Burke’s Fairy Tale, Czerny’s Shrug, Spengler’s River

A January consistory where the liturgy gets “time constraints,” synodality gets incense, and “getting bishops right” keeps getting Catholics wrong

January’s first consistory under Leo XIV carried the kind of symbolism that never needs a press office to explain it. The cardinals gathered. The microphones were rationed. The small groups did the “listening.” The public language stayed soothing. The liturgy, the one subject that actually touches the life of the Church at the altar rail, got treated like a side quest.

Edward Pentin reported the basic structure in the days immediately after: cardinals opted to focus on evangelization and “synodality,” leaving the liturgy off the main table, to the disappointment of those who expected it to be central after the recent restrictions on the traditional Roman rite.

That decision set the tone for everything else that followed. The postconciliar machine never panics over doctrine or worship. It panics over “division,” meaning resistance. It never calls a crisis a crisis. It calls it a “process.”

Czerny and the politics of pretending not to notice

Cardinal Michael Czerny’s reaction, as relayed in The Pillar’s interview, reads like the managerial spirituality of the Francis years with a gentler voice and the same outcome. He says he did not hear anyone saying, “Sorry we didn’t discuss the liturgy,” and he frames the consistory as a healthy exercise of collegial “work.”

A sane Church, a Catholic Church, hears the absence as a scream. The Roman rite is not a hobby for nostalgic people with lace allergies, but the Church’s public worship, the sacrificial act that forms priests, families, and civilizations. When a consistory “runs out of time” for the liturgy, it announces priorities more clearly than any communiqué.

Czerny also describes Leo XIV’s approach to the Mass as “beyond my pay grade,” then reaches for the standard Vatican lullaby: a pope wanting “peace” in the Church. The word “peace” gets used as a cudgel here. Peace becomes the permission structure for suppressing the one form of worship that refuses to flatter modern man. Peace becomes code for pacifying Catholics who still remember that the Mass is an objective propitiatory sacrifice, not a community workshop.

The Synodality Charade

Then comes the line that should end the conversation for anyone still pretending this is serious theology. Czerny says synodality means: “If you just see it, you don’t get it. You have to experience it.”

That is initiation language. “Experience it” is what you say about a retreat brand, a therapy method, a political movement, a psychedelic, a new lifestyle. Catholic doctrine is preached, defined, safeguarded, then embodied. It is not a fog you enter in order to “get it.”

This is the same rhetorical move America has lived through in politics: the shift from truth claims to lived narratives; from law to “equity”; from borders to feelings; from duties to identities; from the real to the curated. The Church’s synodal vocabulary functions like a religious version of that managerial state language. It keeps power. It dissolves accountability. It turns dissent into a pathology.

Spengler’s river and the Vatican II myth that never dies

Cardinal Jaime Spengler supplies the Latin American version of the same program: “the river doesn’t flow backwards,” followed by the claim that Vatican II was an “enormous effort” to recover “essential” elements of liturgical celebration and that “nostalgic proposals” do not help.

That line about the river is a threat wrapped in poetry. It means: the revolution is irreversible. It also means: tradition is not a norm, it is a phase. The Church becomes a timeline instead of a treasure.

Spengler’s definition of the liturgy gives away the modern premise. He insists liturgy is not “simply” religious practice, and calls it a “vigorous expression” of a lived experience of faith, personal and communal, an encounter with Jesus.

Catholics already know liturgy involves faith and encounter. The issue is what the modern hierarchy has tried to replace: the Mass as the Church’s solemn, objective, Godward sacrifice offered by a priest acting in persona Christi, governed by tradition and guarded by rubrics that treat the Holy as real. Vatican II’s liturgical project did not “recover essentials.” It rewired the entire posture of worship toward man. The downstream fruit is visible without a microscope.

Even the secular-facing Catholic press noticed the reality: the liturgy was explicitly passed over at the consistory. When Rome chooses synodality over the altar, it reveals which “experience” it wants.

The Roche paper trail: the revolution keeps receipts

One detail matters because it exposes the sleight of hand. While liturgy was not the main debate, a controversial text by Cardinal Arthur Roche about the traditional Mass circulated among the cardinals at the consistory.

So the liturgy was not ignored. It was managed. It was framed. It was pre-loaded with the same anti-trad assumptions, then moved out of the public room where objections might land cleanly. This is how the postconciliar system wins: not by refuting tradition, by administrating it into a corner.

Burke’s “appointments will fix it” fantasy

Cardinal Raymond Burke’s complaint about the consistory format rings true on the surface. Small-group tables, reports from secretaries, three-minute interventions, a structure that leaves most cardinals unheard.

Then he reaches the familiar conservative Catholic superstition: if the Church gets two things right, everything else falls into place, especially “the appointment of bishops” and “the running of seminaries,” a maxim he attributes to Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski.

Here is the problem. Burke talks as if the system is neutral and the right man in the right office solves it. Leo XIV is already showing the opposite: the system is designed to reproduce itself. The appointments do not correct the revolution. They professionalize it.

Burke becomes a useful idiot the moment he treats the crisis as staffing rather than faith. When the liturgy is treated as “nostalgia,” when synodality is treated as something you “experience,” when governance becomes process and therapy, the machine does not need a new bishop here and there. It needs Catholics to stop believing that this machine is Catholic.

The Appointments Ledger

If you want to evaluate Burke’s claim, you need names, dates, dioceses, and patterns.

Palm Beach, December 19, 2025. Leo XIV appoints Rev. Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez, publicly framed as a migrant advocate, to the diocese that includes Mar-a-Lago, producing a predictable political signal aimed directly at Trump-era immigration enforcement. Fox’s coverage leaned into the symbolism for a reason: everyone can see what Rome is doing here.

New York, late 2025. Leo XIV replaces Cardinal Dolan with Bishop Ronald Hicks, whose chancellor got “married” to another man. A shift widely described as part of a generational and ideological reorientation of the English-speaking hierarchy.

Brisbane, June 2025. Leo XIV appoints Shane Mackinlay, publicly reported as a supporter of women deacons, to one of Australia’s most prominent sees.

Baker, Oregon, July 2025. Leo XIV appoints Thomas Hennen, with major outlets framing the appointment through the lens of LGBTQ outreach and “mixed reactions,” exactly the kind of media catechism Rome now treats as a credential.

January 2026, a wider stream. Public trackers already list a growing slate of episcopal moves in the opening days of the year. The volume matters because patterns harden quickly. When the controlling ideology is synodality, the kind you “experience,” the factory output becomes predictable.

This is the “appointments” reality Burke gestures toward while refusing to name it. The dossiers are being studied. The picks are being made. The direction is visible.

Ghana’s archbishop said the obvious, then the Vatican quoted itself

Archbishop John Bonaventure Kwofie’s remarks in Accra are blunt in a way modern Church officials rarely allow: he calls homosexuality and “gay culture” in seminaries a growing monster, urges formators to “weed out” men with such orientation, and cites the 2005 instruction barring those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support for “gay culture” from admission to seminary and Holy Orders.

On the moral substance, he is pointing toward what Catholic teaching has long recognized: priestly formation collapses when chastity is treated as optional and disordered desire is normalized. The Vatican itself has issued texts warning about the consequences.

The bitter irony is the larger context. Rome’s favored “pastoral” culture, the one that treats hard boundaries as unkind and treats doctrine as a conversation, is the same culture that created the climate where “gay culture” can metastasize in seminaries. You fix it with restoration of discipline rooted in truth, and with worship that forms men to fear God more than their appetites.

Institutions rot when leaders talk like managers, when enforcement is selective, when the loyal get punished and the ideological protected class gets cover. The Church’s version looks spiritual, then it behaves like every captured institution in America.

The conclusion nobody in Rome will say

Czerny’s shrug, Spengler’s river, Burke’s staffing fantasy, and Kwofie’s alarm belong to the same week because they belong to the same crisis.

Rome treats the liturgy as a political problem. Rome treats synodality as an experience, not a definition. Rome treats Vatican II as a permanent revolution that cannot be reversed. Conservatives treat appointments as a silver bullet even while the appointment pipeline keeps feeding the very project they claim to resist.

Pre-Vatican II Catholicism had a clear hierarchy of goods: God first, worship ordered to God, doctrine governing worship, discipline guarding doctrine, then pastoral care flowing from that reality. This January consistory gave us the inverted order again: process first, experience first, “peace” first, and the altar waiting in the hallway for permission to be discussed.

If Burke wants “appointments” to solve anything, he can start with honesty: name the program, name the men, name the premises, then stop acting as if the system is still neutral ground.

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