New President of German Bishops Endorses “Blessing Ceremonies” for “Transgender” Individuals Celebrating Their Transition

Leo says atheists can be saved without faith, DC bishop says “God is DEI,” National “Catholic” Register interviews Dolan; not once demands an account for the gay confirmation in his archdiocese

Germany elects a bishop who blesses sodomy and gender transitions

When the German bishops elected Bishop Heiner Wilmer of Hildesheim as their new chairman on Feb. 24, 2026, they elevated a prelate whose own diocese has already put “gender transition blessing ceremonies” into its official pastoral vocabulary. This is not a rumor from hostile blogs, or a careless paraphrase on social media. It sits in the Diocese of Hildesheim’s own communications, under his episcopal governance.

In a diocesan news release dated Sept. 2, 2024, Hildesheim announced that Wilmer commissioned three pastoral workers as official contact persons for “queer sensitive pastoral care,” tasked with advising parishes and institutions. The diocese then gives concrete examples of what those advisors are there to facilitate: “eine Transperson ihre Transition mit einer Segensfeier begehen möchte” a trans identified person who wants to mark the “transition” with a blessing service. The implication is plain. The Church’s language of blessing, historically bound to repentance, healing, and the order of creation, gets retooled into a ceremonial endorsement for someone “celebrating” the rejection of their sex.

Hildesheim repeats the same idea on its dedicated page for “Queersensible Seelsorge,” again listing transition blessing celebrations as a normal “pastoral situation” alongside scenarios like baptizing the child of a lesbian couple and providing support for parents of a “non binary” child. Domradio, reporting on the initiative, likewise repeats the diocese’s examples, including the “Segensfeier” for a transition. So the horror in my title has receipts: institutional, explicit, and repeated across diocesan channels.

Now put that record back next to the headline: this man has become the public face and coordinating center of the German episcopate for a six year term. CNA’s profile of his election also notes that his voting record places him firmly with the Synodal Way bloc that pushed for same sex blessings and other reforms that drew Vatican criticism. In other words, “transition blessing ceremonies” are not a fringe pastoral experiment tucked away in one corner of Germany. They are part of the trajectory being normalized, protected, and exported upward, until the very concept of a blessing is detached from conversion and attached to self invention.

A man who preaches such things as bishop cries to heaven for vengeance upon himself and his diocese. A bishops conference that would elect such a man president cries to heaven for vengeance on their nation. A pope who would have the temerity, if it were possible, to let this man remain a bishop, cries to heaven for vengeance on his church.

This event clarifies the real sacrament being administered: social recognition. The new rite blesses identities, affirms transitions, ratifies self-definition. Germany elevates the man precisely because he embodies this direction.

Wilmer’s doctoral work was on Maurice Blondel, the excommunicated modernist philosopher routinely linked to the immanentist drift. Read this next to Leo’s “seekers vs non-seekers” redefinition of faith, and you can see the family resemblance. Everything begins inside man and returns to man.

This is what makes the “but the structures are still there” defense feel surreal. When bishops can elect a public advocate of moral revolution, when that election is treated as normal ecclesial governance, the institutional continuity begins to look like a mask that serves the opposite mission.

Leo XIV’s False “Faith”: Augustine used as cover for immanentism

A Vatican News piece presents Leo XIV responding to “Rocco,” an atheist who says he “yearn[s] for God” while still calling himself an atheist.

Leo quotes Augustine: “You were within me, but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!”

So far, fine. Augustine’s restlessness can be the first crack where grace enters. The problem is what Leo builds on top of it.

He writes, “those who love God, those who seek Him with a sincere heart, cannot be atheists.”

Then he pushes the main claim: “the real problem with faith is…seeking Him,” and proposes that the decisive distinction is “between seekers and non-seekers.”

That is a theological sleight of hand. Seeking can be a movement toward faith; it also can be a substitute for faith, a permanent “journey” that avoids assent, avoids submission, avoids conversion, avoids the Cross. When a man says “I believe I do not believe,” the Church’s task is to lead him out of the fog and into the light, toward the act of faith and the life of grace. Leo’s framing massages the fog into a virtue and leads the man to hell.

The deeper issue is what this does to the definition of faith itself. Catholic theology does not treat faith as a longing, or a sincere religious appetite. Faith is a supernatural virtue by which the intellect assents to what God has revealed because God has revealed it. Seeking may accompany that, and usually does at the beginning, but seeking is not the thing. It is the vestibule.

Once you recode “faith” as “search,” you have built a church that can affirm everyone. “Seekers” become the new elect. And notice how smoothly this language harmonizes with the modernist instinct to relocate religion inside the subject: experience, yearning, authenticity, interior drama. “My drama is God! My restlessness is God!” becomes the interpretive key.

That is the same psychological axis on which modernism loves to spin.

Leo’s line “cannot be atheists” functions as a false consolation. In ordinary language, atheism is real. People deny God, reject Him, mock Him, live as though He were absent, and die in that posture. Grace can reach them, yes. The Church can hope, pray, labor, yes. Yet it is spiritual malpractice to blur the line between desire and possession, between longing and faith.

This “seeker” rhetoric offers reassurance without demanding the supernatural virtue of faith that saves. Leo’s answer to the atheist is misleading and endangers his immortal soul. This is shocking and scandalous to educated Catholics, yet it is reported by the media as if it was perfectly acceptable Catholic doctrine. Thus, they share in the guilt.

“DEI means God”: God Sacrilegiously Redefined as Racial Scapegoating

The Archdiocese of Washington Black History Month Mass reads like a case study in how the modern church baptizes contemporary ideology by sprinkling holy water on its vocabulary.

The piece describes the event, notes the “Saintly Seven” portraits near the altar, and then recounts Bishop Roy Campbell’s homily moment: reflecting on “Agnus Dei,” he says, “DEI means God is diversity, He is equity, and He is inclusion.”

God is not an HR department’s preferred framework for social harmony. “Agnus Dei” is a cry to the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, a plea for mercy, an acknowledgment that sin exists, that guilt exists, that redemption costs blood.

DEI language works the other way around. It trains people to interpret reality primarily through group identity, power narratives, and managed inclusion. It also tends to flatten moral distinctions into therapeutic affirmations. So when a bishop drapes that framework over the liturgy, the liturgy is quietly reordered. The altar is conscripted into a civic religion.

Even the rest of the article reinforces the same direction. It celebrates “energy,” “meeting them where they are,” and “listening sessions” to “make sure as many voices as possible shape what comes next.”

That is synodal anthropology: the Church is shaped by voices rather than by revelation. If enough people speak, truth adjusts. A Catholic bishop, preaching directly before Communion, used the most sacred moment to translate the Lamb of God into the shibboleth of the regime.

If the Church’s leaders can do that without fear, they already know the faithful have been trained to applaud.

National Catholic Register: The Cowardly Complicity of Catholic Inc.

The Register frames the Dolan sit down as a “wide ranging interview,” an “exit interview” that “covers many topics,” from his legacy in New York to assisted suicide, Notre Dame’s scandals, and the recovery of Catholic culture. It is presented as comprehensive, the kind of rare access Catholic media loves to advertise when it wants you to believe you’re getting candor instead of choreography.

Yet the transcript sits there like a crime scene with the evidence carefully taped off.

Because the one subject that demanded daylight, the Manhattan sacrilege, is nowhere. We are dealing with a public event in the nation’s most prominent archdiocese: an openly “married” man to another man confirmed and communicated, the “husband” sponsoring and also receiving, a parish known for LGBT activism, Fr. James Martin on the altar, and the whole thing framed as unconditional affirmation while the sacraments get treated like props. That scandal has cried out for reparation and for a public act of episcopal governance. Dolan has never addressed it. And the Register, with a long at length interview in hand, never even brings it up.

This is the negligence, and it is worse than ignorance. The interviewer begins with soft legacy material, even gushing over how “so many people in the Church are sad” he is gone and how happy they are for his years of service, then spends time on Dolan’s new NYPD chaplain role. The conversation drifts into broad cultural commentary and politics, the kind of safe terrain where a cardinal can sound serious without having to answer for anything concrete. Then comes the synodality question, asked in the friendliest possible way, as though confusion among Catholics is merely a “questions” problem and synodality itself is simply the Church’s wholesome “rhythm and process.” Finally we get the “bestseller list,” the book recommendations, the warm wrap up, the thank yous.

Even the closing recommendations tell you what kind of Catholic media operation this is. Dolan praises the Catechism, then turns to Vatican II as “masterpieces,” adding that Leo XIV is “calling us back” to them, and scolds Catholics for never reading the Council’s documents. The interview ends with the Council held up as a cure, while the New York sacrilege, the very kind of disaster that proves the post conciliar apparatus cannot govern itself, remains unmentioned.

The Register should be ashamed of this interview. It is part of a continuing conspiracy of silence in so-called “Catholic” media that protects the Church hierarchy from the obvious tough questions. Questions that demand answers. This prevents Catholics from making informed decisions. That is the point. Catholic journalism in this mode is not watchdog journalism that fears God and asks the questions souls need asked. It is access journalism, reputation management, and an unspoken pact: we keep the bishops comfortable, and in return we stay inside the rope line.

This is why the Manhattan atrocity matters so much. It is a moral stress test. A real shepherd would treat it as a crisis of sacrilege and scandal, because that is what it is. A real Catholic reporter, handed a long transcript window with the man who held the authority and the responsibility, would force the issue into the open. Instead, the Register chose the path of least resistance, which is also the path of complicity.

And Catholics notice. They learn. They learn that the “hard questions” never arrive for the powerful. They learn that the sacraments can be profaned publicly, and the official media will behave as though the only urgent issue is whether people are reading Vatican II documents. They learn, in other words, the operating morality of the regime: affirmation receives protection and the faithful who still fear God are treated as the problem.

If there is any “recovery of Catholic culture” worth talking about, it begins here, with truth spoken aloud, with public repair, with discipline where discipline is due, and with Catholic media that remembers its job before it remembers its invitations.

The Same Operation, Everywhere

That is why the outrage you feel is rational. These stories form a coherent spiritual program. The program converts everything vertical into something horizontal. Blessing becomes recognition. Faith becomes therapy. Journalism becomes access management. And once those substitutions take root, the faithful are left with a hollowed out Catholicism that still looks familiar from a distance, yet increasingly refuses to do the things the Church exists to do: convert sinners, guard the sacraments, and preach the Kingship of Christ with enough clarity that people actually change their lives.

The Manhattan scandal is the perfect illustration because it exposes what the regime protects. When a bishop’s authority is required and when a public act of reparation is demanded, silence suddenly becomes “prudence.” The cameras keep rolling, the committees keep meeting, the cardinal keeps smiling, and the interviewer keeps changing the subject. That is a strategy. If the laity can be trained to accept desecration, then anything can be reframed, anything can be blessed, anything can be made “pastoral.”

So what does a Catholic do when the public face of the Church trains men to applaud the counterfeit? First, refuse the euphemisms. A blessing cannot celebrate what God condemns and faith cannot be reduced to mere seeking. Second, stop outsourcing your moral sense to the same media class that has proven over and over it prefers comfort to truth. Third, do the reparation the shepherds refuse to do. Make holy hours. Fast. Offer Mass intentions. Teach your children what words mean. Hold the line in your own life, because the system’s main goal is to dissolve the line everywhere.

The crisis keeps announcing itself in cheerful tones, with polished photos and “wide ranging interviews.” Yet beneath the professional lighting, the message stays brutally consistent. The world receives affirmation, the sacraments become props, and Catholics who still believe in sin, repentance, and judgment are treated as an inconvenience to be managed. Once you see that pattern, you stop being surprised. You start being prepared. You pray harder, you cling to what the Church has always taught, and you stop letting men with microphones redefine reality in front of your eyes.

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