Brigitte Gets The Host, Illegals Get Dispensations, Trad Families Get The Toll Booth

When bishops suspend Mass for fugitives, reward sacrilege for the powerful, and crack down on coffee hour for trads, you are watching a regime guard its revolution

Advent is supposed to be a season of penance and preparation. Instead we get a parish in Boston evicting the Holy Family from the crèche to score points against ICE, a televised sacrilege in Notre Dame as Brigitte Macron receives Communion, a bishop in Louisiana handing out dispensations that function as cover for people avoiding arrest, and a bishop in Charlotte trying to dissolve what is left of a Latin Mass community. It is very clear whose side the post conciliar establishment has chosen, and it is not God’s.

ICE Was Here, Christ Was Not

At St. Susanna’s in Dedham, MA, the Nativity scene has become an annual political art project. A caged baby Jesus one year. Half–submerged figures for climate change another year. Now the Holy Family has vanished entirely, replaced with an “ICE WAS HERE” sign and a phone number to report immigration agents.

According to the pastor, the display is meant to “evoke dialogue.” We are assured that disagreement does not make it “sacrilegious.” The archdiocese of Boston, finally embarrassed enough to say something, reminds the parish that sacred images exist for worship, not partisan messaging. The parish shrugs and leaves the scene in place. No one is removed. No one is silenced.

Now imagine a different scenario. Picture a parish that sets up a Nativity scene with plaques quoting pre–conciliar papal condemnations of religious liberty or ecumenism, or a sign saying “Vatican II Was Here” over an empty crib to symbolize the spiritual devastation since the council. Would the diocese talk about “dialogue” and “diverse reception”? Ask Fr. James Altman how long a politically incorrect priest lasts. He was erased from parish life for being too blunt about Democrats and abortion, while the Dedham circus keeps running year after year.

Here is the rule: sacrilege is tolerated when it advances the approved causes. The Holy Family may be weaponized against ICE, capitalism, carbon emissions, or whatever this year’s talking point may be. What you may never do is use the crib to question the revolution itself. The only truly untouchable object in the modern Church is the new regime.

A Dispensation for Fugitives, Not for the Faithful

In Baton Rouge the mask slips. Bishop Duca has announced a standing “dispensation” from Sunday and holy day Mass for anyone who is afraid of immigration enforcement. On paper it sounds pastoral. In reality it is a spiritual service program for people who do not want to risk meeting the law they have broken.

The Church has always taught that the state has both the right and the duty to control its borders and to punish lawbreakers. That is basic Catholic social teaching. You can debate prudential details, but you cannot turn the parish network into a sanctuary racket for people who are actively evading arrest. The bishop is not excusing a man who is home with a fever or a family stranded in a snowstorm. He is telling people who fear a knock on the door from federal agents that they may skip the worship owed to God until they decide it feels “safe” again.

That is aiding and abetting fugitives. The same bishops who speak endlessly about the “rule of law” when it comes to environmental regulations or civil rights suddenly discover a higher gospel the moment border enforcement appears. They will not publicly encourage thieves, drunk drivers, or fugitives from homicide warrants to stay home from Mass in order to avoid arrest. Only one category of lawbreaker receives this kind of indulgence, and it happens to be the one that fits neatly into the post conciliar political narrative.

The irony is brutal. Law abiding Catholics who want a reverent liturgy, clear doctrine, and sacramental discipline are treated as a policing problem. ICE is portrayed as the villain, not the human traffickers, drug runners, and repeat offenders who exploit porous borders. Meanwhile bishops hand spiritual cover to anyone who does not want to meet the consequences of their own choices, and then cite Catholic teaching on migrants as if it were a mandate to obstruct the legitimate authority of the state.

Brigitte at the Rail, Tarcisius in the Dock

At Notre-Dame’s reopening, Brigitte Macron walks up from the front pew to receive the Eucharist from a bishop while the cameras roll. By every public standard she is an objective, obstinate, notorious sinner: divorced, remarried outside the Church (with no public sign of convalidation), advocate of abortion, euthanasia, and the LGBT revolution.

Canon 915 could not be clearer about those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin.” Redemptionis Sacramentum urges that the Eucharist be defended from “every irreverence or distortion.” Traditional catechisms would have called this a textbook case of sacrilege: a public sinner receiving publicly, with the minister fully aware of her status.

Fr. Guy Pagès does what bishops are supposed to do. He writes to the dicasteries, then to Leo XIV himself, begging them to act. He quotes Scripture, magisterial documents, and even Benedict’s remark that abuse of the Eucharist parallels abuse of children. He warns that priests who hand out the Blessed Sacrament like party favors risk their own damnation.

He receives silence. No clarification. No correction. No apology to the faithful scandalized by the spectacle of France’s first lady using the Lord’s Body as a prop in a national reconciliation liturgy.

The lesson is simple. Since Amoris Laetitia, cheerfully continued under Leo, sacramental discipline for public adulterers has become a matter of personal preference and a friendly priest. Brigitte Macron is not an outlier, but the regime’s ideal communicant. The only people who still get treated as a problem at the rail are the ones who believe what the Church used to teach. If you question Vatican II, refuse Leo’s novelties, or insist that Canon 915 still means something, the weight of the institution suddenly reappears in full force. Ask any priest who has been sidelined, disciplined, or cancelled for preaching the old Catechism on marriage and the Eucharist.

Charlotte: The Toll Road to Nowhere

Then there is Charlotte. We already know the diocese has moved to corral, isolate, and eventually suffocate the Latin Mass. Now, according to Sensus Fidelium, the bishop has “forbidden” people to gather after Mass just to talk. No hanging out in the parish hall, no coffee, no community.

Families already forced to drive to Mooresville, paying forty-five dollars each way in tolls on a good day, are being told that even the few minutes after Mass must be policed. The aim could not be plainer. The goal is to scatter the flock until the community slowly dies.

This is what episcopal authority looks like when Tradition is the enemy. A bishop who would never dream of disciplining a priest for handing Communion to Brigitte Macron has no problem threatening traditional families for standing around in the parking lot. He cannot stop public sacrilege in Paris, but he can stop you from chatting over doughnuts in North Carolina.

Perhaps the faithful should follow Sensus Fidelium’s suggestion and mail their toll receipts to the chancery. Better yet, they might include a note reminding His Excellency that the Church once regarded bishops as defenders of the flock rather than prison wardens assigned to break up forbidden assemblies.

Faggioli’s Golden Calf: Vatican II as “Point of No Return”

Into this world strides Massimo Faggioli, cheerfully explaining that Vatican II is a revolution whose “propulsive thrust” must be preserved. The council, he tells us, is like Trent after the Renaissance or 1917 after the Russian Revolution. Old categories have been shattered. A new age has dawned.

Faggioli admits that, sociologically, the Vatican II generation is dying off. The theologians who made the revolution are gone. Younger Catholics are weary of nostalgic stories about the 1960s. But historically and theologically, he insists, Vatican II remains the “point of no return,” especially in its teaching on the Jews and other religions. Leo himself, he notes approvingly, has said that Nostra Aetate established a doctrinal “point of no return.”

Notice the implication. The dogmas defined at Trent or Vatican I can be “developed,” reinterpreted, or carefully sidestepped when they impede the post-conciliar project. The traditional discipline of the sacraments can be turned inside out. The liturgy itself can be abolished and replaced. Yet Nostra Aetate is treated as an untouchable, irreversible super-dogma that binds the Church more strictly than Quanta Cura ever did.

The revolution may never be questioned, only “received” in ever more creative ways. If you resist, you are nostalgic, reactionary, incapable of appreciating the “multicultural and multireligious world.” You may even be one of those “radical traditionalists” the FBI keeps getting detailed memos about.

Faggioli says there is “no longer an audience for nostalgic celebrations” of the council. He is wrong. The only nostalgia left in the Church is the nostalgia of his own generation for the heady days when everything seemed up for grabs except the council itself. The young are not nostalgic for Vatican II. They are exhausted by it. They are tired of watching pastors use “the spirit of the council” as a weapon against the faith of their grandparents.

What All of This Reveals

Put the pieces together.

A Nativity stripped of Jesus but full of anti-ICE sloganeering is defended as “prophetic.” A bishop suspends Sunday obligation so that those evading law enforcement can avoid Mass without guilt. A public adulteress who promotes abortion receives Communion on live television and the only cleric who complains is ignored. A Latin Mass community is harassed for lingering in the parking lot. A theologian declares that Vatican II is a “point of no return,” more binding than the entire preceding tradition it quietly contradicts.

What is sacred in this system? Not the Eucharist, which can be profaned for the sake of political theater. Not the Sunday obligation, which yields to media campaigns and identity politics. Not the Holy Family, who may be erased from the crèche if it helps condemn immigration enforcement. Certainly not the ancient Roman rite, which is treated as a contagious disease.

The only untouchable object is the revolution itself. Vatican II is the golden calf set up in the middle of the camp. Everything else – dogma, discipline, sacramental coherence, even natural justice – may be melted down and reshaped to protect it.

So when you see a bishop scattering traditional families while offering dispensations to ICE fugitives, or a Paris prelate handing the Body of Christ to Brigitte Macron, do not tell yourself this is mere inconsistency. It is method. The prelates who fear men more than God will always bend doctrine to please the powerful while crushing those who remind them of what the Church used to be.

The true crime in all of this is not that some people miss Mass because they are hiding from immigration agents. The real crime is that bishops and theologians have turned the worship of God into a tool of their own political and ideological project. They will grant you a dispensation from the Third Commandment before they will grant you permission to attend the Mass of Ages.

In that light, perhaps the faithful do need a dispensation; not from God’s law, which remains binding, but from the abusive regime that blasphemes His sacraments and calls it “accompaniment.” Christ remains. His priesthood remains. The sacrifice of the Mass remains wherever it is still offered without compromise. The revolution may call itself a “point of no return.” God has a way of proving otherwise.

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