“No One Should Perish Forever”: The Universalism of Leo’s New Religion

From poetic relativism at Verano Cemetery to synods approving female deacons, Leo’s Church keeps commemorating the future while burying the Faith.

On All Souls Day, the day set aside for praying the dead out of purgatory, Leo XIV used the occasion not to recall judgment or the need for suffrages, but to preach that “no one should perish forever and that everyone should have their own place and radiate their unique beauty.”

This is the vocabulary of self-esteem, not salvation. The traditional doctrine of purgatory, hell, and divine justice is replaced by an existentialist watercolor of “diversity as communion.” In Leo’s hands, eternal life becomes a collage of individual “beauty” and “recognition,” while damnation is politely ignored as a theological indecency. The focus of God’s “concerns” is redefined in humanist terms: not repentance, but affirmation.

It’s All Souls Day without souls; or sin.

Commemorating the Future, Forgetting the Dead

Leo’s Angelus turned the remembrance of the dead into an ode to progress: “Let us commemorate the future… we are not enclosed in the past or in sentimental tears of nostalgia.”

This inversion of Catholic time, forward-facing commemoration, is pure modernism. For the saints, the liturgical calendar mirrors eternity breaking into time. For Leo, it is an evolving story that “extends God’s life” into the diversity of humanity. Where the Church once lifted her gaze to heaven, Leo invites us to look “forward,” to an open-ended eschaton without judgment, where all “differences” commune in cosmic inclusion.

Even his prayer for the dead ends as a subtle catechism of optimism: “May visiting the cemetery invite us all to remember and to wait in hope.” But hope without repentance is presumption, and remembrance without intercession is sentimentality.

The “tomb” Leo warns against, being sealed within the present, is precisely the grave he digs for the supernatural.

The Ecology of the Afterlife

While the faithful prayed for their dead, Leo appointed two bishops whose careers define the new Church: one in India known for “Ecology Sundays, solar initiatives, and tree planting,” and another in Canada who promotes indigenous rituals as ways “God speaks” through culture.

This is the afterlife of Catholicism as Leo imagines it: a religion where creation replaces redemption, and enculturation replaces evangelization. Environmentalism becomes eschatology; the Beatific Vision is swapped for a sustainable planet.

It is fitting that his homily at Verano Cemetery described eternal life as “an unending feast around the Risen Lord and our loved ones,” the heavenly equivalent of a climate synod potluck.

The Synod of the Serpent: Women Deacons and Pagan Peace

Just days before Leo’s All Souls sermon, the Italian Synod voted to “deepen” the question of female diaconal ordination: a polite way of saying it approved it. Seventy-seven percent of participants supported the project, under the smiling encouragement of Cardinal Zuppi, the president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference.

Zuppi, who celebrates Vespers for traditional Catholics on one day and sponsors women’s ordination the next, perfectly embodies the duplicity of the postconciliar Church: sentimental toward the old, subversive toward the divine.

To commemorate the future, as Leo says, means to erase the past.

The Counter-Church Consolidates

While Leo preaches universal salvation and ecological sainthood, even former defenders of Vatican II are beginning to choke on its fruits. Cardinal Müller, who once declared Vatican II as binding as the Resurrection (which he previously denied) and the SSPX in schism, now laments bishops telling Latin Mass Catholics to “stay home or go to the Lefebvrians.”

Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God, who long urged prayer and patience, now publicly declares that Leo XIV has “supported the LGBTQ+ agenda” and betrayed the Faith. Even the Transalpine Redemptorists have reportedly broken “communion,” with one FSSPX priest suggesting they have “gone full sedevacantist.” Instead of shaming these monks with scare labels, this SSPX priest should bravely join them in speaking out against Leo.

Nevertheless, when even the cautious begin to admit what they see, you know the revolution has devoured its moderates.

Commemorating the Future — Or Burying the Faith

Leo’s All Souls Day language, the “communion of differences,” “radiating beauty,” “commemorating the future,” reads like a séance of the postconciliar dead. It is the voice of a Church that can no longer distinguish heaven from self-expression.

The saints once trembled at purgatory; Leo offers self-actualization. The martyrs once prayed for deliverance from sin; Leo prays for “recognition and attention.”

The modernist afterlife is not eternal life, but eternal relevance; the Church as its own memorial service, lit by solar panels and scented with nostalgia for the Faith it buried.

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