Lights, Camera, Indifferentism: Leo’s Hollywood Jubilee While the West Forgets God

Celebs at the Vatican, victims ignored, Latin Mass rationed and America losing the faith.

When Hollywood Becomes the New “Council”

Cate Blanchett gives Leo XIV a UNHCR bracelet, Spike Lee hands him a Knicks jersey with “Leo 14” on the back, and the Vatican sells it as a Jubilee moment of “hope.” The guest list looked like Oscars night: Spike Lee, Blanchett, Judd Apatow, George Miller, Gus Van Sant, Abel Ferrara, Monica Bellucci, Viggo Mortensen, plus earlier audiences with De Niro and Pacino. The conspicuous absences, Gibson, Eastwood, Voight, Woods, were waved away.

Leo, a self-professed movie buff, told them cinema is “a workshop of hope,” “an art of the Spirit,” and that theaters are “the beating hearts of our communities.” When the lights go down, he said, people rediscover “a portion of the hope that is essential for humanity to live to the fullest.”

It sounds pious. It also sounds like a homily to a new magisterium.

What is not there? No call to conversion. No mention that the only lasting hope is supernatural: grace, the Cross, Our Lord. The “Spirit” here is emotion, not the Holy Ghost who judges the living and the dead.

The Vatican write-up reinforced it. Kenneth Lonergan, openly non-religious, praised the Church as a historic patron of art. Blanchett stressed refugees and displaced storytellers. Leo called cinema the place where people finally shed tears they “cannot shed in daily life,” and where wounds like “violence, poverty, exile, loneliness, addiction and forgotten wars” can be “acknowledged and narrated.”

So cinema is cast as a parallel liturgy: darkened nave, glowing screen, communal catharsis. Once upon a time the Church formed souls through doctrine and the Mass. Now it flatters secular culture-makers and begs them to create more “hopeful” content. “Go and teach all nations” becomes “Go and greenlight better scripts.”

Art and beauty matter. But here, art is being catechized into a rival religion. Instead of subordinating culture to the Kingship of Christ, the post-conciliar Church pours holy water on whatever the culture already wants and calls it evangelization.

Tears in the Theater, Dry Eyes in Chiclayo

Leo told the filmmakers: “Do not be afraid to confront the world’s wounds. Violence, poverty, exile, loneliness, addiction and forgotten wars are issues that need to be acknowledged and narrated.… Giving voice to the complex, contradictory and sometimes dark feelings that dwell in the human heart is an act of love.”

Meanwhile, in Chiclayo, actual victims of clerical abuse received a grim parody of justice.

According to Infovaticana, the priest Eleuterio “Lute” Vásquez, accused of abusing multiple minors, asked Leo for the “grace” of laicization precisely to avoid a full canonical trial. The victims wrote to Rome begging that no dispensation be granted until a proper investigation and judgment took place.

Instead, they were summoned in person, without their lawyer. An anonymous church functionary handed them a dirty, folded piece of paper, no envelope, no seal, no case number, telling them Leo had already granted the dispensation. No trial, no sentence, no formal recognition of what was done, no effort to see how many other children were harmed.

Case closed. Roll credits.

In Rome, elites are urged to narrate the “world’s wounds.” In Peru, real wounds are quietly buried. The abuser gets a graceful exit; the victims get a photocopy.

Mercy without truth is not mercy; it’s anesthesia. On abuse, the system has not repented; it has rebranded. Rome loves to confess sins safely in the past: Inquisition, colonialism, “Doctrine of Discovery.” When the sins are contemporary and clerical, the instinct is still: manage, minimize, move on.

Leo also continued Francis’s tradition of a big photo-op lunch with 1,300 poor people in Paul VI Hall: lasagna, cutlets, dessert. It looks beautiful on Vatican News. It just sits uneasily beside the poor of Chiclayo, who were told in effect that their suffering is less urgent than clearing a clerical backlog.

Roche at Court and the Rationing of the Roman Rite

While Hollywood wandered the Apostolic Palace, Cardinal Arthur Roche, chief enforcer of the crackdown on the old Mass, had a private audience with Leo. Around the same time, the nuncio to Great Britain told the English and Welsh bishops that Leo “does not intend to overturn” Traditionis Custodes but will grant two-year, renewable dispensations to bishops who ask.

Sources told The Pillar the message was: Leo is “not minded to change” Francis’s restrictions, but “there’s no reason to exclude the TLM,” and he will ask Roche “to be generous.” Bishops still must apply to the Dicastery for Divine Worship; pastors still need episcopal permission; exemptions still expire every two years. The structure stays. The leash is simply longer.

In plain English: the theology of Traditionis Custodes stands. The old Roman Rite is not treated as the normal Roman liturgy but as a problem to be contained, a pastoral nuisance instead of a spiritual treasure.

“Generosity” is not a right; it is a favor. You can have the Mass of Ages provided you accept that it is abnormal, that your community depends on the goodwill of the same dicastery that wants you gone, and that every 24 months you get to wonder if Rome will hit “renew” or “revoke.”

It is spiritual food stamps. The government of the Church controls the ration book; you may eat, for now.

So the headlines about Leo “opening the door” to the TLM are mostly pious PR. Opening a door you still guard and can slam shut at will is not magnanimity, but management. The Church that once defined itself around the Sacrifice of the Mass now treats the rite that formed its saints as a concession, extended so long as it does not interfere with the larger project.

Deconstructing the Past While Leaving the Present Intact

Another Jubilee gesture: the Vatican returned 62 artifacts from its ethnographic collection to Indigenous communities in Canada: an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, masks, “war clubs,” and other items shipped to Rome for a 1925 mission exhibition. The press called it “historic restitution” and linked it to the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery.

In the current media climate, that “journey” is always narrated the same way: the missionaries were basically handmaids of empire, Catholic evangelization functioned as cultural erasure, and the Church now must spend the 21st century undoing the damage of its own Gospel.

That story is convenient. It is also wildly simplistic.

The Catholic impulse was not “how do we exterminate these people’s identity”; it was “how do we bring them the truth of Christ and the sacraments,” often against the grain of secular governments. The same priests who sent artifacts to Rome also baptized, taught, defended local communities, and frequently clashed with civil authorities.

The modern Vatican leans into a one-sided script. It talks almost exclusively about “cultural genocide,” “Doctrine of Discovery,” and colonial oppression, and treats evangelization itself as something half-embarrassing that must be laundered through endless gestures of apology. The artifacts come home with the implied subtext: “We’re sorry we ever came in the first place.” That’s the real problem

What’s wrong is using the moment to reinforce the idea that missionary work was essentially oppressive and that the Church’s primary task now is to repent for having tried to convert anyone at all.

Meanwhile, the same hierarchy that publicly agonizes over the sins of missionaries a century ago is dismantling the faith in real time at home: suppressing the Mass that actually made saints, tolerating doctrinal chaos, and leaving Catholics defenseless before no-fault divorce and sexual abuse. They apologize for “colonialism” in Canada, but the ongoing demolition of Catholic identity in the West is treated as progress.

Returning a kayak is easy. Admitting that the post-Vatican II revolution has done more to destroy Catholic culture than any 1920s exhibition at the Vatican gardens; that would require a different kind of reconciliation. And that’s the one nobody in Rome wants to start.

Sacraments by Bureaucratic Fiat

While Rome performs symbolic penance for colonial abuses, the sacramental order is quietly surrendered to the modern state.

Mary’s Advocates reports that Bishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, secretary of the dicastery overseeing sacramental discipline, has undercut the Church’s traditional teaching that only ecclesiastical authority has jurisdiction over separation of spouses in sacramental marriages.

For centuries, the Church claimed exclusive competence to judge whether spouses may separate and on what terms. Civil courts might handle property and custody, but the Church decided whether a spouse could justly leave the home. Granting the state that authority was condemned in anathemas and canon law.

In a recent case, an abandoned wife (“Susan”) petitioned for a canonical ruling that her husband had unjustly left the marital home. Viola’s reply effectively pushed her toward filing civil divorce and implied she would get a fair outcome there. The message: the Church will not insist on its own jurisdiction and has little to offer beyond sympathy.

In a no-fault regime, that is catastrophic. Civil courts split assets regardless of guilt. The faithful spouse is treated like the adulterer. The forum that helped create the problem declares itself the solution. The Church steps back, murmurs about accompaniment, and leaves the faithful spouse alone in front of the state.

This was precisely the surrender earlier popes condemned. Marriage between the baptized belongs under Church law, not to judges who do not believe in marriage at all. Yet today, the same dicastery that micromanages liturgical rubrics tells abandoned Catholics to entrust their marriages to the civil courts.

A Nation Forgets God While the Shepherds Talk Deportations

While Rome courts celebrities and curators, Gallup quietly announced that only 49% of Americans now say religion is an important part of daily life, down from 66% in 2015. On paper, the U.S. still looks Christian compared to Europe. In practice, we’re converging with post-Christian Europe.

If there were ever a moment for the U.S. bishops to speak urgently about apostasy, this would be it.

Instead, they invoked their most solemn collective form, “Special Pastoral Message,” first in twelve years, not to address the collapse of belief, but to issue a statement on immigration and deportations.

The text condemned “indiscriminate mass deportation,” denounced “dehumanizing rhetoric,” and stressed that “human dignity and national security are not in conflict.” They quoted conciliar and papal texts and highlighted that many at risk are Catholics.

Catholic teaching explicitly affirms that nations have the right to regulate their borders and enforce immigration laws; there is no shame clause attached to that right. The demand for justice and mercy shapes how enforcement is carried out, it does not abolish enforcement or turn deportation into an intrinsic evil.

When the bishops start branding policy they dislike as “indiscriminate mass deportation,” they’re playing politics. And whatever you think of Trump’s DHS, “secure borders save lives” is closer to the Church’s teaching on the state’s prerogatives than most chancery press offices will ever admit.

The deeper scandal is this: the same bishops who have been mute or muddled on liturgy, doctrine, sacrilege, and internal corruption suddenly discover their spine when it comes to a prudential policy dispute with a Republican administration. Dogma becomes negotiable; their policy preferences become quasi-magisterial.

Jubilee Optics and the Catacombs

Put it together and the picture is painfully consistent.

Leo welcomes Hollywood to the Clementine Hall and calls cinema an “art of the Spirit.” He dines with the poor on camera. He returns Indigenous artifacts with solemn speeches about past sins.

In the shadows, abuse victims in Chiclayo are handed a grubby sheet of paper announcing that their abuser has been laicized without trial. An abandoned Catholic wife is nudged toward the no-fault divorce court. Traditional Catholics are told that if they behave, their bishops may apply every two years for the privilege of hearing the Roman Canon in Latin.

In the United States, religion is sliding into irrelevance. Churches close. Children abandon the Faith. Yet when the bishops finally decide to raise their collective voice, it is not to warn their own people about apostasy, but to issue a policy paper on deportation.

The post-conciliar Church loves the language of “hope,” “journey,” “dialogue,” “encounter.” It loves returning things, denouncing yesterday’s sins, and partnering with NGOs. It is far less interested in calling men to repent, correcting error, disciplining wolves, or defending the worship that formed its martyrs.

But the true “workshop of hope” is not the Clementine Hall packed with celebrities. It is the basement chapel where a handful of families kneel at an old Mass under a fragile indult; the kitchen table where an abandoned spouse clings to her vows; the tiny parish where a priest still preaches the hard truths with no cameras and no hashtags.

Hollywood can give catharsis. The Vatican can give kayaks and media statements. Only the Faith can give hope.

Until the hierarchy remembers that, the catacombs will be fuller than the theaters, and the real “beating hearts of our communities” will be the places where the Sacrifice is still offered: quietly, precariously, and often in defiance of the very men who claim they are defending unity.

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