Leo’s New Prefectress Rejects Jewish Conversion

A new lay prefect makes conversion optional, McElroy fires an exorcist, German clergy queer the Gospel, and cardinals prepare to bury just war.

The Prefect Who Thought Jewish Conversion Was “Obviously Wrong”

In a 2022 discussion on Nostra Aetate, Alvarado described “supersessionism” as the idea that Christianity nullifies the Jewish faith, then said: “there’s this idea that all Jews should become Christians, which obviously is wrong.” LifeSiteNews reported the clip after her Vatican appointment.

But what, exactly, is “obviously wrong” about desiring that every Jew come to Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel, the Son of God, the Redeemer promised by the prophets, born of the Virgin, crucified, risen, and seated at the right hand of the Father?

Israel’s vocation is fulfilled in Christ. The Messiah did not come to found a dialogue committee with the synagogue. He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets and to draw all men into His Body.

Even the Catechism states, in its modern softened phrasing, that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church His Body, and that the Church is necessary for salvation because Christ explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism. Dominus Iesus likewise reasserts that Jesus Christ is the universal Redeemer and that the salvific incarnation of the Word is not one path among several parallel religious economies.

So when a Vatican communications prefect says it is “obviously wrong” to believe all Jews should become Christians, the scandal is not merely verbal. It reveals the interior grammar of the postconciliar system. The modern Vatican can tolerate Christ as bridge, symbol, inspiration, moral horizon, or interreligious meeting point. What it cannot tolerate is Christ as the necessary Savior of every man.

The new Catholic media strategy is now obvious. The Vatican wants someone conservative-coded enough to reassure EWTN viewers, female enough to satisfy the revolution, lay enough to embody Francis’s Curial reform, and ecumenical enough to keep the forbidden words out of the microphone: convert, repent, be baptized, enter the Church.

The Feminized Curia Was Not a Detour. It Was the Road.

Alvarado is not the first female prefect. That line belongs to Sister Simona Brambilla, appointed by Francis in January 2025 to head the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life. Vatican News called Brambilla the first woman appointed prefect of a Holy See dicastery.

Alvarado is something different: the first non-religious woman prefect. That distinction is important because it shows the logic is accelerating. The Brambilla appointment could still be packaged in the language of consecrated life. A religious sister overseeing religious institutes was already revolutionary, but it had a costume. Alvarado’s appointment drops the costume. She is a lay communications executive placed over a Vatican dicastery whose work includes theological and pastoral communication.

This is the Francis revolution under Leo XIV, only with better public relations.

The old Roman instinct understood that the very structure of ecclesiastical governance teaches that the Church is not a parliament, a media company, a foundation, or a nonprofit advocacy network. When governance is detached from sacred order, the visible form of the Church begins to teach the opposite lesson.

And that is exactly why these appointments are celebrated by the secular press and by progressive Catholics. They know what the symbol means. They know it weakens the old association between office, order, hierarchy, and fatherhood and normalizes the notion that the Church’s visible structure can be remade according to the managerial assumptions of the modern world.

The tragedy is that many conservatives still insist on interpreting each appointment in isolation. Perhaps she is personally orthodox, or will communicate, or will be better than some German progressive. Perhaps EWTN means this is a win. This is how conservative Catholics have been trained to lose: by grading each demolition on a curve.

The issue is not whether Alvarado is pleasant, competent, or personally sincere. The issue is whether the Roman Curia should be refashioned into a bureaucratic apparatus where laymen and laywomen occupy offices once understood through the logic of apostolic governance. The answer from tradition is no. The answer from Praedicate Evangelium is yes. That conflict tells us more than any Vatican press release ever could.

McElroy Finds His Red Line: UFO Demons

Then comes Cardinal McElroy, the man who has made a career of placing “inclusion” where repentance used to be. In 2023, McElroy wrote in America that exclusion based on marital status or sexual orientation or activity is “pre-eminently a pastoral question, not a doctrinal one,” and argued that the Church’s tradition treating sexual acts outside marriage as grave matter has had the effect of placing sexual activity at the center of Eucharistic exclusion. He even wrote that the distinction between orientation and activity cannot be the principal focus of pastoral embrace because it divides LGBT persons into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not.

That is the architecture of moral surrender. Once the distinction between inclination and act is pastorally demoted, the Church’s entire moral witness becomes negotiable in practice while remaining nominally intact in documents. Doctrine stays in the museum. Pastoral practice runs the parish.

Yet this same McElroy moved swiftly against Washington DC exorcist, Fr. Rossetti, over a speculative claim about UFOs and demons. The Washington Archdiocese statement is breathtaking in its selectivity. The archdiocese does not merely say Rossetti was imprudent, sensational, or insufficiently careful. It claims his comments “gravely undermine” Catholic teaching on demons and exorcism.

Really? This is the emergency?

A Catholic priest says demons may use strange phenomena to deceive modern man, and this requires immediate removal. But for decades, bishops, theologians, and priests have publicly undermined the Sixth Commandment, the necessity of conversion, the uniqueness of the Church, the sacrificial nature of the Mass, and the male priesthood. Somehow the machinery of discipline rarely moves with that same crisp efficiency.

One does not need to defend every Rossetti formulation to see the absurdity. Catholics are not obliged to believe every UFO sighting is demonic. They are not obliged to have any firm opinion about UFOs at all. But Catholic tradition is abundantly clear that demons deceive, manifest, terrify, simulate, manipulate, and exploit human curiosity. If anything, the modern obsession with extraterrestrial “revelation” is exactly the sort of arena where a serious exorcist might reasonably warn people against credulity.

McElroy’s problem is not really imprecision. His problem is uncontrolled supernaturalism. The Conciliar Church can tolerate supernatural language when it is therapeutic, poetic, ecological, or interreligious. It becomes nervous when the supernatural turns concrete: demons, possession, exorcism, hell, conversion, judgment, sacrilege.

The new religion prefers evil as a sociological category. Structures of exclusion. Polarization. Rigid identities. Harmful narratives. It has much less appetite for the old Catholic vocabulary: Satan, mortal sin, sacrilege, damnation, and the need for grace.

The Abuse Shadow Behind the Exorcist Story

McElroy’s sudden zeal for precision looks even worse in light of his record. In 2018, EWTN/CNA reported that McElroy faced questions over his response to a 2016 letter from Richard Sipe alleging sexual misconduct by Theodore McCarrick and other clerics. McElroy said he had met twice with Sipe, asked for corroborating documentation, and later cut off further discussion after Sipe used a process server and circulated the letter more widely. National Catholic Reporter likewise reported McElroy’s explanation and noted that Sipe’s letter named McCarrick and alleged misconduct with seminarians and priests.

Then there is the Rachel Mastrogiacomo case. Crux reported in 2018 that Mastrogiacomo said she had been raped in multiple acts of satanic ritual abuse by a Catholic priest, Jacob Bertrand, in the context of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Bertrand later pleaded guilty to criminal sexual assault. Crux also reported that after she saw Bertrand back in ministry, she went to civil authorities in Minnesota, and that when the Diocese of San Diego was asked for Bertrand records, it refused, according to Mastrogiacomo.

Crisis later published a detailed interview with Mastrogiacomo in which she alleged that McElroy did not remove Bertrand from ministry until August 2016 after criminal proceedings began, and quoted reporting that Dakota County prosecutors said the Diocese of San Diego initially denied having an investigative file and then resisted providing it.

A man whose record includes serious questions about his handling of abuse warnings and accused clergy now acts as though Rossetti’s UFO demon speculation is the sort of doctrinal emergency that requires public decapitation.

That is the Conciliar disciplinary instinct in miniature. The system is often slow, careful, procedural, and nuanced when the scandal involves victims, predatory clergy, doctrinal subversion, or sexual revolution. It becomes fast, blunt, and absolute when the offender is a traditional-leaning priest who embarrasses the respectable class.

Germany Queers the Kingdom of God

Meanwhile, in Germany, Fr. Burkhard Hose has taken the next logical step. In an essay at katholisch.de, Hose argues for reading Scripture through a queer lens. He writes that queer exegesis seeks suppressed perspectives, critiques power, and can contribute to healing wounds. More revealingly, he says Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God itself can be described as queer, because parables recognize the everyday world as a place of theological insight while questioning prevailing patterns and orders.

The mustard seed becomes, in Hose’s reading, a symbol for lifestyles, beliefs, and bodies that do not fit the established order, especially what the Church labels “disordered,” “irregular,” or “problematic.” He then reads the parable as a critique of magisterial control, saying the Kingdom cannot be normalized, disciplined, or administered, and that it creates refuge rather than conditions of entry.

There it is again: no conditions of entry.

That is the new gospel. It is ideological ventriloquism. The text does not speak. It is made to confess the revolution.

And notice how easily this fits with Alvarado’s remark. In one case, the idea that all Jews should become Christians is treated as obviously wrong. In another, the idea that those living in grave sexual disorder must repent is dissolved into a queer reading of the Kingdom. In both cases, the scandal is the same: the Gospel’s universal demand is treated as a form of exclusion.

The old Church preached one Lord, one faith, one baptism. The new apparatus speaks of many journeys, many identities, many perspectives, many wounds, many listening processes. Christ still appears, of course, but increasingly as chaplain to the process.

The Cardinals Will Discuss Peace, Synodality, and the Burying of Just War

The June consistory completes the picture. Diane Montagna has reported that Cardinal Re’s June 3 letter to the cardinals sets out sessions on the international situation, Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and the implementation of the Synod on Synodality. She notes that liturgy is not explicitly mentioned, while one session will focus on the encyclical’s claim that just war theory is now outdated.

The encyclical itself says that, while preserving a strict right of self-defense, the “just war” theory has often been used to justify any kind of war and “is now outdated.” It proposes dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness as more effective tools for resolving conflict.

This is framed as moral progress. In reality, it is another example of the postconciliar habit of taking a hard Catholic doctrine, accusing it of abuse, and then replacing it with a sentimental abstraction. Just war doctrine was never a permission slip for bloodlust. The Catechism’s own formulation treats military force as subject to strict conditions, grave scrutiny, and the prudential judgment of those responsible for the common good.

A doctrine can be misused. That does not make it outdated. Marriage can be misused. Authority can be misused. Scripture can be misused. Even mercy can be misused, as the last decade has demonstrated with exhausting clarity. The answer to misuse is not abolition. The answer is right use.

But the modern Vatican prefers therapeutic gestures over moral distinctions. It is easier to denounce “war” than to distinguish aggression from defense, justice from vengeance, protection of innocents from imperial ambition. It is easier to speak of dialogue than to admit that some aggressors must be resisted by force. It is easier to call old doctrine outdated than to do the harder work of applying it.

And what will the cardinals discuss afterward? The Synod. Vatican News says the Synod Secretariat’s new path toward the October 2028 Ecclesial Assembly will proceed through stages of remembering, interpreting, orienting, and celebrating. The vocabulary itself is almost a parody of bureaucratic mysticism. Remembering what? Interpreting according to whom? Orienting toward what? Celebrating which faith?

Meanwhile, the Roman liturgy remains wounded. Traditional Catholics remain under suspicion. Dioceses continue to restrict the Mass of their fathers. Yet the cardinals will be asked to meditate on the international situation, discuss the latest papal manifesto, and receive an update on synodal implementation.

The message could hardly be clearer. The old Mass can wait. The old morality can wait. The old doctrine on conversion can wait. The old teaching on just war can be declared obsolete. The Synod, however, must continue.

The Real Scandal Is Not Bad Communication

The old Church sent missionaries to convert the nations. The new Vatican appoints communicators to explain why conversion sounds problematic. The old Church trained exorcists to cast out demons. The new hierarchy removes an exorcist for sounding too convinced that demons are real. The old Church guarded Scripture as the Word of God. The new theologians queer the parables. The old Church developed just war doctrine to restrain violence while defending the innocent. The new encyclical calls it outdated.

And then we are told this is renewal.

It is not renewal. It is replacement by attrition. One doctrine softened, one office feminized, one priest disciplined, one synodal stage advanced, one traditional instinct pathologized at a time.

The faithful do not need better Vatican messaging. They need the Catholic Faith.

And that, increasingly, is the one thing the Vatican communications machine seems least prepared to communicate.

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