Leo XIV Flaunts Girl Altar Boys in Adidas at Papal Mass; Trad Inc. Falls Silent
Fr. Martin jokes, Chris Hale cheers, and Trad Inc. pretends the moment never occurred. Trad Inc. sold “we dodged a bullet” in 2025. Now the sanctuary is a meme, and their feeds are scrubbed clean.
Let’s go back for a second to August 25, 2025. As I reported then…
Articles showed pictures of altar boys. Trad Inc. accounts praised Leo’s words….
We dodged a bullet! Those were the words of Rorate Caeli blog, attempting to praise Leo for supposedly inspiring words to “altar servers.” Never mind that noticeably absent from Rorate (or any other Trad Inc. website) by that point was any noticeable coverage of Leo’s repeated scandals covered here at Hiraeth; including:
The kicker? Do you think the above is a complete list of Leo’s scandals from his election until Rorate’s tweet of August 25, 2025? Think again. The above scandals took place from the day of Leo XIV’s election on May 8, 2025 to May 23, 2025. Only two weeks after taking the helm of the conciliar church! There were many more atrocities of deeper severity that Leo committed between May 23, 2025 and Rorate’s tweet of August 25, 2025. I simply don’t have the time or space to list them all.
The point is that it was crystal clear to any objective Catholic observer, much less Traditional Catholic media who should know better, exactly what kind of pontiff we were dealing with almost immediately. Yet Trad Inc. participated in the most egregious media blackouts of anything negative Leo did; not only during this early period, but also to this day.
Yet Rorate had the temerity to say we dodged a bullet by Leo’s election. If Francis was a bullet, Leo has proven to be a cannon.
The Rest of the Story
As it turns out, Rorate’s tweet praising Leo’s words to altar servers did not tell the full story. Neither did Dr. Peter Kwasniewski’s Facebook post of August 27, 2025:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HywsWt9mM/
Dr. Kwasniewski starts his post, “Pope Leo XIV, speaking to (male) altar servers:”
He ends it with, “Sounds like a prelude to praising TLM congregations, where altar serving and vocations flourish. One cannot IMAGINE Pope Francis speaking like this. Deo gratias for our new pope.”
There’s one little problem. If either Rorate or Dr. Kwasniewski would have checked the photographs from the address they would have noticed one small detail. Rows of girls in white capes and cassocks, smiling as the “altar boys” of France.
Fr. Dave Nix soon pointed out the problem to Dr. Kwasniewski in the comments. Dr. K made a feeble reply and commenters started roasting the situation. Dr. K closed comments soon thereafter.
Did Trad Inc. apologize, draw attention to the problem and speak out against it? Of course not. They drove on by to the next topic. Only sites like this one, who tell you the truth and have no agenda to cover for Leo, reported on it.
Trad Inc. publicizing this event would have embarrassed them and destroyed the false narrative they’ve been selling since day one: that far from Francis 2.0, Leo is a reasonable, level headed, listening, reformer pope who is going to slowly restore sanity and decorum to Rome and the Church.
Leo Reveals Girl Altar Boys in Adidas as the New Normal in Rome
Fast forward to today…
James Martin, SJ shares the scene with a smirk: female altar servers stir “controversy” in some American dioceses, apparently the Diocese of Rome treats it as settled, effortless, almost self-congratulatory. Then Christopher Hale supplies the punchline: “for the first time during his pontificate” Leo XIV is “being served by an altar girl,” and the standout detail becomes the Adidas sneakers. The sanctuary gets converted into sacrilege. The thing once defended as serious discipline becomes a casual aesthetic, polished for social media and applauded as progress.
That is the point of the sneakers. Rome is teaching Catholics to treat the sanctuary as a space where nothing carries sharp meaning anymore, only branding, optics, and the warm glow of inevitability.
Trads Used to Care About Such Things
Meanwhile the same outlets and accounts that once warned that girls in cassocks reshape the priesthood and dissolve the discipline of the altar, remain conspicuously quiet. Their silence functions as complicity. If they acknowledge the new images, they surrender the story they have been selling since May 2025.
As of this moment, I checked the X accounts of some of the largest mainstream Traditional accounts. No sign of the issue on the accounts of Dr. Kwasniewski, Rorate Caeli, Michael Matt, The Remnant, Pelican +, Eric Sammons, One Flanders Five, Crisis Magazine, or Taylor Marshall.
Yet there was a time when all Traditional Catholic journalists worth their salt warned against the danger that girl altar boys and women serving at the altar posed to the Faith. The reasons for this are ancient. As I stated in my May 21, 2025 piece:
Girl Altar Boys: From Condemned Evil to “Pastoral Option”
The sight of girls in cassocks serving at the altar is now so common that few even question it. But for over a millennium and a half, the Church had only one word for it: evil.
In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius I condemned the very idea, rebuking bishops in southern Italy for allowing women to “serve at the sacred altars” and declaring the practice a “reprehensible custom” that must be abolished. The tradition was clear and universally upheld: the sanctuary is not a place for women.
Pope Innocent IV reaffirmed this in the thirteenth century, stating explicitly that women must never presume to serve at the altar and that such service must be “altogether refused.”
In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV condemned the idea with finality, calling it “evil” and insisting that the Church must preserve “the discipline handed down by the Apostles.” …This was the consistent, authoritative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
And yet now? In the post-Vatican II age of rupture, the evil has been baptized as virtue.
First came the disobedience: priests and bishops allowing girls to serve at Mass despite the clear prohibition.
Then came the surrender: Rome’s 1994 indult permitting bishops to allow female servers if they felt like it.
Then, finally, the endorsement, Pope Francis amending canon law in 2021 to make female altar service part of the Church’s official structure.
So an “evil” condemned by Benedict XIV is now a norm under Leo XIV.
…The post-conciliar hierarchy watched a condemned evil practice become a tolerated option and then a celebrated feature of the new liturgy. And they never lifted a finger to stop it.
The sanctuary is no longer guarded. It is open to anyone: no tonsure, no ordination, no tradition. Just a willingness to serve a rite that no longer remembers its own theology.
Another twenty years of this, and most Catholics won’t even know that the Church ever taught otherwise.
Conclusion
If mainstream traditional outlets refuse to show their readers the inconvenient photographs, what else will they omit when the next “encouraging” remark arrives with a hidden payload? The safest response for a Catholic reader in 2026 is simple: stop outsourcing your eyes. Read the text, then look at the images. Track actions, appointments, policies, and public theology, including the lines already crossed under Francis and carried forward in polished packaging. Support the outlets, like this one, willing to print the whole story, even when it embarrasses the brand. The crisis thrives on selective vision.
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.
You know we're in pre-apocalyptic times when a leftist like Hale is more honest about ecclesiastical issues than Trad. Inc.
They are inculturating females at the alter for their eventual acceptance as clergy.