our heads, when we enter the church”. Indeed charity demands that we think more carefully, because good intentions detached from prudence can produce consequences that are neither merciful nor just.

This is why Pope Leo XIV’s recent interventions on migration are becoming a cause for concern. The problem is not that the Pope is teaching error. Much of what he says is true, necessary and firmly rooted in the Gospel. TWhat concerns me is that he is repeatedly presenting one part of Catholic teaching with such emotional and rhetorical force that the corresponding part is almost disappearing from view.

At a moment when migration has become one of the most socially explosive questions in Europe and the United States, the Pope speaks eloquently about the dignity of migrants, the duty to welcome, the cruelty of indifference and the need for legal routes. He speaks much less clearly about the right of nations to control their borders, the distinction between lawful migration and illegal entry, the limits imposed by social capacity, the preservation of national culture, the consent of existing populations or the obligations migrants assume towards the countries in which they settle.

This imbalance is disturbing because the West is already dangerously polarised and this issue is one of the key reasons why. Political and cultural elites have promoted multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion while often treating those who question the consequences as morally suspect. Ordinary citizens who express concern about housing, public services, crime, cultural fragmentation or the rapid transformation of their communities are frequently described as fearful, xenophobic or racist. Discussion is not encouraged but closed down. Anxiety is not examined but pathologised.

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This phrase carries with it the pathos of exile, the courage of martyrdom, the steadfastness of the prophets and the quiet conviction that, even when the world appears to have abandoned God, He never abandons His people.

It is a phrase capable of inspiring us to extraordinary fidelity. But does it also tend towards a nurturing of extraordinary presumption?

It has become increasingly common in recent months to hear it invoked by those who believe the Catholic Church has entered the greatest crisis in her history, a crisis so profound that the ordinary structures of ecclesial life have become unreliable custodians of the Faith. Among some traditionalist circles, particularly those sympathetic to the Society of St Pius X, the language of the faithful remnant has become almost instinctive. It is not generally presented as an official ecclesiology, but rather as an explanation of present circumstances. Yet ideas have trajectories. They develop according to an internal logic and what begins as a description of a crisis can become a redefinition of the Church herself.

That is not to say that the present crisis is in any way imaginary. It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. The collapse of Mass attendance across much of the Western world, the catastrophic decline in priestly and religious vocations, the widespread ignorance of even the most elementary truths of the Catholic faith, the moral scandals that have devastated confidence in the hierarchy, the liturgical experimentation that has often obscured the sacrificial nature of the Mass and the theological ambiguities that have characterised so much ecclesiastical discourse since the Second Vatican Council have left many Catholics ignoratnt of their faith and many who do know their faith bewildered and wounded. Those who seek refuge in communities where doctrine is taught clearly, where the liturgy is celebrated reverently and where the demands of the Gospel are proclaimed without embarrassment do not deserve either caricature or contempt. Their concerns are frequently real and often justified.

However a problem arises when the search for refuge becomes the search for identity. It is one thing to seek a haven during a storm, it is quite another to conclude that the storm has destroyed the ship itself and that only those gathered within one’s own lifeboat now constitute the true vessel of salvation. This is the distinction which lies at the heart of the contemporary debate over the faithful remnant.

The expression itself is profoundly biblical. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand the history of salvation without it. The story of God’s dealings with humanity is repeatedly the story of His preserving a faithful remnant through whom His promises are fulfilled. When the world descended into violence before the Flood, Noah and his family became that remnant through whom creation itself was renewed. When Elijah despaired that he alone remained faithful amidst Israel’s apostasy, God reminded him that He had preserved seven thousand who had not bent the knee to Baal. Isaiah repeatedly speaks of the remnant of Israel that will survive judgement and become the seed of restoration. Following the Babylonian Exile, it is the returning remnant that rebuilds Jerusalem and prepares the way for the coming of the Messiah. St Paul himself takes up this theme in his Epistle to the Romans, seeing within the believing Jews of his own day the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy that “a remnant shall be saved.”

Nor does the rest of the New Testament abandon this language. Our Lord speaks of the “little flock” to whom the Father has chosen to give the Kingdom. He warns that the gate is narrow and the way hard that leads to life. He asks the haunting question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” The Book of Revelation depicts those who remain faithful amidst persecution as those who “keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus.”

The existence of a faithful remnant is therefore not a theological novelty but a permanent feature of biblical revelation, However there is a subtle distinction running through every one of these biblical examples that deserves closer attention: In Scripture, the remnant is always identified by God.

Noah did not declare himself the remnant. Elijah did not identify the seven thousand. Isaiah did not appoint the survivors of Israel. Even St Paul does not presume to define the boundaries of God’s remnant by his own authority. In every case, it is God who preserves, God who chooses, God who reveals and God who judges.

The remnant is therefore an object of divine election before it is an object of human recognition.

That distinction carries enormous ecclesiological significance. The remnant in Scripture never exists because it has judged itself superior to the rest of God’s people. Rather, it exists because God, in His providence, preserves His covenant despite the failures of His people. The remnant is never primarily evidence that a few men have remained faithful. It is evidence that God has remained faithful to His covenant when almost everyone else has forgotten it.

This is perhaps why Scripture consistently discourages any premature confidence in identifying who precisely constitutes that remnant. The prophets call Israel to repentance, not to self-congratulation. Christ warns His disciples to persevere, not to assume that they alone have understood the Father’s purposes. Even the Apostles, who knew they had been specially chosen by Christ, continually exhort the faithful to humility, vigilance and perseverance lest they themselves should fall.

The danger, then, is not in believing that God preserves a remnant. The danger lies in believing that we are competent to identify ourselves as that remnant in such a way that the category ceases to be God’s judgement and becomes our own. This temptation has accompanied the Church from her earliest centuries. Every age has believed itself to be living in extraordinary times. Every age has looked upon its own confusions and concluded that history had reached its decisive moment. The conviction that one’s own generation occupies the final chapter of salvation history possesses an almost irresistible attraction. It lends urgency to every controversy and apocalyptic significance to every crisis and it makes sense because our time is limited and the Church endures.

The first Christians themselves expected the imminent return of Christ. St Paul had to correct misunderstandings within the Church at Thessalonica concerning the Day of the Lord. Throughout the patristic era there were those convinced that the great apostasy had already begun. Medieval Europe repeatedly witnessed movements proclaiming the end of the age. The upheavals of the Reformation were interpreted by many as unmistakable signs of the Antichrist’s arrival. The French Revolution, with its open assault upon Christianity, appeared to countless Catholics to herald the final rebellion against God. The twentieth century, scarred by two world wars, totalitarian ideologies and unprecedented technological destruction, gave fresh plausibility to such expectations.

Yet Christ’s own words remain stubbornly resistant to every attempt to identify the timetable of Providence.

“Of that day and hour no one knows.”

These words are not merely a prohibition against date-setting, they are a profound theological warning against interpreting history as though we possessed God’s perspective upon it. Christians are commanded to discern the signs of the times, but they are never authorised to declare with certainty that they are living through the definitive fulfilment of every prophetic warning.

There is wisdom in this restraint. It protects the Church from the arrogance that mistakes contemporary events for the final chapter of God’s dealings with humanity. It reminds each generation that countless Christians before them have lived through crises which appeared no less decisive than their own.

One of the remarkable features of Church history is how often groups convinced that they represented the final faithful remnant gradually separated themselves from the visible life of the Church. The pattern is strikingly consistent. The crisis is judged unprecedented. The hierarchy is judged compromised. The majority of ordinary Catholics are judged to have capitulated. Fidelity becomes concentrated within an increasingly self-conscious minority. What began as a call to reform slowly becomes an alternative account of where the Church herself is to be found. This trajectory is not confined to one period or one movement. It has appeared in various forms throughout Christian history because it arises from a perennial temptation. Faced with genuine corruption within the Church, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between preserving the Church and replacing her. It is precisely here that the biblical understanding of the remnant offers a necessary correction.

The remnant never exists because God has abandoned His people. It exists because He refuses to. Once you understand that important distinction, it changes everything.

The remnant is not God’s alternative to Israel, it is the means by which Israel herself is restored. Noah is preserved so that humanity may begin anew. Elijah’s seven thousand are preserved so that Israel’s covenant may endure. The exiles return so that Jerusalem may be rebuilt. Even the Apostles, the smallest of beginnings, are immediately commanded to preach the Gospel to every nation under heaven. The remnant is never an end in itself, it is always the seed from which God intends something larger to grow.

This observation leads naturally to a question that contemporary discussions of the faithful remnant do not always address with sufficient care: If the remnant exists only for itself, has it remained faithful to the biblical pattern at all? Or has it become something fundamentally different?

These are much more than merely historical questions, they strike at the heart of the Church’s understanding of herself, of her mission and of the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit within her. They invite us to ask not simply whether the Church is experiencing a profound crisis, but whether our interpretation of that crisis remains faithful to Christ’s own promises concerning His Body. It is to those promises and to the astonishing universality of the Gospel they proclaim, that we must now turn, contrasting the expansiveness of the Gospel and the living action of the Holy Spirit with the tendency of remnant ecclesiology to become defensive and static.

The New Testament introduces a development so profound that it is easy to overlook precisely because it has become so familiar to us. The Old Covenant was entrusted to one people, one nation, one Temple and one priesthood. Israel was chosen not because she was greater than the nations but because through her God intended to bless the nations. Election was always ordered towards universality, the remnant preserved throughout Israel’s turbulent history was never preserved for its own sake. It existed so that God’s promises to Abraham, that through his descendants all the families of the earth would be blessed, might finally come to fulfilment.

This is why everything in the ministry of Christ moves in the direction of expansion rather than contraction. The Kingdom begins with twelve Apostles but immediately reaches towards every tribe and nation. The barriers separating Jew and Gentile begin to fall. The Samaritan woman, the Roman centurion, Zacchaeus, Cornelius and the Ethiopian eunuch all become signs that God’s salvific plan is widening beyond anything Israel had imagined. Pentecost itself is an event of astonishing catholicity. The miracle is not that everyone suddenly speaks one language, but that each hears the Gospel proclaimed in his own tongue. Diversity is not abolished but gathered into unity.

This universal horizon reaches its fullest expression in the Great Commission. The Apostles are not instructed to preserve a small enclave of doctrinal purity until Christ returns. They are commanded to “make disciples of all nations”. The Church’s instinct, from her very birth, is centrifugal rather than centripetal. She is constantly moving outwards, carrying the Gospel into the world because the love of Christ impels her.

It is in this context that St Paul’s remarkable declaration must be understood: God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The universality of God’s salvific will is not a peripheral doctrine but one of the great affirmations of the New Testament. Christ did not offer Himself merely for an elect few. He died for all. The Church exists because God refuses to abandon the human race to sin and death. Every sacrament, every missionary endeavour, every theological development and every act of pastoral charity participates in that universal desire.

This creates a tension which every authentic theology of the faithful remnant must resolve. How can the Church simultaneously affirm that the way is narrow and that God desires the salvation of all? How can Christ speak of a little flock while commanding that the Gospel be preached to every creature?

The answer given by Scripture is subtle but profoundly beautiful: the remnant exists for the many, it is never presented as God’s abandonment of the many. It is essential that we remember this distinction especially when some Christians begin to identify themselves with the remnant. There is always a danger that what Scripture presents as God’s instrument for the salvation of the world becomes, in human hands, the justification for withdrawal from the world. The missionary impulse gradually gives way to a defensive posture. Preservation begins to eclipse proclamation. The Church ceases to appear as the sacrament of salvation for humanity and instead becomes a sanctuary for those who have already recognised the truth.

It is difficult to read the New Testament without noticing how relentlessly Christ frustrates every attempt to narrow the scope of God’s mercy. Again and again He refuses the categories by which His contemporaries sought to define the boundaries of the Kingdom. He praises the faith of Gentiles. He eats with sinners. He tells parables in which the expected heirs of the Kingdom find themselves standing outside while those invited from the highways and hedgerows enter the wedding feast. None of this diminishes the seriousness of judgement, the Gospel never suggests that salvation is automatic or that repentance is unnecessary. But the movement is always outward, God’s grace constantly exceeds expectation.

This theological instinct has characterised the Church throughout her history. It is one of the reasons why authentic Catholic development has always been expansive. The Church does not invent new revelation, public revelation concluded with the death of the last Apostle. Yet she grows in her understanding of that revelation because she is not merely an institution preserving ancient documents but a living Body animated by the Holy Spirit.

It was this living quality of the Church that John Henry Newman explored with such brilliance in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Newman recognised that Christianity presented an historical puzzle. The Church of the nineteenth century confessed doctrines and employed theological language that the Apostles themselves had never articulated in precisely those forms. The Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures of Christ, the mature articulation of sacramental theology and the Marian dogmas all represented developments. Yet none of them constituted new revelation. Rather, they unfolded what had always been contained within the apostolic deposit of faith.

Newman’s great insight was that living ideas develop because they are alive. Corruptions and developments are not the same thing. A corruption alters the identity of a thing, a genuine development enables it to become more fully itself. As we often say on Catholic Unscripted, an acorn becomes an oak. It does not become a different species of tree.

This organic understanding of development has enormous implications for ecclesiology, it means that the Church’s life cannot simply be frozen at any particular moment in history, however venerable. Every generation receives the same apostolic faith, yet each generation must also deepen its understanding of that faith under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is essential then that we recognise that development is therefore not a concession to modernity but an expression of the Church’s vitality.

The liturgy itself bears eloquent witness to this truth. It is often forgotten, particularly in contemporary debates, that what is commonly called the Traditional Latin Mass is itself the fruit of centuries of organic growth. The Roman Rite did not descend complete from heaven. Nor did it emerge fully formed in the apostolic age. Its prayers, ceremonies, calendar and ceremonial developed gradually across more than a millennium. St Gregory the Great would have recognised much in the Missal of 1962, yet he would also have encountered elements unknown in his own day. Likewise, the Christians of the second century would have recognised the Eucharistic sacrifice but not every liturgical form through which that sacrifice later came to be expressed. Before the middle of the 20th Century, it was quite rare for catholics to receive Holy Communion during Mass.

Traditional Catholics rightly defend this liturgy because they recognise in it the accumulated wisdom of centuries. Yet that very fact demonstrates that they already believe in liturgical development. The question is not whether development is possible, the question is whether authentic development remains possible after the Second Vatican Council. This is where Pope Benedict XVI made one of his most important contributions to modern Catholic thought. His vision was neither that nothing had changed nor that everything had changed. He rejected both the hermeneutic of rupture and an antiquarian desire simply to return to an earlier moment in history. Instead he proposed what he famously called a hermeneutic of reform in continuity. The Church remains herself precisely because she is alive. Continuity does not exclude reform. Reform does not require rupture.

His Moto Proprio Summorum Pontificum reflected precisely this conviction. Benedict did not envisage two permanently competing liturgical worlds existing in mutual suspicion. He hoped that the older form of the Roman Rite would preserve those treasures of reverence, silence and sacrificial emphasis that had become obscured in many celebrations of the newer Missal. At the same time, he believed that the ordinary form possessed genuine riches, including a broader lectionary and certain pastoral developments, from which the older form might also benefit. I certainly think it could be argued that having readings in the vernacular is a valuable development, but my point is that Pope Benedict XVI’s vision was not static preservation but mutual enrichment.

Whether that vision was realistic is a question historians may continue to debate. After Pope Francis promulgated Traditiones Custodes, many decided that Pope Benedict’s vision was dead. Yet Benedict’s theological instinct remains profoundly significant. He truly believed in the Church’s supernatural dimension and thus that the Holy Spirit had not ceased guiding the Church in 1962. He believed that the same Spirit who had guided the Church through the development of the Roman Rite over fifteen centuries had not suddenly withdrawn His assistance after the Second Vatican Council.

This point deserves careful reflection because it exposes a question that lies beneath almost every contemporary dispute about tradition. Where, precisely, do we believe the Holy Spirit is acting?

Catholics rightly affirm that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from formally teaching error in matters of faith and morals under the conditions defined by the First Vatican Council. Yet His activity cannot reasonably be reduced to those comparatively rare moments. Christ promised not merely isolated interventions but His abiding presence. “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” The Spirit is the soul of the Church, He sanctifies, purifies, corrects, renews and deepens her life continuously. The Church is not a museum whose treasures are merely guarded against decay. She is a living organism in whom divine life continues to circulate.

This observation introduces a question that deserves to be asked with both charity and seriousness. If one concludes (as the FSSPX does) that the Church’s ordinary life has remained in profound doctrinal confusion for more than sixty years, that her principal liturgical reform represents a rupture rather than an authentic development, that successive pontificates have largely failed in their fundamental task of strengthening the brethren, and that the ordinary structures of ecclesial governance have become unreliable custodians of the apostolic faith, what account remains of the Holy Spirit’s ordinary guidance of the Church?

The question is not whether grave mistakes have been made. History leaves no room for naïveté on that score. The Church has survived corrupt popes, weak bishops, disastrous pastoral decisions and periods of astonishing moral collapse many times before. The question is rather whether Christ’s promises permit us to conclude that the Spirit’s ordinary work has effectively migrated from the visible structures of the Church to those communities that stand in increasing tension with those structures.

It is at precisely this point that the contemporary discussion of the faithful remnant begins to move beyond questions of liturgy or canon law and enters the far deeper territory of ecclesiology itself.

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The appointment of Bishop Christian Würtz as the new Bishop of Eichstätt is one of the most perplexing decisions of Pope Leo’s pontificate to date. It is difficult to understand not simply because of who Bishop Würtz is, but because of the unmistakable context in which this appointment has been made.

Christian Würtz is not an unknown figure whose views have only recently emerged. He is a canon lawyer and theologian whose public record has been established over many years. He has supported significant elements of the German Synodal Way, including texts advocating blessing ceremonies for couples whose relationships fall outside the Church’s traditional understanding of marriage, proposals recognising gender diversity, and reforms to Catholic teaching on sexuality. He has engaged sympathetically with the Maria 2.0 movement and responded respectfully to women who applied to seminaries in protest against the Church’s reservation of priestly ordination to men, describing their actions as a serious expression of concern while explaining that universal Church law prevented any change.

Whether one agrees with those positions or not, none of them can have come as a surprise to Rome. Pope Leo and the Dicastery for Bishops knew exactly whom they were appointing.

That is what makes this decision so significant.

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When I was about 6 years old, unable to sleep, I snuck downstairs at what I imagined was midnight but was likely 9pm. It was a rare occasion when my mother was out for the evening, probably at the CWL (Gimme a yikes!) and I found my dad in the living room watching what I later came to understand was a Hammer Horror film. Unlike ever vigilant mum, who monitored what we watched on telly like a soviet prison guard, dad swept me up in his arms and sat me on his knee as we sat back to watch this film together.

There was a scene which has stayed with me throughout my entire life. At one point, a beautiful and frightened looking woman appeared at a window, pleading with whoever was inside to open it and let her in, claiming her life was in danger. Her beauty and her vulnerability struck me. I wanted to open the window for her and let her in, I could see how terrified she was. The person inside refused her entry several times, causing this beautiful angel to plead in fear, as tears fell down her delicate and innocent cheeks. I was frightened for her; I remember thinking that anything could happen to her out there in the dark alone. At last, the person inside relented and opened the window. At that exact moment, her face changed as she bared her inordinately sharp incisors and dug them straight into this poor bloke’s neck. I let out a scream, turned inwards to hide my head in my father’s chest, and began to cry. At this point I think my dad panicked somewhat, realising how terrified I was, and shooed me off to bed before mum got back.

The idea of sleeping ever again seemed impossible. I tossed and turned, glancing at my window in fear. It didn’t help that we lived in a dormer bungalow built into a wood, where the branches of nearby trees brushed against it. I have often reflected on what was so utterly terrifying about that scene. There was no blood and guts, no masked marauder with a chainsaw, no heads spinning and projectile vomiting, but it remains one of the most terrifying things I can recall.

Years later, I took my own children to see a cartoon film called Zootropolis. In it there was a meek and gentle little sheep who turned out to be the villain. As the film draws to its conclusion, the ‘good guys’ run towards this sheep, in total trust, reporting their findings to her, only to have her countenance turn before they realise she had been the ‘bad guy’ all along. The meek and mild sheep! Impossible!

I rolled my eyes and brushed it off as more Hollywood pap, but my youngest couldn’t sleep that night, or the night after, or the night after that. It transpired that she was deeply affected by the deception. She had liked the innocent little sheep and considered her to be the one character who she could trust in the whole film.

What had disturbed us both so greatly in these experiences was the realisation that a greater peril than the evil we can see, is the evil we cannot.

A person who disguises their true intent behind an outward show of innocence and niceness is a danger to watch out for. If it is true that such deceit is frightening, it is even more so when the villain is dressed in the robes of the perfect and spotless victim – Christ himself.

As the SSPX were busy being excommunicated, we reported on a mass that had taken place at Holy Apostles, Pimlico. In attendance at that mass were several priests, 2 Bishops and 1 Cardinal. That cardinal was Timothy Radcliffe OP.

The Mass was organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of two men; Julian Filochowski and Martin Pendergast. Lest anyone is in doubt regarding the nature of the mass, the transcript as outlined in this article, removes any prospect of plausible deniability about what occurred. This was a mass that betrayed Christ, and his spotless Bride the Church.

And Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe was at the centre of it.

“Such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve. I repeat: Let no one take me for a fool” 2 Corinthians 11:14

And this is exactly what Cardinal Radcliffe takes us for. Fools.

Shortly after this mass was ‘exposed’, he gave an exclusive interview to AdVaticanum to ‘clarify’ his role.

In it he ‘firmly distanced himself’ from any suggestion that he had participated in a specific blessing of the couples relationship. “I gave no blessing” he said.

This calls to mind the changes made to the Serious Crime Act in 2007, which was altered to include ‘Joint Enterpise/Secondary Liability’. Under this law a person who acts to encourage or assist an offence can be prosecuted as if they were the main perpetrator. If a bystander is present and their presence or actions are intended to encourage or assist the primary offender, they can be convicted alongside them.

Whilst I’m not advocating for Cardinal Radcliffe to be shoved into the back of a police van face first, this change in law does recognise a reality that the church identified long before Blair’s government did. That Morality doesn’t just consist of avoiding evil but also of avoiding doing good. Hence St. Thomas Aquinas’s articulation of the first principle of morality: “Good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided” (Summan Theologiae, I-II:94:2). The Church names these ‘Sins of Omission’.

At each mass we pray the confiteor saying ‘For what I have done, and for what I have failed to do’.

Cardinal Radcliffe failed that day. He failed to say no to his friends. He failed to love them.

In the interview he goes on to say “It was agreed that this occasion should be private. Why the privacy was not respected I do not know. So, making it more public by writing articles about it would be against the will of the Church. This [mass] was not designed to celebrate gay relationships as such. To promote it as such would be to misrepresent it. To do so for the purposes of exciting scandal would be morally wrong.”

Ah…you see what’s happening here? The real villains are those making a stink about it.

One wonders what Cardinal Radcliffe is really more concerned about - the fact of the mass itself, or that it was made public.

We all know what we saw. I cannot explain why Holy Apostles decided to put that mass up on their YouTube channel – but they did. That was their choice. And once they did so, they made it open to public scrutiny. One can surmise that they were proud of it, until exposure to the light blinded them. Unlike Saul, they retreated and hid. Unlike Saul, Cardinal Radcliffe excused, gaslighted and manipulated his way out of it.

I am to understand that having declined an interview with us, he will appear

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