A Church of Projection: From Vienna to Minneapolis to Papa Stronsay, the Mask Set Aside
When bishops marry before laicization, basilicas rent themselves to light shows, Vienna is handed to a dissenter on “women’s ordination,” and the few who say “anathema” are shown the door
Vienna: Disobedience Gets the Miter
The regime just confirmed Josef Grünwidl as archbishop of Vienna: an ecclesiastic publicly sympathetic to the women-“ordination” project, communion for non-Catholics, and the soft demolition of celibacy. Years before this promotion, he was already curating “polyhedral” spirituality: thousands of paper doves strung through a parish nave as an “ecumenical community work,” an airy symbol system where sentiment replaces dogma and aesthetic spectacle papers over doctrinal rupture.
Call it what it is: reward for disobedience. The conciliar Church preaches “synodality” but practices a very simple morality: break the old boundaries and you rise. Guard them and you’re sidelined.
Vienna isn’t an outlier; it’s the blueprint. The new episcopal profile is managerial, emotive, and permanently “open,” which in practice means open to everything except the perennial discipline of the Church.
The Bishop Who Married Before Laicization
Reinhold Nann, former ordinary of Caravelí, civilly married while still awaiting laicization. He now evangelizes the usual talking points: celibacy harms the Church, the early Church didn’t require it, “clerical power” is the problem, etc. He laments the loss of salary, pension, and health insurance, but assures us he gained “freedom to be himself.”
This is the priesthood reimagined as a therapeutic career path, and when the vows pinch, the vows are the enemy. The saints called that acedia. The new Church calls it “discernment.”
Celibacy is next on the demolition docket. If bishops can publicly recast their vows as pathology and keep their standing among the polite, don’t be shocked when diocesan “pastoral plans” start piloting optional celibacy under the mercy banner.
Minneapolis: Basilica as Projection Screen
“Luminiscence” will bathe the Basilica of St. Mary in mapped video, narration, strobes, and a revolving musical set from Bach to Moussorgsky, “a unique path to reflection and community.” Cathedrals in Europe already hosted the prototype; now the spectacle lands here.
Once you gut worship of sacrifice and doctrine, the building becomes a venue. Sacred architecture turns into a chassis for content. Today: light show and mood-music. Tomorrow: branded “immersive experiences” designed by agencies who also stage tech keynotes. The result is habituation: the faithful learn to expect affect, not adoration.
Leo’s First Exhortation: Cheerleading the Latin-American “Option”
A glowing Commonweal review hails Dilexi te as an “ode” to post-conciliar Latin theology: liberation as the Church’s mission, the poor as the new locus of encounter with God, Vatican II reread against the grain of tradition. The document canonizes the shift from salvation to “liberation,” from conversion to “process,” from truth to “fraternity.”
The hermeneutic is settled: Scripture and Tradition are filtered through Medellín and Aparecida. “Preferential option” becomes the organizing principle of worship, doctrine, and governance. Works of mercy are good; replacing the Cross with a program is not. The poor deserve the Faith, not to be instrumentalized as a perpetual pretext for remodeling it.
Papa Stronsay Speaks: “Anathema” with Names and Reasons
The Transalpine Redemptorists have issued a sober, bracing open letter: after 17 years of trying to live tradition within the structures, they conclude the “new Church” birthed by the Council is incompatible with the Catholic Faith in doctrine, liturgy, and discipline. They explicitly repudiate Amoris, Fiducia supplicans, religious indifferentism, and the Pachamama scandal and they ground their stance in the duty to obey God before men.
Pair it with the Christchurch file dump: decrees, precepts, attempted expulsions, sacramental restrictions, and pressure campaigns, precisely when these monks draw faithful and vocations. The pattern again: discipline for the orthodox; promotions for the innovators.
They are saying the quiet part aloud: the “chain of command” binds only insofar as it binds itself to Christ’s deposit. When authority amputates itself from that root, it becomes a cudgel. Their stance is not romantic insubordination but the classic thesis of ministerial, not absolute, authority.
The SSPX Writes a White Paper; Then Pads the Corners
Menzingen’s multi-part “assessment” of Francis carefully maps the system: mercy as solvent, fraternity as horizon, integral ecology as the political instrument, synodality as the method. It notes the Abu Dhabi thesis (“diversity of religions willed by God”) and the horizontal redefinition of “salvation.” All true—and yet the tone reads like a dissertation abstract submitted for peer review in the very academy that burned the library.
The analysis names the architecture but refuses the verdict. If unity has been inverted, from unity in revealed truth to unity in earthly projects, then the only faithful remedy is rupture with the project, not “dialogue” with its outcomes. Archbishop Lefebvre warned against building within a new religion; his heirs now describe that new religion with accuracy and then place a cushion beneath it.
Polite institutionalism is potent anesthesia. When even your critics agree to speak in the regime’s key, the regime has already won the music.
Projection, Not Profession
Put the week together:
Episcopal office awarded for programmatic disobedience (Vienna)
Priestly vows reframed as harmful restraints (Nann)
Basilicas converted into platforms for sensory content (Minneapolis)
Magisterial tone shifted from Credo to manifesto (Dilexi te)
Traditional communities punished for fidelity (Papa Stronsay/Christchurch)
Institutional critics self-neutered by academic distance (SSPX essays)
This is by design. The conciliar project replaces profession (a creed to be confessed and obeyed) with projection (a story to be performed and felt). The old religion binds us to the Sacrifice and to the truths that judge nations. The new religion binds us to initiatives that need good lighting.
What To Do (Instead of Despair)
Guard the lex orandi. Wherever the Mass of the ages can be offered, guard it; where it’s hedged, work, suffer, and build around it. Tolle Missam, tolle Ecclesiam cuts both ways: preserve the Mass; you preserve the Church.
Refuse the euphemisms. “Accompaniment” without conversion is abandonment. “Dialogue” that excludes the First Commandment is betrayal.
Support the beleaguered. Communities punished for fidelity need material help, public defense, and intelligent advocacy, not just sympathy.
Speak plainly. The faithful deserve clarity: the present program is incompatible with the Faith handed down. Say it, prove it, live it.
Closing
The mask didn’t slip this week; it was set aside. When light shows pass for mystagogy, when Vienna is entrusted to disobedience, when a bishop discovers “freedom” by breaking vows, and when the few who say “anathema” are driven from their homes, stop telling yourself this is an unfortunate series of misunderstandings. It’s a religion of projection, and it hates the old profession because the old profession names a King.
Choose your side accordingly.
If you value independent Catholic analysis and want to help keep this work going, you can make a one-time contribution below. Every donation directly supports the writing, research, and production of Hiraeth in Exile.
Thank you for helping preserve independent Catholic journalism rooted in truth and tradition.
When I read about the Redemptorists, I was reminded of the famous line from the old movie “Network” where the frustrated news anchor screams “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
They have had enough of going along to get along while their religion has been hijacked and destroyed bit by bit. Our passivity from 12 years of Francis earned us Francis 2.0. Leo will be pope for the next 15 years, then what, Francis 3.0? By that time, none of the younger generation of Catholics will know their faith because, undoubtedly, a new modernist version of the catechism will be instituted. I applaud those priests for taking a stand. Hopefully, more will follow suit.
I’ll give another example of inversion. This one is not religious but socio-economic. However it has consequences for the Faith, so bear with me.
Whitney Webb just revealed that groups like Just Stop Oil are funded by oil dynasties—Rockefeller, Getty.
Why would they do that? One commentator summarizes her argument thus: “They've shifted the focus from real pollution to CO2, making you the villain, not the corporate or military polluters.”
Think about that one. It’s not the mess corporates make extracting resources, spilling them, not cleaning up properly afterwards. It’s not heavy metals or PFAS forever chemicals or glyphosate or residues of pharmaceuticals and birth-control (and soon abortion) pills in the drinking water, or a list many, many times longer than this one could draw up. It’s not nine-year-olds open-cast mining for rare earths in the Congo. Oh, no, it’s none of these: it the harmless gas carbon dioxide that’s used by plants in photosynthesis that’s the problem.
And that means that the problem is not the corporates and the military but YOU. It’s you heating your home; you cooking your meal; you driving your grandmother to the hospital.
And if you say: “How consequences for the Faith?” recall that we just saw Leo blessing a block of ice—“blessing” something not for liturgical use but as a photo-opportunity for this agenda, to the service of which Francis co-opted the Church. Which diverts it from its real mission of saving souls.
The only important question in all this is this: were Francis and Leo dupes or did they know what they were doing?
The commentator I referred to above notes: “Control energy, and you control a family's economic power, mobility, and even its size.”
Have Catholics yet realized that an intrusive state could use “carbon credits” to try to control the number of children they have?
Suddenly that block of ice in the Vatican doesn’t look merely clownish but is revealed as downright sinister—because you’ve got to look at the agenda advancing behind it.