Holy Week in the Synodal Church: Politicizing the Way of the Cross and Washing the Feet of Transexual Prostitutes

From the Colosseum’s politicized Stations to Sydney and Bogotá, Holy Week under Leo XIV keeps preaching accompaniment and symbolism without repentance.

The Passion, Rewritten for the Age of Activism

Leo XIV’s Good Friday Via Crucis was entrusted to Father Francesco Patton, and Vatican News openly framed the meditations as an effort to bring faith, hope, and charity into “the real world.” Patton himself said the reflections were drawn from “current reality” and were meant to provoke reflection and, if necessary, “change.” That tells the reader at once what kind of text this is. Not chiefly a meditation on sin, propitiation, judgment, and redemption, but a Passion narrative filtered through the social vocabulary of the modern Vatican.

And the problem is not abstract. The stations themselves make it plain. In the first station, where Christ stands before Pilate, the meditation pivots almost immediately into a discourse about worldly power: the power to start or end wars, to use the economy either to oppress or relieve misery, to trample dignity or defend it. Those aren’t illegitimate concerns in themselves. But when the first station of the Cross begins to sound like a global policy forum, the accent has shifted. Pilate is no longer primarily the unjust judge before whom Innocence stands condemned. He becomes a springboard for commentary on war, economics, and governance.

The fourth and fifth stations are even more revealing. In the fourth, after invoking the sorrow of Our Lady, the prayer intention suddenly includes “migrants, the displaced and refugees.” In the fifth, Simon of Cyrene becomes the template for humanitarian workers and volunteers, and the text goes so far as to say that many of them “do not even believe in you,” yet still help Christ carry the Cross. That smuggles the old postconciliar instinct of the “anonymous Christian” into Good Friday itself. The old lesson of Simon was discipleship, conversion, and participation in Christ’s sufferings. The new lesson is that unbelieving aid workers are, in effect, already carrying the Cross anyway.

Then comes the seventh station, where Christ’s second fall is interpreted as lifting up those crushed by injustice, exploitation, violence, and an “economy that seeks individual profit” over the common good. Again, there is a familiar pattern. The fall of Christ is no longer treated first as part of His redemptive suffering for sin. It becomes an emblem of systemic social misery. The Cross is retained, but its force is redirected. Instead of pressing the soul toward repentance, it trains the imagination toward structures, conditions, and material burdens.

The eighth station is worse because it is so shamelessly topical. The women of Jerusalem are expanded into a catalogue of contemporary grievances. We are told of children imprisoned during protests, deported by “policies devoid of compassion,” shipwrecked on desperate journeys, killed in war zones, and even wiped out in death camps. The prayer that follows asks for tears over war, massacres, genocides, the cynicism of the powerful, and our own indifference. This is a deliberate recasting of the station into a modern humanitarian lament. A devotion once meant to draw the faithful into compunction now reads like a liturgical briefing paper for the age of migration crises, protest crackdowns, and global conflict coverage.

Even the stripping of Christ in the tenth station is made to carry a stack of contemporary themes: authoritarian prison conditions, torture, intrusive surveillance, rape, sexual exploitation, media exposure, voyeurism, and privacy violations. Once more, the Passion is translated into the idiom of rights, dignity, and social abuse. By the thirteenth station the prayers are for prisoners, political prisoners, the families of hostages, and those buried under rubble. One can almost predict the omissions by this point. Abortion, euthanasia, sodomy, pornography, sacrilege, apostasy, and the revolt against nature are nowhere near the center. But surveillance, migration, detention, and public humiliation are all granted immediate liturgical access to Calvary.

That is why the whole thing feels so alien even while using Catholic language. Christ still appears. The Cross still appears. Sin is still mentioned. But the emphasis has been rerouted. The Passion is no longer allowed to stand in its terrible supernatural clarity as the sacrifice that reconciles man to God. It must also, and almost above all, serve as a vessel for the preferred anxieties of the postconciliar church. Keep redemption, but render evil mainly in social and political terms. Keep Our Lady, but make her preside over the moral priorities of the modern humanitarian imagination. That is what these stations do, and that is why they are so damaging. They do not deny Calvary outright. They domesticate it.

Rockhampton gets the bishop the moment deserves

On April 1, Leo XIV appointed Bishop Daniel J. Meagher, formerly auxiliary of Sydney, as bishop of Rockhampton. The Holy See bulletin presented the expected résumé. He studied economics and civil law at Sydney University, worked as a lawyer, then studied theology and was ordained a priest in 1995 before becoming an auxiliary bishop in 2021. On paper, it looks like a standard episcopal promotion. The details of his public record are what make the appointment revealing.

In 2023, during the Sydney archdiocese’s launch of its Reconciliation Action Plan, the event was preceded by an Indigenous smoking ceremony. Catholic Weekly reported that Meagher defended it by saying purification rites were common across the world’s religions and cultures, that Catholics traditionally used water, and that Indigenous Australians had found smoke more suitable. He then added that, while only Jesus is the redeemer, there are many ways of expressing the need for redemption and that this was one “culturally appropriate” way. That is the whole postconciliar instinct in miniature. Boundaries blur, pagan ritual is recontextualized, and what once would have scandalized ordinary Catholics is explained away as a noble local symbol compatible with Christian meaning.

Then came Meagher’s comments on so-called gender-diverse persons in 2024. Catholic Weekly reported that he said such people need acceptance and love, that they face many challenges, and that he hoped Catholics could find room in their hearts for compassion, respect, and love because all are children of God seeking happiness and meaning. That sort of language has become the standard dialect of the conciliar churchman. It is warm, vague, and carefully detached from the moral substance of the question. No one is told to repent. No one is told that created sex is not clay for self-invention. No one is told that compassion becomes fraud the moment it stops telling the truth about the body and the soul.

His liturgical instincts fit the same pattern. In 2025, Catholic Weekly described a Mass he celebrated for Neocatechumenal deacons as vibrant and full of the movement’s distinctive hymns, guitars, and clapping. The same report says Meagher later called the Neocatechumenal Way a “great blessing” for the archdiocese. So this is a whole style. Ritual informality, managerial warmth, symbolic accommodation, frictionless speech about inclusion, and the familiar inability to say a clean Catholic no when the age demands yes. Rockhampton received exactly the kind of bishop this regime likes to reward.

Bogotá turns Holy Thursday into affirmation theater

Then comes the spectacle in Colombia. On April 2, Cardinal Luis José Rueda Aparicio washed the feet of transgender sex workers in Bogotá’s Santa Fe tolerance zone, and reports in Infobae and Noticias Uno said it was the second consecutive year he had done so. Infobae reported that he used the occasion to say discrimination fractures society, creates a kind of caste system with no place in society, and that all are welcome in the House of the Lord. The “women” interviewed afterward said they felt included, respected, happy, and loved. One said the ritual helped them make themselves known to society and show that they are no different from anyone else. The point of the gesture was plain enough. It was a public liturgical sign arranged to communicate recognition and affirmation.

That is precisely where the postconciliar pastoral style leads when it is allowed to ripen. First the language of sin is softened. Then accompaniment takes center stage. Then categories of disorder are replaced by categories of wounded identity. Then the hierarchy begins staging symbolic gestures toward the groups the world most wants canonized as victims. By the time a cardinal is kneeling in Holy Week before trans sex workers in a red-light district for the second year running, the transformation is already complete. The rite may still carry the shell of the Gospel scene, but the meaning presented to the public has changed. Christ washed the feet of His apostles on the night before His sacrifice. Here the mandatum is redeployed as a tableau of inclusion. It becomes one more sacramentalized photo opportunity for the church of permanent outreach.

No one disputes that sinners may be approached with patience and charity. The Church exists for sinners. The scandal lies elsewhere. There is a difference between calling sinners to repentance and placing them onstage as representatives of a protected identity whose public validation is itself treated as a triumph of mercy. The old Catholic instinct would have looked for conversion, amendment of life, rescue from vice, and escape from scandal. The new instinct reaches first for symbolism, visibility, and empathy. The faithful are expected to applaud the tenderness while asking no questions about the moral grammar underneath it.

The pattern is the point

These episodes belong to one ecclesiastical temperament. The old Catholic order placed the accent on truth, judgment, repentance, sacrifice, grace, and the salvation of souls. The new order still uses Catholic images and words, but the pressure now falls elsewhere. Systems. accompaniment. recognition. process. inclusion. professionalization. managed symbolism. The hierarchy still speaks of Christ, but very often it speaks of Him as the patron of the age’s approved concerns rather than as the divine judge and redeemer who died to save men from sin and hell. That is why so many official gestures now feel both pious and strangely bloodless. The forms remain. The center shifts.

Holy Week under Leo XIV offered a compact portrait of the religion of the conciliar establishment as it now exists in practice. The Cross is retained, but drafted into sociology. The episcopate is filled with men fluent in accommodation. Pastoral theater steadily replaces the old insistence on conversion. That is why Catholics who still remember the older voice of the Church feel such whiplash when they read these stories. They are watching an entire governing instinct lay its cards on the table.

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