“Do you think I came to bring peace to the earth?” (Luke 12:51) - An attempt at an initial theological assessment of the pontificate of Leo XIV.
By Vigilius
Shortly after Robert Prevost’s election as pope, there was almost universal enthusiasm among conservatives, but now opposition to the pope is flaring up again. This is due in part to a number of Leo’s decisions, but also to statements found in the recently published interview book “Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the 21st Century”. This interview in particular is further fueling the already heated debate about Leo’s qualities. Against the backdrop of this passionate controversy surrounding the new pope, I would now also like to make a few comments on the current pontificate.
1. As always in such cases, there are already voices calling for leniency toward Leo on the basis of the contingency argument. I think we should not allow such considerations to arise in the first place. When someone voluntarily assumes an important leadership position, he bears full personal responsibility for the proper exercise of that office. There are no excuses, neither a difficult childhood nor a poor education nor socialization in an intellectually unfavorable environment nor bad advisors and speechwriters nor a lack of knowledge of events nor, as Caminante points out, “feminists surrounding him.”1 If he does not have what it takes to properly perform the office offered to him, the candidate must decline; if he accepts the office, he is fully liable. Then the Pope should just separate himself from the feminists surrounding him and find employees who are up to the task. After all, he does possess the plenitudo potestatis. The still unreplaced prefect of the Orders Dicastery, Signorina Brambilla, who has even received female reinforcement from Leo, and the disastrous bishops whom he appoints in series, with few exceptions, are his own responsibility, and it does not matter whether this was initiated in the Bergoglio era. Leo’s signature is on the appointment documents; it is his decision. Many Catholics in the pitiful dioceses will have a hard time bearing the burden of these acts for a long time to come. Also in the case of texts published under his name, it does not matter whether a pope may have been asked by his predecessor to publish them. Likewise, the gay pride parade on September 6 through St. Peter’s Basilica, which was intended from the outset as a triumphal procession for the movement and was received as such throughout the world, is also his responsibility; after all, it is his basilica. Anyone who holds the supreme teaching office of the Church and possesses the absolute power conferred upon him for its proper exercise must also fulfill this function, otherwise he must step down. Psychologizing rhetoric of understanding has no place in this context.
2. The view has been expressed that Leo is not a theologian. What is probably meant by this is that although Prevost studied theology—at a liberal educational institution—and focused primarily on canon law, he is not as knowledgeable and independent a theologian as Ratzinger was, for example. In my opinion, however, the fundamental problem is that Prevost is not a philosophical mind. This refers, formally, first to the acumen and ability to think with consistency. Subsequently, it refers to the fact that all the material problems we face are ultimately philosophical in nature. Today, more than ever, the Church needs clergy who are able to understand the complex intellectual connections, especially those relating to the modernity discourse that affects us so profoundly. One must have navigated the rugged, uncomfortable landscapes of rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy, German idealism, Nietzsche’s atheistic philosophy, and the philosophy of the 20th century, which was heavily influenced by him, including Martin Heidegger’s thinking on the history of being and French deconstructionism, in order to even begin to grasp the abysmal and complicated problems that have also deeply captured the modern Church. And I, at least, cannot recognize this conceptual approach in Pope Leo’s statements to date.
On the practical level, an exceptionally great deal depends on the correct, sufficiently differentiated understanding of the problems raised by the modern consciousness. This can be seen particularly in the case of minority and gender issues. As early as the 1930s, post-Stalinist neo-Marxism, in the form of its prominent authors such as Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean-Paul Sartre, developed a plan to find new revolutionary subjects with whom bourgeois society could be overcome, replacing the proletariat that could be bought by capital. While social minorities such as homosexuals, transgender people, people of color, lesbian women, women in general, but also natives in the former colonial areas, immigrants, etc. are identified as post-proletarian revolutionary subjects, the most effective revolutionary principle is no longer to be the gulag, but morality. This means that the new revolutionary subjects are systematically stylized as suffering victim groups of bourgeois-capitalist patriarchy and, conversely, the members of the white, heteronormative majority society as a morally reprehensible group of perpetrators. By virtue of its program of the “march through the institutions,” formulated primarily by Gramsci and indeed extremely successful, neo-Marxism has achieved a collective superego formation that has largely paralyzed bourgeois societies. Especially in academic circles, the very institutions that underpin society have been stigmatized in the bourgeois consciousness as misanthropic, intolerant, and unscrupulous in their exercise of power. This must have a ruinous effect on social and political stability. The most significant catalysts for the formation of neo-Marxist morality are kindergartens, schools, universities—and churches.
Of course, none of the variants of Marxism are actually concerned with individuals and minorities. If individuals or groups become dysfunctional for the project of destroying bourgeois societies, they are simply rejected and replaced by new revolutionary subjects. At the moment, we are witnessing the radical left effectively sacrificing the long-courted homosexual community because it considers an alliance with Muslims to be more expedient for the destruction of the West.2 In general, one can be sure that with the left’s having achieved political domination, the gulags will also return. The Marxist perspective is always concerned solely with the radically egalitarian process of self-objectification of matter, which dialectically empowers itself toward itself by overcoming all the resistance that itself has generated. All differences that are considered substantial in metaphysics are viewed in this perspective as transitory illusional shapes that necessarily arise in the development process of matter itself and disappear again in its history of emancipation. The increased integration of the motifs of French deconstructivism, strongly inspired by Nietzsche, into the neo-Marxist agenda, which has been observable since the late 1990s, is no coincidence. Judith Butler, the battleship of gender theory, precisely formulates her self-staging theory of the ‘theatrical self’, which is significantly influenced by Michel Foucault, as a project of gains in autonomy, which she understands as processes of the progressive liberal self-organization of matter.
Pope Leo formulates a commitment to marriage and family, but he effectively counteracts this with his only seemingly harmless remark on the LGBTQ+ agenda, an agenda that a considerable portion of the slow-witted, sentimental clergy has long since adopted as their own. In the interview, Leo says that he does not “have a plan at the moment”3 on this issue. However, he could never say that if he understood the philosophical content conveyed in this only supposedly humanitarian agenda. For I consider it unlikely that he himself would accept these positions. But that brings me back to my first point. As pope, Prevost is under the obligation to continue the fight of his predecessors in the first half of the 20th century against the great collectivist ideologies and to decipher LGBTQ+ ideology for what it is: the old, subversive revolutionary project of Marxist materialism in a new guise. However, I fear that Leo will fail here, explicably but inexcusably. Presumably, like his late friend and patron, he will naively succumb to temptation under the guise of goodness and give this deeply anti-Christian agenda the higher consecration of Christian assistance for the suffering and persecuted.
3. The LGBTQ+ issue leads directly to the Pope’s statements on the changeability of church moral and ordination regulations. More specifically, it concerns Leo’s statement on female deacons: “I at the moment don’t have an intention of changing the teaching of the Church on the topic”4; and, with regard to homosexuality, the sentence: “I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the near future, that the church’s doctrine in terms of what the church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage, will change.”
Commentators have noted, with the intention of appeasement, that these statements imply neither the Pope’s prediction that these teachings will actually change at some point, nor that he himself would ever intend to change these teachings. However, these analyses are only true prima facie. For the point of the statements is that they consider a change in the convictions that have been valid up to now to be possible in principle. The positions in question are therefore no longer regarded as having the unconditional claim to truth (and only as such are they articles of faith), but merely as statements whose validity depends on contingent factors such as diplomatic expediency. The clarity of Prevost’s judgment in these matters refers solely to the assessment of their historical position—it is merely that at the moment, their change is merely unlikely. If Leo, as Caminante says, “believes in immutable truths,” these things are certainly not among them. However, in terms of the substantive content of these superficially harmless statements, this means nothing other than that, from a truth-theoretical perspective, those positions have already dissolved for Pope Prevost, even if he probably does not realize this with reflexive clarity. He merely creates the appearance of constancy. One could also say that these statements, under the guise of their opposite, themselves perform the change in the positions in question. Prevost no longer believes that they are true; he believes, tertium non datur, that women can be ordained as deacons and that homosexual acts can be ethically legitimate, at least under certain conditions.
Most people do not even consider the logical implications of both positions. With the opening of the sacramental diaconate to women, the theological principle is destroyed that only men, on the basis of the non-contingent maleness of Jesus Christ, can sacramentally represent the High Priest and make His sacrifice present, from which presence-making all degrees of the sacramental Ordo are defined and to which they are essentially related. And in an analogous, yet intrinsically connected way, the legitimization of homosexual acts in principle also modifies the entire theological cosmos, not just the moral-theological structure and, in it, not just the sexual-ethical structure. In a certain sense, the entire dogmatic system revolves around the axis of gender duality, which implies the question of marriage and the understanding of sexuality, extending into the ecclesiological topos of the Christ-Mary correspondence, in which the essence of the Church—and of the ordained ministry—is represented. These are not separable individual questions that could be changed without changing the whole. For the sake of intellectual honesty, we should clearly state this and not reassure ourselves with the theologically irrelevant information that the Pope’s statements do not constitute an announcement that he will himself already positively formulate what he considers possible, i.e., true, and give it practical legal force.
Another related note in the context of the question of ordination. In the interview, Leo expressly commits himself to continuing his predecessor’s line, not only with regard to the integration of lay people in synodal processes, but also with regard to the practice of appointing lay people to church leadership positions. The Pope therefore intends to continue Bergoglio’s operation of separating the sacerdotal office on the one hand from leadership competence on the other, not least for the sake of the women’s question, and, as Signorina Brambilla, whom I have already mentioned, makes clear, also in areas relevant to pastoral care and doctrine.
I find Leo’s announcement particularly disturbing, because its significance for the Church can hardly be overestimated. The practice of leadership by lay people undermines the theological determination of the sacramental office also for authority in the Church, and will increasingly lead to a weakening of sacramental consciousness in general, together with the unique position of the priest in the Church. The Church lives exclusively from the presence-making of Christ’s sacrifice in the Mass, and all ecclesiastical functions must be defined from the altar, as I have already emphasized above with regard to the diaconate of women. The priest is the genuine leader and teacher of the parish because he is the Sacerdos, i.e., the sacramental self-representation of the eternal High Priest who sacrifices Himself, who as such is King and Teacher. The Bergoglian-Prevostian project of lay empowerment breaks down this subtle structure of correspondences in the Catholic sacramental cosmos and greatly promotes the self-protestantization of the Church. The essential logic of the corpus Christi mysticum does not recognize lay people in pastoral and magisterial leadership positions. Joseph Ratzinger’s early statement that the separation of ordination and leadership authority is “absolutely inadmissible” is unconditionally worthy of approval. For, according to Ratzinger, this separation of authorities “pushes one into the realm of the magical and the other into the realm of the profane: the sacrament is then understood only in ritual terms and no longer as a mandate to lead the Church through word and liturgy; leadership, conversely, is seen as a purely political and administrative matter.”5 On closer inspection, we are confronted with the rather ugly finding that Pope Prevost, dressed in mozzetta and suaviter in modo, is busily engaged in selling off the family silver, just like his predecessor.
4. Pope Leo expressly professes his faith in Jesus Christ. During his recent meeting with Leo, Cardinal Burke also reportedly praised the Pope for preaching Christocentrically. After the past few years, one almost overlooks the bizarre nature of such statements, which praise a Pope for prominently mentioning Christ in a speech. This reminds me of Luigi Malerba’s entertaining novel The Naked Masks, in which the quarreling Roman cardinals elect as successor to Leo X someone who was not even present at the conclave and are now in a state of great excitement in view of the imminent arrival of the new pope, for this man has a reputation for believing in God.
In his work Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard rightly says of himself that he has always found the courage to “think a thought through to its conclusion.” The revered philosopher knows exactly why this point is so important. For only when a thought is thought through to its conclusion, that is, with all its implications and logical consequences, is it thought at all. And only then does it become fruitful. Otherwise, it sinks into the insignificance of an impression. This also applies to the confession of Jesus as the Christ. And here, too, it must unfortunately be noted that Pope Leo seems to lack at least the willingness to recognize and bring to bear the implications of this confession. This inconsistency is already evident in the aforementioned question of leadership, but it also takes on a high degree of urgency in view of the so-called “interreligious dialogue.”
I have looked at Leo’s recent greeting to the participants of the interreligious meeting in Bangladesh—and I am both appalled and thoroughly weary of this dreary affair. This is—again with reference to the most scandalous document of the last council, namely Nostra Aetate—the same Bergoglian rhetoric with the identical theological gravamina from Fratelli tutti, the Amazon Synod, the Abu Dhabi document, and the speeches in Southeast Asia. Despite its phraseological form, which has been offending our linguistic aesthetic sensibilities for decades, this conciliar prose conveys extremely explosive content: As Leo puts it in his address, we are naturally always already “one family,” “brothers and sisters,” and all “children of God.”6 That is why it must supposedly be about “a culture of harmony between brothers and sisters” which—Leo explicitly refers to Francis—must not be disturbed by those who feed the “weeds of prejudice,” “sow distrust,” “foster fear,” and view “differences as barriers” rather than “avenues of mutual enrichment.” These disrupters of harmony can only be those who stubbornly insist on dogmatic questions of truth. Bergoglio’s ‘Indietristi’ are back.
All of these slogans and theses of Leo are just as worthy of criticism as the relevant statements by Jorge Bergoglio, from which they are largely inspired. For the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the One and Only, the Truth in Person and the sole Savior of the whole world, that is, the confession of the principle ‘extra Christum nulla salus est,’ is the barrier par excellence between the confessions, including those of the monotheistic religions. The strife that Christ brings, the fire that He wants to cast upon the earth, refers precisely to the conflict about Himself, and this strife brought the Lord to the Cross. And because ‘extra Christum nulla salus’ is identical in meaning to ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’, the original Christological conflict is at the same time the dispute over the concept of the Church as corpus Christi mysticum. Only in Christ, that is, only in the supernatural community of life of Christians with Christ in the Holy Spirit, are we as united as God wants to see human beings united, and that is why in Sacred Scripture and dogmatic tradition the terms “children of God” and “sisters and brothers” are reserved for those who are incorporated into Christ through faith and the sacraments and form Christ’s Church.
To illustrate the relevance of this connection, it is worth including Leo’s address at the recent conference “Raising Hope for Climate Justice.”7 Leo’s central reference documents are now Bergoglio’s Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum. My point now is here not that the conference title uncritically adopts the neo-Marxistly characterized term “climate justice,” nor that Leo, with his equally uncritical assumption of the topos of man-made climate change, is dangerously venturing into a field in which the Church has no specific competence. Far more significant is that Leo identifies the project of “integral ecology” and listening to the famous “cry of the earth,” in connection with which he once again invokes the idea of “one family, with one Father,” with the Christian message itself. Leo explicitly states that “ecological conversion” is “no different to the one that orients us towards the living God.”
What is the real problem here? The problem is not that Leo identifies ecological issues as ethical problems and speaks out prominently on them. And, of course, the maxims of natural moral law also apply to Catholics, and no reasonable Christian would doubt that we must strive to ‘preserve creation’ and do justice to all living beings within the limits of our possibilities. The problem is rather that Leo does not seem to understand that something can very well be constitutive of the Christian, i.e., Catholic faith without being specifically Catholic. However, this distinction is of crucial importance. Ethical questions are largely the domain of philosophical reason, and Christian theology has no special authority in dealing with most ethical issues. None other than Thomas Aquinas emphasizes this point. The genuine ethics of the New Testament are categorically different from philosophical ethics, and the two should not be confused. Thus, the call to follow Christ on the Cross, or what classical moral theology has called ‘works of supererogation,’ which are exemplified by great saints such as Maximilian Kolbe, cannot be generalized philosophically. What Maximilian Kolbe did for the married man in the concentration camp must not be ethically demanded of everyone; his act springs from a supernatural faith in Jesus Christ and the desire to become similar to the Lord.
This outlines the specific nature of what Leo is insanely giving away. For it is precisely the specificity that constitutes the essence of a thing. If I want to understand something, I must not primarily ask what it has in common with all other things without distinction, but what its proprium is. The proprium of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ and our conversion to this Person, Who is the incarnate second Person of the Godhead. It is precisely with this call to conversion that the New Testament begins the appearance of the Messiah: Repent and believe in the Gospel, for the Kingdom of God is near—in Christ Himself. But when Leo identifies this proprium with “integral ecology” and “ecological conversion,” he dissolves the core of the Christian message into mere generality. Christians then speak in their very essence only of what everyone else is talking about anyway, which means nothing less than that they lose their identity along with their specificity. This was precisely the horror of the Bergoglio pontificate.
Bergoglio, however, was more consistent than Prevost. He never spoke of Christ in the way that Leo speaks of Christ in other places indeed. For Pope Bergoglio, Jesus was, and consistently so, only the humanitarian and socialist Jesus of ‘todos, todos, todos,’ that is, the one whose program was only any more identical to the natural project of universal brotherhood and “integral ecology.” According to Bergoglio’s explicit statement, this project is supposed to be God’s actual purpose—the realization of the Promised Land.8 And now Leo emphatically adopts this rhetoric—and thus, presumably quite unthinkingly, stabs himself in the back. Leo’s two series of statements cannot logically be reconciled.
Because of its relevance to identity, I would like to dwell on this question a little longer and at the same time show why the dissolution of the specificity means not only the ruin of the Church, but also, perhaps contrary to first appearances, causes the greatest damage to the world itself. For what is the proprium christianum talking about? To put it negatively: What is omitted in the Church’s own inflationary, indiscriminate talk of “brothers and sisters” and the identity of ecological and Christian conversion, of universal natural brotherhood and the Promised Land? This talk fundamentally conceals the central anthropological truth that human nature is essentially oriented toward the supernatural. This orientation is what makes man a spiritual person and gives him his special dignity. Abstracted from his inner orientation toward the gratia Christi, the homo naturalis, and here I follow the analyses of the philosopher Max Scheler9, would be nothing more than a ‘clever animal.’ This dignity is at the same time man’s real indigence, for in order to fulfill his own nature, he is dependent on the free Grace of God, which God grants him in Christ and which lifts him infinitely above the realm of this nature and makes him similar to God. This is what Augustine means by his ‘restless heart’, which only finds rest in God. And the longed-for being in God is identical to being in Christ: “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). What Leo and Bergoglio conceal, then, is that the Christological sphere is decisive for man—namely, as man. For it is only in the Grace of Christ and through incorporation into the corpus Christi mysticum that man attains that “fullness” to which he has always already been oriented: from the beginning, the Father decided to “unite all things in heaven and on earth” in Christ, in order to “bring about the fullness of time” (Eph 1:10). Outside of Christ, the mere world is only what Paul describes it as: “For His sake I have given up everything and consider it rubbish, in order to gain Christ” (Phil 3:8).
Therefore, it must be emphasized in front of the Pope that, with regard to other religions and the supposed “human family,” the avoidance of conflict and “peace as our most cherished dream” cannot be the goal. The most cherished of all dreams must be directed toward the victory of Christ’s truth, with which alone there is the true humanity of man and thus only true peace. Who, like Pope Leo in the interview book, says of himself: “I believe very strongly in Jesus Christ and believe that that’s my priority, because I’m the Bishop of Rome and Successor of Peter, and the pope needs to help people understand, especially Christians, Catholics, that this is who we are,”10 must neither formulate such interreligious greetings nor identify the message of faith with the merely natural sphere of ethics. Rather, for the sake of human salvation, the Pope should do exactly what Leo himself says: he should teach that man is only in his own truth in the Grace of Christ. Therefore, only the incarnate second Person of the Godhead is the true Man, and we ourselves become true men to the extent that we are united with Christ. The Pope must be consistent and speak of the fact that, except in Jesus Christ, “there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12) Therefore, “at the name of Jesus every knee must bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil 2:10).
The whole of liberal theology, which Bergoglio has taken to extremes, boils down to precisely this self-abolition of the Christian message. At this point, I can only emphasize once again the tremendous urgency of this point. The identity of the Christian faith stands or falls with it; Christians can no longer speak of a ‘naturalness’ that abstracts from Christ. There is nothing that Christ is concerned less with than this naturalness. Rather, he is concerned with our integration into the inner divine life, through which He glorifies the Father. We are either in Christ and thus in His mystical body, or we are absolutely lost. Significantly, the Leonine rhetoric of the speeches quoted was eagerly taken up by Bishop Bätzing, who has completely left behind supernatural faith, in his opening sermon at the autumn plenary assembly of German bishops. Robert Francis Prevost’s profession of faith in Christ is of little help to believers when his papal statements repeatedly end up in the theological swamp that was his predecessor’s ancestral habitat.
5. Now to the liturgical question. It seems to be a widespread opinion in traditionalist circles that the Pope has no authority to change the rite. The Montini reform of the Mass rite is rejected primarily as an illegitimate act, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of formal competence. Certainly, the formal aspect is emphasized so vehemently here because the Novus Ordo is rejected on theological (and aesthetic) grounds. However, the primary argument put forward against the reform by the ecclesiastical authority is usually the aspect of authority, namely that the liturgy is a binding, unchangeable element of tradition and ultimately a normative datum given by the Holy Spirit to the Church, which prohibits reformist interventions. To emphasize this, it is popular among traditionalists to speak of the ‘Mass of all ages.’
I consider this emphasis on immutability to be incorrect. Although the liturgy is indeed something received in its theological essence, the evoked ‘Mass of all ages’ does not exist. It does not exist historically, nor does it exist logically. The liturgy is not a deductive mathematical or philosophical system, but a quantity whose determinations cannot be made clear-cut a priori. The design of the liturgy belongs to the sphere of what the Greeks called ‘synadeic’ considerations, that is, to the realm of judgments of appropriateness. These judgments, which refer to the numerous individual moments of the liturgy in their most possible coherent combination, are fluid by their very nature because they are formed within fundamentally contingent, historical contexts such as linguistic semantics and cultural symbolism, which are constantly, albeit mostly slowly, transforming in complex intra- and intercultural processes. Fundamentally, already from an epistemic point of view, liturgy is not a monolithic block that fell directly from heaven to earth and is now immutably predetermined for all time. Such ideas are mere imaginings. I have a slight suspicion that, say, the apostles may not have celebrated the rite of the ‘Mass of all ages.’
Already for the epistemic reason mentioned above, I find it incomprehensible that ecclesiastical authority should have absolutely no reformatory access to the liturgy. In my opinion, the ordained ministry must even have the possibility of access to the rite, because this competence must not only be identified with abuses by ideological liberalism, but can also make welcome corrections to creeping hypertrophy and colonization of the liturgy, for example from popular sentimentality. Many fathers of the last council wanted, for example, as can be seen from the bishops’ submissions to the preparatory commission, to reduce the gradually increased overload of the old pontifical offices. This is a perfectly understandable and completely legitimate process. I think that the problem that obviously exists with the Novus Ordo cannot be solved by denying the Church’s office any authority to modify the rite in general. Although this demand is psychologically understandable against the background of the post-conciliar liturgical trauma, the idea is too simplistic. Even in the future, there will be no formal principle that can definitively prevent wrong decisions and abuses by the office in liturgical matters.
This brings me to Prevost’s concept of liturgy and the rites conflict. The decisive passage from the Leo interview reads: “I do know that part of that issue, unfortunately, has become – again, part of a process of polarization – people have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate. I think sometimes the, say, ‘abuse’ of the liturgy from what we call the Vatican II Mass, was not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer … that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. Again, we’ve become polarized, so that instead of being able to say, well, if we celebrate the Vatican II liturgy in a proper way, do you really find that much difference between this experience and that experience?”11
What bothers me about these remarks is not that Pope Leo considers modifications of the rite to be legitimate in principle, but rather the anthropocentric functionalism with which he views the rite and questions of ritual design. And this functionalism is thematically linked to the entire pathology of the modern, and certainly the late modern, Church. Here I must admit that hardly anyone has recognized this pathological connection more sharply than Joseph Ratzinger, whose theology I otherwise have some reservations about. Ratzinger has identified the crisis of the liturgy with the crisis of the Church in general, and rightly so. For the decline of the liturgy stems primarily from the fact that the ritual changes after the Council were always made under the functionalist calculation that supposedly defined the liturgy, arguing about what is probably more “helpful” in view of the “experiences,” that is, the immediate needs of the people in each case. And Leo thinks exactly the same way when he suggests that some of these modifications may not have been “helpful” in satisfying spiritual needs and that it would have been more efficient to make other adjustments or to stop making adjustments at certain points. In this line of argument, we always encounter the same nexus of categories, even when Leo praises the Novus Ordo in Latin because he suspects that the more sublime Latin could also lead to good “experiences” in the Montini Mass.
Pope Leo rightly diagnoses that “people have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics”. The Bergoglio camp likes to level this accusation against the traditionalists, and Marcel Lefebvre was already confronted with it in the past. But this is highly unjust, because if the rite is valued anywhere for itself, it is here. To recognize this, one does not even have to be a passionate partisan of the Ordo Antiquus oneself. The politicization of the liturgy is rather an almost original business of the left-liberal bloc. It stems primarily from the fact that the liturgy, like no other ecclesiastical practice, has an influence on the religious consciousness of the faithful. During a heated argument with an American feminist theologian, the lady told me quite unabashedly in front of a large audience that on the revolutionary side, one is so fixated on the liturgy because the rite has much stronger impacts of change on the broader church community than a thousand books, most of which no one reads anyway. She is right about that.
To return to Leo: As justified as Leo’s diagnosis of the political instrumentalization of liturgy is, it must also be said that he himself, unfortunately, operates with instrumental-functionalist considerations, too. Because this point of functionalism is of central relevance, I would like to explain it in more detail.
Functionalism means that a thing is defined in its essence by the function it has for purposes outside itself. However, criticizing functionalist justifications in theological matters does not mean denying that there are and are allowed to be significant effects for human beings in our relationship with God and thus also in the area of liturgy. Of course, God has indispensable functions for us. There is, as Kierkegaard rightly and sharply criticized, an understanding of theocentrism in which humans believe that they themselves are completely insignificant and must, in a sense, eliminate themselves in their relationship with God. In contrast, Kierkegaard emphasizes that, precisely in the religious relationship, he would never abandon the “infinite passion for himself” and the question that necessarily arises from this passion: “What will become of me in eternity?” In fact, we cannot abandon this interest for ourselves because we are definitively given to ourselves and, as persons, we can never step back from ourselves. Such an attempt would be a program of bad selflessness.
However, the matter is complex and can only be formulated dialectically. A good example to illustrate this is friendship, which Aristotle quite rightly says provides us with goods so important that life without friends would not be worth living. And often, according to Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, “we can only achieve through our friends what we cannot achieve on our own.” Now there are people who suspect this and want to have friends at all costs because of these goods that lie in friendship. They will never find friends. For, as Aristotle says, one finds a friend only when one “wishes the friend well for the friend’s sake.” This is the dialectical connection: the beneficial, urgently needed functions only arise when one does not seek these effects in the rationale behind friendship. Friendship arises through love, i.e., through selflessness, not through functionalist calculation. That which is needed must only be an unintended side effect in the approach to determining the subject matter. The “infinite passion for oneself” only achieves its own goal when it takes the step beyond itself and affirms the other for the other’s own sake. Only when the other is not defined by his function for me, then the one, who nevertheless constitutively needs the other, is, to use Hegel’s words, in the other with himself.
And it is precisely this dialectical law that applies most highly in relation to God. Man needs God, but he needs him precisely as one who is not defined by his function for me. Tradition expresses this by saying that God has no need of man and that He glorifies Himself in all His acts. And that is why God must become interesting to man for God’s own sake. This is precisely the message of Christian mysticism: to abandon the egocentric functionalization of God and simply glorify God for God’s own sake. And when a person takes this step beyond himself and leaves the anthropocentric-functionalist paradigm behind, he becomes free and is gifted with the infinite riches of the Godhead—but only then. Under this condition of the dialectical unity of self-reference and selflessness that defines the essence of love, Kierkegaard could find the answer to his question “what will become of me in eternity?” at the glass shrine of the incorrupt Bernadette Soubirous in Nevers. She loved the Mother of God passionately and, in this very mode of self-transcendence, is entirely with herself in her Other.
The consequences for the concept of liturgy are quite evident. The Mass is substantially the presence-making of Christ’s sacrifice, which the incarnate second Person of the Godhead offers in the Holy Spirit for the glorification of the Father and into which God wants to integrate us. Therefore, the essence of liturgy must not be defined by its anthropological functionality. Rather, all liturgical considerations must revolve around the question which ritual elements most appropriately realize this intra-Trinitarian event of God’s self-glorification in the Sacrifice of the Lamb, into which the Church is incorporated. It is about the glorification of God, about the worship of the One who, I would like to repeat, is not determined by his functionality for us. And only then can the liturgy become healing for man at all, because in it he encounters the mystery of the Godhead, which is an end in itself. However, the Church has become so infiltrated by the anthropocentric and functionalist paradigm of modern consciousness that even the popes since Montini—with the exception of Ratzinger—and often even the traditionalist defenders of the Ordo Antiquus are following in the footsteps of this paradigm. The recovery of the Church, however, will depend on whether the idea of God as an end in Himself is once again thought through to its conclusion.
6. I come to my final point, which refers directly to Caminante. He is of the view that Prevost is the pope that the Church needs today. Caminante considers him the best choice because Leo is restrained, a good listener, a conciliator, and, with his “moderate progressivism,” prevents schism. According to Caminante, a pointedly progressive pope would have led the conservatives into schism, and a pointedly conservative pope “would have caused the progressives to take to their heels.” According to Caminante, who is now also building bridges, this pontifex is “possibly the last chance to prevent a new Reformation.”
In a subsequent article, Caminante explained the motive for his remarkable defense of Pope Leo.12 With his conciliatory view of Leo, he wants to help the traditionalists moderate their rapidly growing criticism of Leo for reasons of prudence, so as not to jeopardize the announced talks on the Tridentine rite. Indeed, it would be somewhat unfortunate if these talks were accompanied by vociferous hostility toward the Pope from the traditionalist camp.
As much as I can understand Caminante’s call for prudence with regard to the rite talks, I do not agree with his schismophobia. To quote Kierkegaard once again, we must summon the courage to think our own thoughts through to their conclusion. What have we been preaching over and over again in recent years? What is the subject of Caminante’s astute and angry analyses, which are directed at the Argentine bishops, for example? We have been talking about nothing less than the fact that the schism has long since existed in substance. When it comes to the fundamental questions of the Catholic faith, especially Christology, the doctrine of sacrifice, the concept of ritual, and ecclesiology, there is, on sober reflection, no longer any common ground between us and left-wing liberals such as Bätzing, Tucho, Cupich, Marx, Hollerich, and the countless similar clergy and theologians. We live in completely different worlds, which—from a traditional perspective—are only tenuously held together by the sacramental objectivity of ‘ex opere operato.’
So far, this de facto schism has just not yet been formally declared and institutionally manifested. But is that an advantage? I don’t think so. Rather, it is a desperate attempt to conceal the rift, which only perpetuates and intensifies its destructive effects on the Church. Until the last council, the Church always had the courage to think her thoughts through to their conclusion and cut off rotten limbs. For the apostle Paul, anathematization was already part of the Office’s mission. I myself would very much like to see the people in question finally be formally identified for what they are and then “take to their heels.” The numerous members of this milieu will never more change spiritually, perhaps up to a few exceptions—and meanwhile they have established repressive power structures and cliques, which is particularly evident in the Church in Germany, that urgently need to be broken up. I believe it would be high time that the papal office formally excommunicates all these hideous figures and undertakes a genuine re-formation of the Church.
If this were to happen, which is unlikely, there would be a significant motion, and the Catholic Church would probably become significantly smaller. At first, there would be great confusion. It is possible that an uncompromising and combative pope who took the fourth chapter of the Second Epistle to Timothy seriously again would eventually even have to leave the Vatican under pressure from political circumstances. I do not understand why such upheavals should be prevented at all costs. We must not view these things from the perspective of bourgeois consciousness. Preservation and harmony are not religious categories, and the concept of unity is a logical one, not a political-psychological one. And does not the Lord Himself ask: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8) The Church is clearly not guaranteed a prosperous future in this age.
In summary, I would like to say: I cannot validly judge whether Robert Prevost is the right pope for the Church today. As we know, the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and the Holy Spirit certainly chooses crooked lines, too, to write straight on them. However, in my limited view, I cannot share Caminante’s assessment, at least for the moment; the data does not support it. I certainly have the impression that Leo, unlike Bergoglio, indeed wants to be a Christian in the traditional sense. But the disaster comes from the inability or lack of courage to think thoughts through to their conclusion. Not to recognize that in a system, and tradition has ingeniously produced such a system, the change of a single moment changes the entire structure. I fear that this man’s rather obvious tendency toward intellectual inconsistency is the substrate of his habitus of conciliation, so that on closer inspection, this habitus is far less advantageous than it may initially appear. In a way, this is much more dangerous than Bergoglian coarseness, which in its own way has created clear conditions. Leo, I suspect, will contribute above all to whitewashing the massive fault lines that run through the Church rather than really addressing them.
In any case, I would like to insist that conflict and crisis, i.e., distinction and possibly also separation, constitute the central existential of the Church in this age. Until Christ completes her in her entirety, she must, whatever the cost, go to war with her Lord and make this war her own. Precisely when she refuses to fight for the sake of harmony, she will certainly suffer the worst losses. We should not forget that the commander does not appreciate mediocrity: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16)
https://elwanderer.com/2025/09/22/el-libro-sobre-leon-xiv-la-biografia/; https://elwanderer.com/2025/09/24/la-entrevista-a-leon-xiv
This alliance is well described by Noam Petri and Franziska Sittig, Die intellektuelle Selbstzerstörung. Wie der Westen seine eigene Zukunft verspielt (Intellectual Self-Destruction. How the West is gambling away its own future), Hanover 2025.
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2025/09/pope-leo-speaks-to-cruxs-elise-ann-allen-about-lgbtq-issues-and-the-liturgy
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2025/09/pope-leo-speaks-to-cruxs-elise-ann-allen-about-lgbtq-issues-and-the-liturgy
Joseph Ratzinger, Demokratisierung in der Kirche?, in: Joseph Ratzinger/Hans Maier, Demokoratie in der Kirche, Limburg 1970, 31f.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/pont-messages/2025/documents/20250828-messaggio-incontro-bangladesh.html
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2025/october/documents/20251001-conferenza-mariapoli.html
As in his “Lenten Message” for 2024, “God leads us through the desert to freedom”: https://www.dbk.de/fileadmin/redaktion/diverse_downloads/Botschaften/2024-Botschaft-zur-Fastenzeit.pdf.
See Vigilius’ previous articles on the subject:
Max Scheler, Zur Idee des Menschen, in: Gesammelte Werke Bd. 3, Bern 1955, 174-193.
https://cruxnow.com/vatican-at-the-met/2025/09/pope-leo-xvi-speaks-to-cruxs-elise-ann-allen-on-relations-with-other-churches
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2025/09/pope-leo-speaks-to-cruxs-elise-ann-allen-about-lgbtq-issues-and-the-liturgy
https://elwanderer.com/2025/09/26/la-prudencia-mas-necesaria-que-nunca-en-la-defensa-de-la-misa/