Forty-Eight Transvestites, Zero Altar Rails

Leo’s jubilee of inclusion, synodality, and “Mother Earth” has room for everyone — except the Catholic Faith.

Priest-Free Parishes: Vienna’s “New Normal”

In Leo’s Church of permanent emergency, the priest is no longer the man who offers sacrifice; he is a logistics problem.

Josef Grünwidl, Leo’s new archbishop of Vienna, told Austrian state TV that we should stop thinking of the Church “in terms of priests” and focus instead on parishes “remaining alive locally – even if there is no priest present every Sunday.” His plan is to “empower” lay men and women to support and organize parish life when the priest is absent.

(Archbishop Josef Grünwidl in his clerics polo and sport coat.)

The crisis is not framed as apostasy, collapsing vocations, or decades of liturgical abuse. The crisis is that Catholics might need to drive farther to get to an actual Mass. Better, says the new logic, to keep every village “alive” with a lay-led Sunday celebration than to admit that the sacramental life of the Church cannot be reduced to a community gathering with a borrowed stole.

For centuries, Catholics trudged through snow to reach a priest, because the Mass is Calvary renewed. Now bishops shrug and propose that the priest is optional, but the parish council is indispensable. The priest becomes a guest at the community’s event, not the man whose very existence is ordered to offering sacrifice.

This is how the “Eucharistic Revival” looks from the top: a slow, quiet shift from a Church built around the altar to a Church built around the meeting room.

Deaconettes, “Emerging Issues,” and the Synodal Operating System

While Vienna normalizes priestless Sundays, Rome continues rewriting the rulebook. The Synod’s Study Group 5 on the female diaconate has announced that all synodal contributions on the topic have gone to the commission, which will produce results “in the coming months.”

Meanwhile the Synod interim report on its ten study groups speaks of women’s “participation in the life and leadership of the Church,” describes homosexuality as an “emerging issue,” and calls for further “decentralization” of liturgical authority along with “Eucharistic hospitality” for mixed-confession families. Doctrine becomes a raw material to be processed into “operational proposals.”

The controlling phrase is the “principle of pastorality” as an “interpretive horizon” for a “paradigm shift” in the relationship between doctrine and life. Once that is accepted, the female diaconate is not about the sacramental character of Holy Orders; it becomes a test of whether the Church will finally “listen” to women’s experiences and validate them with an ordination ceremony. Homosexuality is no longer a matter of grave sin and repentance, but an “emerging issue” attached to identities that must be recognized, affirmed, and eventually sacramentalized.

In the old religion, revelation judged experience. In the synodal religion, experience judges revelation and demands a new liturgical form to match. That is why, as we will see, the same machine that talks about “deaconettes” and “emerging issues” also obsesses over inculturation, smudging, Pachamama, and “Mother Earth.” It is one project.

Lasagne, Chicken Cutlets, and Forty-Eight Men in Dresses

Nothing illustrated that new operating system better this week than Leo’s Jubilee “Lunch for the Poor” in the Paul VI hall. About 1,300 guests attended, including migrants, the homeless, the disabled — and forty-eight men identifying as “transgender women.”

The secular press complained that the activists were “snubbed” because none of them sat at Leo’s head table this year, unlike the previous two years. Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, who runs the event, scrambled to assure the Washington Post that this was simple logistics: the spots at the papal table “were given to poor parishioners who had attended an earlier Eucharist,” and the trans group arrived later and sat elsewhere. “The Church is open to everyone,” he insisted. “They came because they’re an integral part of the Church, that is all.”

That line is the whole problem.

No one begrudges feeding the poor. No one objects to talking to sinners. The scandal is the messaging: public, organized, high-profile endorsement of a political and ideological project that mutilates bodies and denies nature. You are supposed to see forty-eight men in women’s clothing at a Vatican event and conclude not that something is deeply disordered, but that the Church is finally “credible” and “inclusive.”

Meanwhile, in most dioceses, you cannot get a public rosary against abortion into the chancery newsletter without being treated as a threat to unity. But a block of trans activists at a papal lunch is “integral to the Church.”

We are not watching simple charity. We are watching the construction of a new moral hierarchy, where those furthest from Catholic teaching receive the warmest public affirmation, and those closest to Catholic tradition are barely tolerated, if at all.

Kneeling Not Welcome: Charlotte’s Quiet War on Reverence

If you want to see where all this “pastorality” ends in the liturgy, look at the Diocese of Charlotte.

St. Mark’s in Huntersville installed altar rails when it began offering the traditional Mass in 2017. Over time, the rails became the normal way of receiving Communion at all Masses. People knelt. Many received on the tongue. Reverence increased.

Then came the new bishop, Michael Martin, who banned parish Latin Masses and corralled the old rite into a single non-parish chapel. In May, a leaked draft “pastoral” letter proposed sweeping changes aimed squarely at tradition-minded parishes: discouraging altar rails, limiting Latin in the Novus Ordo, insisting on lay ministers of Communion, pushing Communion under both kinds, and treating all of the above as a test of loyalty to Vatican II.

Now Fr. John Putnam at St. Mark’s has announced that the parish will stop using the altar rail for Communion on the First Sunday of Advent. First he implied the bishop required it; then, after pushback and clarification, he admitted this was “his decision,” presented as obedience to the “normative practice” of standing to receive per the U.S. bishops’ norms.

The faithful may still kneel; but not at the rail. They will kneel awkwardly in the aisle, without the visible line of demarcation between sanctuary and nave that helped catechize them simply by existing.

The message is brutally clear: kneeling is tolerated as a private eccentricity, provided it does not reshape the architecture or atmosphere of the Novus Ordo. The altar rail is not just wood. It is a theological statement about separation, sacrifice, the Holy of Holies. That line must go, even if the genuflecting remnant is still allowed to hover near it for now.

This is how “synodality” looks on the ground: no document yet, no formal decree, but the pressure flows one way. Rome hints, drafts leak, the bishop signals, and priests preemptively dismantle reverence to “stay in harmony” with likely future directives.

Mexican Bishops Slander the Cristeros — Say They Died for Religious Liberty

Not every episcopal statement this week was sentimental mush, but some of it was worse. The Mexican bishops issued a substantial message ahead of the 2026 centenary of the Calles Law and the Cristero uprising, recalling more than 200,000 martyrs who died shouting “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” in the face of an openly anti-Catholic regime. On the surface, they sound as though they are honoring men who shed their blood rather than accept a secular state.

Scratch the surface and you see the trick. The language quietly recasts those martyrs as witnesses to “freedom of conscience” and “religious liberty,” as if they fell so that modern Mexico could enjoy a pluralistic marketplace of beliefs under a neutral constitution. That is sacrilege. The Cristeros did not die for the right of Freemasons and Protestants to evangelize alongside Catholic priests. They died for the social reign of Christ, for a confessional Catholic order, for a government that publicly recognized the kingship of Our Lord and submitted to His law.

When the bishops invoke “Christ the King” today, they slide almost immediately into the vocabulary of rights, dialogue, and coexistence. The very feast that Pius XI instituted as a rebuke to secular states is quietly bent into a consecration of the liberal order. The message becomes: our martyrs fought so that no state would ever again “impose” religion; which is exactly the opposite of what those men believed as they went to their deaths with the name of Christ the King on their lips and a militant Sacred Heart on their banners.

The same conference now operates comfortably inside a regime of religious liberty and pluralism, trades in “non-negotiable values” language when it suits them, and submits to government “dialogue” structured by secular ideology. When the new Calles laws appear under rainbow flags and public-health slogans, hate-speech codes, gender ideology, compulsory indoctrination in schools, the bishops offer cautious statements and pastoral letters instead of the kind of resistance their own martyrs would recognize.

The Cristeros gave their lives so that Christ, not the state, would rule Mexico. Their successors talk as if the highest good is a state that treats the Church as a useful partner in promoting peace, development, and social cohesion. The vocabulary has changed from kingship to coexistence, from “He must reign” to “we must accompany.” To drape that capitulation in the blood of the martyrs and call it religious liberty is not pious; it profanes their memory.

Inculturation as Syncretism: The New Archbishop of Keewatin–Le Pas

Leo has now appointed Fr. Susai Jesu, OMI, as archbishop of Keewatin–Le Pas in Canada. His parish in Edmonton, Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples, became famous as a showcase for Indigenous inculturation: smudging, drumming, eagle-feather ceremonies, Indigenous fabrics on the altar, and a constant insistence that Catholicism and Indigenous spirituality are “two worlds” that can be “combined.”

The rhetoric is always the same. Smudging is called a “purification ritual” without answering the obvious question: which spirits, exactly, are being addressed? Eagle feathers are praised as symbols of honour and wisdom without confronting their connection to a pre-Christian cosmology in which eagles mediate between man and a “Great Spirit” who is not the Trinity. Elders speak of “Grandfathers” and rainbow serpents, and the Church’s official organs nod along, eager not to “judge cultures.”

Inculturation is supposed to be the baptism of culture, not the baptism of paganism. Right now the traffic is almost all one-way. Indigenous symbols enter the sanctuary; Catholic doctrine quietly retreats into generalities about “reconciliation,” “healing,” and “walking together.” The people are never told that every culture, including their own, has elements that must be rejected and burned, not swung in a thurible next to the incense.

By moving Jesu into a metropolitan see, Rome is sending a message. This is the model. This is what the “decentralization of liturgical authority” is for: not to allow the traditional Mass to flourish, but to keep experimenting with new mixtures of Christ and Pachamama, Christ and the Great Spirit, Christ and the Rainbow Serpent.

“Mother Earth” and the Resurrection as Energy

To see the theology emerging from all of this, look at the November issue of Women–Church–World, the monthly supplement of L’Osservatore Romano, dedicated to “Daughters of Mother Earth.” The cover features Pachamama-style imagery. The text repeatedly invokes “Mother Earth” as a nurturing subject, claims that “in the Earth there is the breath of the Creator God,” and tells us that Indigenous peoples “perceive the sacredness of the Earth” and are “great masters.”

Sister Adele Howard, interviewed at length, speaks of feeling the “whispers of Creation” and the “tears” of the Earth, recounts an Aboriginal elder pointing to a waterhole and identifying a presence as the “Rainbow Serpent,” and finishes by saying that her strength comes from the Risen Jesus; because, she says, “the Resurrection is energy” that constantly regenerates itself.

This is the official ecosystem of ideas in which the Synod and Leo’s appointments make sense. The more you talk about Mother Earth and “energy,” the less room you leave for sin, judgment, and atonement. If the Resurrection is just regenerative cosmic energy, then Calvary is no longer a bloody sacrifice for sins; it is a mythic image of Gaia’s renewal. The Mass stops being a propitiatory sacrifice and becomes one more energy ritual alongside smudging, drumming, and rainbow-serpent stories.

At that point, forty-eight transvestites at a Vatican lunch are not an embarrassment. They are another sign of the same religion: a world where everything fluid, marginal, wounded, and “emerging” is closer to the divine than doctrine, law, or objective moral norms.

Leo “Big Fan” of Homosexual Activist Pop Star

One more piece of the puzzle: Leo’s private meeting this week with Italian pop star Laura Pausini, long celebrated as a heroine of homosexual activism in Italy. He reportedly told her he is a fan, with his secretary declared her “biggest fan from Latin America.” Pausini calls herself a devout Catholic while publicly opposing the Church’s teaching on the family, contraception, abortion, and sodomy. She has carefully scrubbed her lyrics of gendered language so that same-sex couples feel represented.

The message is unmistakable. Those who cheer the revolution are received, photographed, and praised. Those who question it are tolerated only if they make clear they accept the new rules.

The Managed Opposition

Bishop Fernando Rifan of Campos, for example, emerged from his audience proudly stress­ing that he and his flock are “very different from radical and schismatic groups,” explaining how they came back into “full communion” with Rome, and gently reminding Leo that they “need” a successor bishop for their traditional apostolic administration.

He is the acceptable traditionalist: Latin liturgy, yes; criticism of the post-conciliar project, no. Campos exists as the museum wing of the revolution, tolerated so long as it does not suggest that the revolution itself is the problem. Whether Rome even bothers to give that museum a new curator will tell us how small a space they intend to leave for any remnant of the old rite within their new system.

Forty-Eight Transvestites, Zero Altar Rails

Put the week’s stories together and the pattern is obvious.

In Vienna, the sacramental priesthood is quietly downgraded in favor of lay-led Sunday services. In Charlotte, the altar rail is removed so the sanctuary no longer looks like the Holy of Holies and kneeling remains only as a tolerated quirk. In Canada and the Vatican press, pagan cosmologies are mixed into Catholic language about creation and resurrection. At the Synod, talk of deaconettes, homosexual “emerging issues,” and Eucharistic hospitality is wrapped in the language of “pastorality” and “paradigm shift.”

The same structure invites forty-eight transvestites to a papal lunch and calls them “integral to the Church,” while it corrals the old Mass into a single chapel and treats altar rails as a structural threat to unity. It courts pop stars who champion sodomy, and it expects traditional Catholics to be content with a few well-supervised museum enclaves, so long as they never say that the revolution itself is the problem.

The Cristeros did not die for “religious liberty.” They died so that Christ would publicly reign over Mexico, so that governments and laws would bow before His kingship. Their successors preside over a Church that increasingly acts as if the real sovereign is the zeitgeist, and Rome’s job is to negotiate the terms of surrender as gently as possible. To invoke those martyrs while blessing the liberal order they rejected is theft.

Forty-eight transvestites can sit down to lasagne and chicken cutlets in Paul VI Hall and be told they are “integral” to the Church. The ordinary Catholic asking to kneel at an altar rail is treated like the awkward relative everyone wishes would stop talking about the past.

The question is not whether the crisis is real. The question is how long Catholics will keep pretending that this is just a rough patch in an otherwise healthy system, rather than the rotten fruit of a tree planted sixty years ago. The martyrs of Mexico knew what to shout as they died, “Long Live Christ the King!” and we are fast approaching the point where merely repeating their cry will be enough to mark us as enemies of the new religion rising in Rome.

If you value independent Catholic analysis and want to help keep this work going, you can make a contribution or subscribe below. Every donation and subscription directly supports the writing, research, and production of Hiraeth in Exile.

Thank you for helping preserve independent Catholic journalism rooted in truth and tradition.