Leo XIV: The Francis Program, Rebranded

Leo XIV keeps staffing the Vatican like a leftist NGO, then Trad Inc. says he’s not Francis 2.0, while the West keeps sliding into moral—and demographic—ruin.

There is a scam that keeps working because too many Catholics have been trained to treat evidence like an “attitude problem.” The scam goes like this: the Vatican does something objectively revolutionary, usually by appointment, document, or symbolic act. A few normal Catholics notice it. Then the courtiers and their lay cheerleaders step forward and explain that nothing really happened, you are overreacting, you must read it “pastorally,” the Holy Spirit is doing something “new,” the problem is “polarization,” and please shut up so the professionals can manage the decline.

The week’s stories line up like a police report from a collapsing city. A pro LGBT archbishop placed at the heart of clerical oversight. A Vatican media push to dissolve the meaning of anathema and schism into therapeutic “healing of memories.” A long, leftist essay proving Leo is Francis 2.0 as Trad Inc. denies it. A Pew report showing Catholic identity bleeding out across Latin America. A cultural piece from Britain describing the leftward radicalization of young women and the civilizational consequences that follow. Then, across the Atlantic, an actual pro life policy win from Trump’s NIH, the kind of concrete act that saves lives and constrains the abortion regime.

In other words, the Church of Vatican II continues to catechize the world in ambiguity and accommodation, while the political right, imperfect, coarse, often compromised, sometimes still manages to do the one thing that matters in politics: stop the machinery of death.

Exhibit A: “Secretary for Clergy” goes to a man who cannot say “No”

LifeSiteNews reports that Leo XIV has appointed Archbishop Carlo Roberto Maria Redaelli as Secretary of the Dicastery for Clergy.

You do not have to be a canonist to understand what this means. The Dicastery for Clergy touches priestly discipline, seminary formation, clerical life, and the entire administrative bloodstream of the modern priesthood. Even LifeSite’s own summary of the dicastery’s scope reads like a checklist of levers: formation programs, discipline, hierarchical recourse, dispensations, seminaries, clerical associations.

So who is Redaelli, according to the reporting being cited?

A cleric praised for refusing “the role of the judge” when confronted with the same sex “marriage” of a Catholic scout leader. The approving description is the tell: he neither “absolved” nor “condemned,” he invited “discernment,” he asked whether grace can be found in a divisive occurrence.

This is the postconciliar disease in a single paragraph. The bishop as social worker. The shepherd who will not name wolves. The refusal to judge that quietly judges the faithful who still think Christianity has content.

There is a reason the 2017 Avvenire coverage of that scout case existed at all: because ordinary Catholics still recognized that public sexual revolt is scandal. The parish priest in the story said the quiet part plainly: as a citizen, the state permits many things; as a Christian, God’s will matters.

That is Catholic moral reasoning in the real world. Then the modern system steps in to dissolve it into “community reflection.”

This is moral disarmament.

Then comes the part Trad Inc. always wants you to ignore: Redaelli has a track record on the old Mass, too. Reports from the Italian context describe him dismissing Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum as juridically meaningless by asserting the 1962 Missal was abrogated by Paul VI, calling the legal logic a “nonsense” law and denying the legitimacy of broad liberalization.

So the same ecclesiastical temperament appears in both places. He treats the moral law as a field for “discernment,” and he treats tradition as a paperwork problem that can be waved away by bureaucratic assertion. That combination is the post Vatican II managerial priesthood at full maturity.

In a sane Catholic world, this sort of man would not be placed over clergy. In the current regime, he is exactly the sort of man who gets promoted, because the job is not to produce saints. The job is to produce compliant, therapeutic functionaries who do not fight the revolution.

Likoudis as the hostile witness, and why Trad Inc should hate his essay

Andrew Likoudis is not your ally. He is the kind of liberal Catholic who has spent his adult life cheering the postconciliar project as it dissolves doctrine into “pastoral accompaniment.” That is precisely why his essay matters.

His piece is useful as a hostile witness. The courtier from the other side of the aisle walks into the courtroom, swears an oath, then reads the whole indictment aloud. He does it with a smile, he calls it “continuity,” he celebrates it as progress, then he tries to wave away the obvious conclusion with a line about tone and “not Francis II.” The escape hatch is rhetorical. The evidence is admissions against interest.

Trad Inc keeps telling readers, “Relax, Leo isn’t Francis 2.0.” Likoudis spends an entire essay demonstrating continuity in practically every domain that defines the Francis program. He anchors Leo’s first address in an explicit pledge to renew commitment to the post Vatican II path, explicitly name checking Francis and Evangelii Gaudium as the programmatic blueprint. Then he parades the continuity points like trophies: integral ecology and Laudato Si, the new “care of creation” liturgy, AI ethics framed as “integral human development,” the seamless garment logic that blurs abortion into a general humanitarian list, migration messaging that treats borders as moral pathology, the LGBT “welcome” program with Fiducia Supplicans left standing, synodality treated as the Church’s new operating system, ecumenical signaling that treats doctrinal fissures as a reception problem, and liturgical governance built on the same managerial premise that produced Traditionis Custodes.

Likoudis calls all of that continuity and he celebrates it. The value of the essay is that it strips the mask from Trad Inc’s denials. A liberal apologist can list the whole program with joy because he believes it is the future. A conservative apologist cannot list it honestly without losing his audience, so he reaches for fog, delay, and character commentary.

That is the hypocrisy angle. Trad Inc claims Leo is not Francis 2.0. Likoudis supplies ten lanes of continuity and hands you a laminated map. Trad Inc wants plausible deniability. Likoudis removes it. He is a flaming liberal, which makes his inventory of continuity even more damaging to the conservative grift. When the enemy’s publicist is more honest about what is happening than your own “traditional Catholic” commentators, the problem is cowardice, and the essay becomes a weapon in your hand.

Vatican News tries to launder 1054 into a group therapy session

Vatican News ran a piece on the “lifting of the anathemas,” sixty years on, featuring Cardinal Kurt Koch and Metropolitan Job of Pisidia.

The headline already tells you the genre. “Healing of memories.” The therapeutic framing. The implication that doctrine and jurisdiction are mostly a misunderstanding that needs emotional processing.

Then the article leans into the revisionist line: in 1054 there were “no anathemas” in the proper sense, no schism, only a limited excommunication of individuals, and even that lacked canonical value because Leo IX was dead when the bull was delivered.

Metropolitan Job is quoted saying there was no schism.

Koch emphasizes “sister Churches” ecclesiology and holds out Eucharistic communion as the eventual goal.

This is the core postconciliar impulse: downgrade dogmatic rupture into administrative friction. In a world where truth matters, anathema means something. Schism means something. Excommunication means something. The Church historically treated communion as a real boundary, not a sentimental aspiration.

What Vatican II Catholicism cannot tolerate is the idea of boundaries that bind. That is why it constantly reframes conflict as “misunderstanding,” sin as “fragility,” conversion as “journey,” heresy as “tension,” and schism as “wounds to be healed.” It is a new theology of reality.

The same system that cannot say “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” without immediately sprinting to “welcome and integration” also cannot say “schism” without immediately reaching for “healing of memories.”

A Church that forgets how to anathematize will forget how to evangelize.

Latin America: the scoreboard says the conciliar revolution failed

Pew Research Center released a major report on Latin America showing Catholic affiliation declining across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Catholic shares dropped by 9 percentage points or more in all six countries over roughly a decade, while the religiously unaffiliated rose significantly.

OSV summarized the same findings with the headline anyone can read as an obituary: “Catholicism down in Latin America, but belief in God remains high.”

This is the true fruit of the post Vatican II missionary strategy. A region formed by Catholic identity is being de Catholicized. The “nones” rise. Protestantism holds steady or grows modestly in places. Belief in God persists. So the hunger remains, the institutional Church shrinks, and the spiritual vacuum gets filled by whatever is loudest and simplest.

Pew’s details are humiliating for the architects of aggiornamento. People remain religious in practice in many countries. Belief in God stays high even among many “nones.”

So the collapse is not “secular inevitability,” but specifically a collapse of Catholic identity, catechesis, and confidence.

This is what happens when bishops become managers of “dialogue,” priests become facilitators of “community discernment,” and the liturgy becomes entertainment. The people do not become atheists. They become homeless. They keep praying, then they stop calling themselves Catholic, because Catholicism no longer looks like a home with walls. It looks like a lobby.

The postconciliar elite keeps selling the same product and then acts shocked when the customers walk out.

Britain’s “toxic femininity” piece, translated: the regime is re educating the young

Toby Young’s Spectator essay argues that while Britain’s government claims it is tackling male radicalization and “misogyny” in schools, the larger trend is young women veering sharply left into an “omnicause” ideology, with downstream effects on dating, marriage, and fertility.

Leave aside the author’s label and focus on the mechanism. A state announces programs to “spot misogyny,” train teachers, and route boys into re education. That is ideological enforcement. It treats ordinary male adolescence as a threat, then builds a bureaucracy to police it.

Young’s point, drawing on a Financial Times analysis as he describes it, is that the ideological divergence is driven less by men racing right, more by women racing left.

He ties it to social media dynamics and to institutional feminization, echoing an argument that female dominated institutions often drift into progressive activism and “two tier” justice, punishing disfavored groups and excusing favored ones.

A Catholic reads this and recognizes the shared Western pattern: a managerial state that pathologizes normality, excuses predation when it aligns with protected ideologies, then punishes dissent as “harm.”

The Vatican spends decades policing “rigidity,” ridiculing “clericalism” in the traditional sense, cracking down on the old Mass, and obsessing over “exclusion.” Meanwhile it cannot locate the spine to discipline doctrinal rebels, sexual revolutionaries, and liturgical vandals. Then it acts surprised when the culture collapses, the birth rate collapses, and the young turn into ideological tribes that cannot even date each other.

There is a civilizational lesson here: when a society trains its women to despise marriage, motherhood, and normal sexual morality, it does not get “liberation.” It gets extinction.

The Trump NIH fetal tissue move & defunding abortion: why voting still matters

Now we have two stories in the same week that actually touch levers of state power in a concrete way, the kind of levers that leave bodies on the floor when the wrong people pull them.

First, the Daily Wire reports that Trump’s administration, through NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, is ending NIH funding for research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions, effective immediately, applying broadly across NIH grants and programs. Mainstream coverage confirms the policy shift and notes the scale, reporting that NIH funded 77 projects using fetal tissue in fiscal year 2024, and that the new policy ends funding for that category while pointing to alternative platforms like organoids, tissue chips, and computational approaches. You can argue about scientific debates. You can argue about what researchers prefer. The moral point is clean. Taxpayers should not be compelled to subsidize an industry that depends on the products of abortion. Bhattacharya’s framing, as reported, explicitly ties the decision to conscience concerns and to the existence of alternatives.

Then comes the second move, and this one hits even closer to the core of the abortion empire’s business model because it reaches beyond domestic policy into the international aid machine.

Reporting this week indicates the State Department is finalizing an expansion of the Mexico City Policy that will bar U.S. nonmilitary foreign assistance from going to organizations involved in performing or promoting abortion overseas, and in a major broadening, it also targets what the administration describes as “gender ideology” and DEI programming tied to the LGBT agenda in foreign aid. The LifeNews write up frames it in precisely those terms, presenting it as an expansion that effectively ends taxpayer funding for international abortion promotion and extends compliance requirements across recipients and their downstream partners. Reagan established the Mexico City Policy in 1984 and it has been toggled on and off by administrations for decades, precisely because it matters: it decides whether American money becomes the oxygen supply for the global abortion industrial complex.

And the key contextual point is that Trump already reinstated the policy by presidential memorandum on January 24, 2025, directing implementation and extension across global health assistance to the extent allowable by law. This week’s reporting is about broadening and operationalizing that framework with finalized rules that expand reach beyond the narrower global health categories and aim at a much larger slice of nonmilitary foreign assistance.

So now here is where the “never Trump” Catholics should feel their faces get hot.

This is what politics looks like in the real world. Not essays about “witness.” Not throat clearing about “tone.” Not the refined moral vanity of people who want to be seen as principled while refusing to touch the one lever that actually stops the machine. Reality is where children die. Reality is where executive agencies decide whether to fund the harvest of fetal tissue at home and the export of abortion activism abroad. Reality is where aid bureaucracies and NGOs become laundromats for ideological colonization, with abortion and the LGBT program packaged as “health,” “equity,” and “rights,” then shipped into weaker countries under the flag of American benevolence.

And if you want the scoreboard, it’s already written in dates. The pro life movement’s biggest legal victory in modern American history came through a Supreme Court that overturned Roe and Casey in Dobbs on June 24, 2022. Trump appointed three justices who joined the majority that made Dobbs possible: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett. That alone should have ended the moral preening forever.

So yes, those who spent years doing the never Trump “conscience” routine, were playing moral dress up. They were treating the judiciary and the administrative state as background noise while the abortion regime kept grinding on, prosecuting its enemies, funding its network, and expanding its ideology. They wanted to keep their hands clean while letting the blood keep flowing.

They would have given us Kamala, and anyone pretending that would have been morally equivalent to Trump is lying. Under Kamala, pro lifers do not get policy wins, they get targeted. The abortion industry does not get defunded, it gets protected. The global aid machine does not stop exporting abortion and LGBT ideology, it gets turbocharged and wrapped in sanctimonious language about compassion.

Never Trump Catholic logic has always been self congratulation masquerading as conscience. It is the luxury ideology of people insulated from consequences. The people who actually have to live with the consequences do not have the option of pretending that elections are meaningless.

The single thread tying it all together: the managerial religion and the managerial state

Put the pieces together.

This is one story told in different accents. The West is governed by managers who fear judgment, fear boundaries, fear clarity. They prefer processes, dialogues, and “journeys.” They rename surrender as compassion. They call enforcement “harm.” They call dissent “extremism.”

The Catholic instinct recognizes the fraud immediately. Mercy without judgment is not mercy. Unity without truth is not unity. Dialogue without conversion is not evangelization. A Church that refuses to govern will be governed by the world, and the world has one catechism: appetites first.

Trad Inc. continues to sell patience and “tone” analysis while the appointments land where they always land. The faithful are told to wait. The revolutionaries are never told to stop.

In politics, the same pattern appears. The regime uses schools, media, and law to re educate, stigmatize, and punish. Then “respectable conservatives” clutch pearls about manners, refuse to fight, and lose ground they will never recover.

Final diagnosis: the soft voice and the hard boot

Leo XIV’s Vatican speaks softly about “welcome,” “discernment,” “sister Churches,” “healing memories,” and “synodal style.”

The boot comes down elsewhere: on the old Mass, on doctrinal clarity, on anyone who refuses the new language.

In the civil order, the state speaks softly about “safety,” “inclusion,” and “training.”

The boot comes down on dissent, on parents, on boys deemed ideologically suspect, on pro lifers who expose the abortion industry.

So yes, call the never Trump posture what it is. A moral cosplay that would have gladly delivered the country to the very people who prosecute pro lifers and enthrone abortion as a civic religion.

The better question for Catholics is simpler. Who actually restrains evil? Who actually builds walls where walls are necessary? Who actually names sin as sin, then governs accordingly?

Leo XIV’s appointments answer that question on the ecclesiastical side. Trump’s NIH decision answers it on the political side.

One side manages decline with nicer language. The other side, at least sometimes, still throws a wrench into the machine.

The age of tone analysis is over. The age of consequences is here.

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