Austrian Diocese Sponsors Pride Fetish March, San Bernardino Bishop Celebrates LGBTQ Eucharist, and Leo’s Newspaper Denies the Devil Exists. Meanwhile, the SSPX is Still in “Schism.”

A U.S. bishop tells Catholics to avoid SSPX sacraments while rainbow liturgies, Pride sponsorships, and Vatican devil revisionism continue inside Leo’s Church.

The First American Letter Arrives

The Diocese of Ogdensburg moved quickly.

Bishop Terry LaValley’s July 1 letter declares that the Society of St. Pius X is in “formal schism” with the Roman Catholic Church because of the episcopal consecrations at Écône. He tells Catholics in his diocese to avoid SSPX liturgies, sacraments, activities, and schools. He points them instead toward diocesan Latin Mass options at St. Mary’s in Potsdam and St. Mary’s in Evans Mills. He invites SSPX priests who want to step away from the “break with the See of Peter” to come into diocesan shelter.

The letter reads like the local American edition of the Roman campaign.

It takes a global act from Écône, turns it into a diocesan warning, and aims the pressure at one concrete place: St. Therese Chapel in Nicholville. Suddenly the faithful are told to walk away from the chapel, the school, the priests, the confessional, the sacramental life, the entire Catholic ecosystem their families may have built over years.

This is how the campaign reaches the pews.

Rome issues the decree. Bishops translate it into local fear. Families get a letter.

The Sloppy Sacramental Panic

LaValley’s sacramental language is breathtaking.

He says participation in SSPX sacramental life is illicit and forbidden, including Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Marriage, and Holy Orders. Then he says the only exception is Penance in danger of death.

That is a maximalist warning dressed up as pastoral concern. It uses sacramental anxiety to move people out of SSPX chapels and into approved structures. A mother reading that sentence is supposed to wonder about her children’s baptism. A penitent is supposed to fear confession. A couple is supposed to stare at its marriage. The point is spiritual pressure.

The language also reveals the haste and overreach of the moment.

Baptism is a strange place to begin such a threat. The Church has always treated baptism with extraordinary breadth because souls matter. In danger, anyone can baptize validly with water, the right words, and the intention to do what the Church does. Yet the Ogdensburg letter throws Baptism into the same warning paragraph as Marriage and Holy Orders, as though the faithful should feel a general cloud over every sacrament connected to the SSPX.

That is pastoral malpractice.

A bishop who cares for souls should speak with precision when sacraments are at stake. LaValley speaks like a man carrying a Vatican script into a local emergency.

The Real Issue: Vatican II Doctrine

Then the letter becomes useful.

LaValley says the division between the SSPX and Rome is “not simply about the celebration of the Mass and the Sacraments.” He says the SSPX repudiates and denounces the Second Vatican Council, especially ecumenism, religious liberty, collegiality of bishops with the pope, and the Church’s understanding of and relationship with Judaism.

There it is.

That paragraph is the honest paragraph.

The real offense is doctrine. The old Mass is the visible sign. The disputed sacraments are the pressure point. The consecrations are the immediate occasion. The deeper fight concerns Vatican II and the new ecclesial order that followed it.

Ecumenism.

Religious liberty.

Collegiality.

Judaism.

The very items LaValley lists are the questions Archbishop Lefebvre spent decades refusing to swallow. These are the points where the postconciliar religion changed the Church’s public face, missionary posture, political theology, relation to false worship, and understanding of authority.

LaValley wanted to warn his people away from schism. He ended up confirming the SSPX argument.

This fight is about the Council.

Copenhagen Says Suppression Does No Harm

Bishop Czesław Kozon of Copenhagen reportedly says Traditionis Custodes does no harm to the Church, while the SSPX consecrations do. He favors pastoral availability for people who request the old rite, but insists the postconciliar liturgy is the Church’s liturgy and can be celebrated beautifully.

That is approved conservative logic in its pure form.

The old Mass may be permitted as a pastoral concession. The diocesan bishop may celebrate it when asked. People with attachments may be cared for. Meanwhile Traditionis Custodes can be defended as harmless, because everyone must recognize the new liturgical settlement as the Church’s official life.

Families lose Masses. Communities get uprooted. Priests are intimidated. Children are moved from reverent worship into parishes full of liturgical and doctrinal nonsense. Apparently that does no harm.

Écône consecrates bishops for continuity, and the word “tragic” appears.

The hierarchy can absorb decades of rupture. It panics when Tradition builds a lifeboat.

San Bernardino’s Rainbow Cathedral

While Ogdensburg warns Catholics away from SSPX sacraments, Bishop Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino celebrates a homosexual Eucharist at his cathedral. Ministers and choir members wear rainbow stoles. Rainbow symbols decorate the cathedral. The language centers unconditional acceptance. Homosexuals in civil partnerships attend and receive public welcome.

Place that beside LaValley’s letter.

SSPX faithful are told to avoid a chapel where children learn the old catechism and priests offer the old Mass. In California, the cathedral itself becomes a rainbow theater of belonging. The language of welcome wraps itself around people living in relationships the Church has always judged gravely contrary to nature and divine law.

This is the new pastoral order.

Catholic Tradition is dangerous.

Rainbow symbolism in the cathedral is accompaniment.

The old rite threatens unity.

Sexual revolution imagery in the sanctuary expresses inclusion.

The contrast preaches itself.

Gurk Sponsors Pride

Austria adds another scene.

The Diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt is a sponsor of the first Pride demonstration in Villach. The march includes dog masks, a communist flag, and a sign reading: “Jesus had two dads — why can’t we?”

That slogan is a perfect little blasphemy of the age. It takes the mystery of the Incarnation, the eternal Fatherhood of God, and St. Joseph’s guardianship of the Holy Family, then flattens it into Pride rhetoric.

And a Catholic diocese appears among the sponsors.

This is where the postconciliar language of dignity and welcome ends up on the ground. A chancery can tell itself it is accompanying the marginalized, standing for human dignity, opposing hatred, or building bridges. The street supplies the actual catechism: communist flags, fetish masks, and slogans playing games with Our Lord’s divine Sonship.

Rome can live with this atmosphere.

Écône gets called schism.

The Pope’s Newspaper and the Devil Problem

The Vatican newspaper story cuts to the doctrinal root.

In the July issue of Donne Chiesa Mondo, L'Osservatore Romano's monthly supplement, Marinella Perroni treats the Genesis serpent as a late-developing religious symbol rather than the devil of Catholic faith. The serpent becomes the cunning animal of desert nomads. Demonology becomes late Jewish development shaped by contact with other religions. The connection between serpent, woman, fruit, devil, women, and sin becomes a patriarchal construction.

Silere Non Possum’s critique is right about the method. The article does not need to stand up and say, “the devil does not exist.” It can do the work through genealogy. Explain how the belief developed. Explain the cultural background. Explain the patriarchal effects. Leave the reader with the impression that Satan is a narrative device, a projection, a religious symbol, a cultural artifact.

That is how modernist theology often operates.

It does not always deny. It dissolves.

The devil becomes psychology. Sin becomes wound. Hell becomes symbol. Scripture becomes community memory. Dogma becomes development. Tradition becomes perspective. Heresy becomes conversation.

Meanwhile the pope’s newspaper carries the operation.

Ogdensburg tells Catholic families to flee the SSPX for the safety of “full communion.” Then the official Vatican press world circulates theology that treats the devil like a problem in religious genealogy.

What exactly is the faithful Catholic being invited back into?

The Approved Safe Zone

LaValley points SSPX faithful toward diocesan Latin Masses at St. Mary’s in Potsdam and St. Mary’s in Evans Mills.

That invitation tells the whole strategy.

The old Mass is useful when it functions as a containment tool. Give the distressed faithful an approved chapel. Give them Latin, incense, chant, and the 1962 Missal. Keep them away from SSPX doctrine. Keep them away from priests who will explain Vatican II, religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, and the new theology of Judaism. Keep them inside diocesan structures, where the same bishop can decide tomorrow that the pastoral arrangement has run its course.

This is the great approved-traditionalist bargain.

You may have the old liturgy if you leave the doctrinal indictment at the door.

The SSPX refuses that bargain. That is why the anger is sharper.

Rome can manage Latin. Rome fears memory.

“Formal Schism” and Formal Collapse

The phrase “formal schism” sounds impressive on diocesan letterhead.

Yet the same official world cannot keep its own house in order. Rainbow stoles in a cathedral. A diocesan Pride sponsorship. A Vatican newspaper platform for devil revisionism. Bishops defending liturgical casualness in sacred spaces. Officials treating the old Mass as a regulated hazard. The SSPX as the great emergency.

This is the collapse behind the legal language.

A Catholic father in Ogdensburg reads the letter and is told to avoid St. Therese Chapel. He is told to seek nourishment elsewhere. He is told the Society repudiates Vatican II teachings on ecumenism, religious liberty, collegiality, and Judaism. He then looks at the wider Church: Pride liturgies, rainbow sanctuaries, feminist theology, soft-pedaled demonology, football in churches, Buddhist honors, synodal jargon, and bishops who can discover severity only when Tradition refuses to die.

The letter asks him to trust the men who created the crisis.

That is a hard sell.

What Church is This?

This is where the modern Catholic lives.

He sees the visible structures. He understands the claims of authority. He knows schism is serious. He also sees the governing pattern.

Discipline runs toward Tradition.

Mercy runs toward revolution.

Warnings run toward Écône.

Dialogue runs toward everyone else.

The old Mass is restricted, then offered as bait.

Pride receives welcome.

The devil receives historical reinterpretation.

Vatican II receives protection.

Families who want Catholic doctrine receive letters.

The question grows heavier with every episode. How can the authority charged with guarding the Faith operate as the protector of the very revolution that dissolves it? How can a bishop warn people away from old sacraments while diocesan life fills with rainbow ideology and official Catholic publications play games with the devil? How can “unity” mean surrendering to the very system that scattered the flock?

The usual answers have lost their power. “Obey” is too thin. “Be patient” is too easy. “The gates of Hell shall not prevail” is true, but it was never meant as a sedative for Catholics watching shepherds feed the wolves.

Ogdensburg Has Done Us a Favor

LaValley’s letter is useful because it says aloud what polite men avoid.

The fight concerns Vatican II.

The fight concerns ecumenism, religious liberty, collegiality, and Judaism.

The fight concerns whether Catholic Tradition judges the Council or the Council judges Catholic Tradition.

The faithful should thank him for the clarity.

The SSPX problem, from Rome’s perspective, has never been a mere paperwork problem. A Society that offered only incense and chant could be managed. A Society that offers a doctrinal indictment must be isolated.

That is why St. Therese Chapel in Nicholville receives a warning while rainbow cathedrals and Vatican feminist theology receive space to breathe.

That is why families are told to abandon SSPX priests while official structures teach them to make peace with the revolution.

That is why bishops suddenly point to diocesan Latin Masses when the SSPX becomes too attractive.

The old Faith remains the real target.

Ogdensburg made the point clear.

Now Catholics should read the letter with eyes open.

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