Confirmed in Sin: Leo’s Revolution No Longer Hides Its Face

From a Homosexual Confirmation in New York to a Vampire Liturgy in Germany, Modern Catholicism Has Finally Made Peace with the Darkness It Once Cast Out

Gio Benitez: A Confirmation That Confirmed the Revolution

This week the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan, the Jesuit-minded parish famous for rainbow banners and Broadway Masses, offered a sacrament that would have baffled every catechism before 1962. ABC News anchor Gio Benitez, openly homosexual and civilly “married” to another man, received the sacrament of confirmation with his husband standing beside him as sponsor. If this same priest had said a Latin Mass without permission he would have been suspended. Instead, cameras rolled. Applause followed. Father James Martin, ever the apostle of affirmation, commented beneath the video with a single word: “Welcome!”

No one in authority objected. No one questioned whether the rite was valid, licit, or simply insane. In the new ecclesiology, publicity is proof of holiness.

Confirmation, by every traditional definition, seals the soul already living in fidelity to the creed it professes. It means renouncing sin and the world, not canonizing them with lighting and applause. Yet the modern liturgy of “inclusion” has turned the sacrament from a weapon of grace into a prop of self-expression. The Spirit no longer descends as fire; it poses for photos.

Benitez marked the occasion online with a caption fit for a meditation app: “I found the Ark of the Covenant in my heart, stored there by the One who created me … exactly as I am.” To a generation catechized by Francis rather than Trent, that line sounded profound. To anyone who remembers that grace perfects nature by correcting it, not indulging it, the statement was pure sentimental heresy.

Benitez thanked the late Francis for inspiring him with “a legacy of inclusivity.” That legacy, amplified now under Leo XIV, has made “inclusion” the eighth sacrament. The old catechism begins with the question, Why did God make you? The new one begins with Why shouldn’t He affirm you?

The tragedy here is a clergy class eager to baptize confusion for clout. They could have guided him toward repentance; instead, they staged a photo shoot. The same priests who agonize over whether kneeling during Communion is “divisive” will cheer as a same-sex couple approaches the altar, because that spectacle tells the world that the Church has finally caught up. It has caught up, that is, with the world it was sent to convert.

The Church was never a therapist’s couch. It is a hospital for the soul, and the first medicine it offers is truth. Mercy without conversion becomes morphine. “Love one another” was never permission to ignore the moral law; it was the command to will another’s salvation, even when that love wounds pride. The sentimental Gospel on display in Manhattan was not Christianity, but emotional relativism.

The old catechism still whispers beneath the din: grace and public contradiction do not cohabit. Either the Cross reshapes the person, or the person refashions the Cross. Only one of those is Catholic.

A German Bishop Rediscovers the Word “Soul”

Across the Atlantic, the German Bishops’ Conference recently published school guidelines celebrating “sexual diversity.” The document proclaims that teachers must adopt an “open and appreciative attitude” toward every self-identified orientation and gender. Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau, the rare prelate who still remembers that the soul exists, issued a lonely rebuke. The text, he said, promotes a “desacralized understanding of humankind” and smuggles in a new anthropology altogether. Beneath its syrupy language about love, he detected a dose of the oldest poison in Christian history: Gnosticism.

Oster warned that once you detach God’s love from His law, you are no longer preaching Christianity at all. “Almost every line,” he wrote, “suggests not too much sexual morality, and certainly not the claim to truth … an overdose of an emotionally charged super-dogma: ‘God loves everyone exactly as they are.’”

There it is again; the creed of the new Church. God loves you exactly as you are, therefore you need never become who He created you to be. Grace is no longer a cure; it’s a compliment. Confession is no longer repentance; it’s self-reporting. The Cross, once the instrument that killed sin, is now the backdrop for selfies proving that sin was never real.

Mysticism for the Spiritually Numb

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the ghostwriter of Amoris Laetitia and current prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, recently gave the theology behind this shift its academic gloss. Speaking at a Vatican conference on mysticism, he explained that mystical experience can serve as a “therapeutic path” in a world that has lost “sensitivity toward God.” The Holy Spirit, he said, acts with “full freedom,” sometimes “against nature.”

Against nature indeed. Fernández’s approach dissolves revelation into feeling: what one experiences as divine becomes divine enough. The saints once feared deception by false spirits; today’s theologians invite them for peer review.

The result is a religion perfectly adapted to the spirit of the age. It promises transcendence without truth, ecstasy without obedience, healing without holiness. It is what C. S. Lewis warned about: a Church that says be kind when it once said be perfect. The old sermons began with sin and ended with salvation. The new homilies begin with self-esteem and end with applause.

When mercy becomes morphine, the patient dies smiling. The Gio Benitez confirmation was simply the smile made sacramental.

The Dracula Liturgy

If Manhattan gave us the doctrine of self-canonization and Germany supplied its theology, Freising provided the visual aid. There, a parish vicar decided to hold a “Halloween service” in the cemetery chapel. He arrived wearing a Dracula cape over his vestments. An open coffin, synthetic fog, and ambient music set the tone. The faithful, about fifty of them, were delighted. Photographs show the vampire-priest preaching beside the coffin, which he later explained symbolized the “empty tomb.”

After criticism appeared online, the parish issued a statement assuring everyone that it had not been a Mass and therefore not sacrilegious. The fog machine, they clarified, was merely a “creative expression of Christian hope.” The pastor apologized not for the spectacle itself but for deleting negative comments too hastily, noting that “as a synodal church, it is important to listen.”

Listen to whom? To the undead apparently.

A priest once wore black to signify mourning for sin and red to signify martyrdom. Now he wears a cape to signify relevance. The inversion could not be clearer. The Dracula service was not a lapse in taste; it was the logical extension of a Church that treats form as theater and mystery as marketing. When worship becomes entertainment, the line between Mass and masquerade vanishes.

The coffin in that chapel was a perfect icon for modern Catholicism: the faith of our fathers lying half-open, ventilated for optics, while a grinning cleric assures us there is nothing to fear. Death has lost its sting because sin has lost its meaning..

Meanwhile, the Traditional Latin Mass, the only form of worship that still teaches the fear of God, is restricted, stigmatized, or exiled to gymnasiums. Dracula gets a microphone; tradition gets a permit. And bishops wonder why belief in the Real Presence collapses faster than their attendance numbers.

The Freising fiasco was dismissed as a local eccentricity. It isn’t. It’s the logical conclusion of the theology that began with Who am I to judge? and ends with Why judge at all? Once sin becomes an aesthetic choice, liturgy becomes performance art. The same Church that confirmed Gio Benitez now blesses theatrical necromancy. The symbolism writes itself.

Epilogue: Back to the Narrow Door

From Manhattan to Munich to the mortuary chapel in Freising, the revolution preaches one creed: you are fine as you are. It has its theologians, its sacraments, and its saints; none of whom require a change of life. But the Gospel does not share the delusion. “If any man will come after Me,” says Christ, “let him deny himself.” Denial is the mark of discipleship.

A Church that confirms the unrepentant, theologizes disobedience, and cosplays resurrection will keep attracting cameras but not converts. The applause of the world is the laughter of hell. The saints were mocked for warning souls away from sin; today they would be canceled for “pastoral insensitivity.” Yet only their path leads anywhere but the grave.

The true renewal of the Church will not come from synodal listening sessions or ecological conferences. It will come from silence before the tabernacle and the rediscovery of the fear of God. That fear is not servile; it is the beginning of wisdom. Without it, mercy curdles into sentimentality, theology into poetry, and worship into pantomime.

The door remains narrow. The way remains hard. No amount of fog, hashtags, or press releases will widen it. But for those who still kneel, who still confess, repent, and adore, the light beyond that door has not dimmed.

The rest may find their Ark of the Covenant wherever they like; the Church’s treasure is still nailed to a Cross.

If you value independent Catholic analysis and want to help keep this work going, you can make a contribution or subscription 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.