Rome Promotes a Bishop “Purified” by Pagan Rites

A consistory run like a synod workshop, a pro life bell treated as an embarrassment, interfaith consultors who baptize yoga and Pachamama, and Sicilian bishops scolding Catholics for closed attitudes

The Consistory That Looked Like a Workshop

Cardinal Joseph Zen describes a consistory that functioned like a continuation of the Synod on Synodality: round tables, lots of chatting, minimal plenary time, and a compressed schedule that shrank what had been planned as two days into one. He says the cardinals were pushed to choose two topics out of four, with synodality and evangelization selected, and he calls the whole exercise a wasted afternoon. He even uses the language of a hijacking, a “continuation” driven by Francis era “foot soldiers,” with the end result being fewer chances for cardinals to speak freely.

Zen’s most revealing detail is social, not procedural: he says he became the lone “black sheep,” got cold looks, then received private appreciation from “traditionalist” brothers.

That is the system in miniature. Public conformity. Private grumbling. A room full of men trained to fear their own candor.

The Vatican’s own public framing of the gathering leaned hard into the “listening” theme, the same vocabulary now used to justify everything from doctrinal ambiguity to managerial control.

A structure built to manufacture consent always needs the same cosmetics: dialogue, accompaniment, communion, mission. The more the Church’s authority is hollowed out, the more the language swells.

Paglia and the Bell He Would Rather Not Hear

In Sanremo, Bishop Antonio Suetta installed a “Bell for the Unborn Children” in the diocesan bell tower, set to ring every evening at 20:00 as a reminder of children killed by abortion. The diocese presented it explicitly as a call to remembrance and prayer.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia led the Pontifical Academy for Life from 2016 until May 27, 2025, and now carries the safe, ornamental title of President Emeritus. When he was asked about the bell publicly, he distanced himself and said he preferred bells for the elderly and for fraternity. as if the unborn are an awkward topic that must be swapped for something less scandalous to polite society. This is the postconciliar operating system in one scene: even the Vatican’s former “life” spokesman treats explicit witness for the unborn as a problem to manage, then reaches for approved abstractions the media class will applaud.

The unborn get a sound, and the institutional reflex is embarrassment. The postconciliar instinct treats explicit moral witness as “divisive” and treats vaguer themes as safe. The elderly matter. Fraternity matters. In the modern Church’s public theater, only one of those can be mentioned without triggering elite discomfort. The bell did its job: it exposed what the class of professional ecclesiastics has learned to fear.

Interreligious Dialogue Consultors: Pachamama, Yoga, Abu Dhabi

Leo XIV appointed nineteen consultors to the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue in one stroke, and the list reads like a syllabus for the religion of the age: pluralism as virtue, synodality as method, feminism as reform, indigenous cosmology as enrichment.

The public record of the following consultors tells the tale:

Emilce Cuda has criticized post Dobbs pro life politics as “ideological positions,” pressing the familiar move that relocates the fight away from abortion toward a basket of “in between” issues.

That move always lands the same way: abortion becomes one concern among many, and the Church becomes another NGO with candles.

Catherine Cornille has argued that Christian life can be aided by Buddhist meditation and Hindu yoga, framed as tools to help Christians meet their “highest goals.”

The First Commandment becomes a self improvement program. Grace becomes technique.

Sofía Nicolasa Chipana Quispe, tied to decolonial and indigenous theological currents, has spoken in explicitly Pachamama terms, describing humans as part of Pachamama and belonging to Pachamama.

Catholicism, recoded as cosmology.

Fr. Edmund Chia’s published approach treats religious plurality as something more than a social fact to tolerate, describing it as meaningful within God’s design, a way of reading pluralism as providential rather than a mission field.

Then there is the broader ideological umbrella hovering over this entire dicastery ecosystem, with “human fraternity” language and Abu Dhabi rhetoric now treated as a baseline for “peace.” That is the modern program: interreligious dialogue as the Church’s primary public identity, with conversion quietly pushed off stage.

Morelia Gets a “Purified” Archbishop

On January 19, 2026, the Vatican’s own bulletin made the succession official: Carlos Garfias Merlos’ resignation as metropolitan archbishop of Morelia was accepted, and José Armando Álvarez Cano, previously the coadjutor, succeeded him.

That is the clean, bureaucratic line. The dirt is in what gets normalized on the way to that line.

Álvarez Cano is not merely accused by partisans of having “inculturation tendencies.” There is long standing local reporting from Huautla de Jiménez (January 31, 2012) describing him being “purified” in a Mazatec ritual, explicitly called a limpia, performed by women in traditional dress before the episcopal ceremony, with the article presenting it as a meaningful preparatory act alongside the Catholic rites and symbols of ordination.

If you want the doctrinal problem stated plainly, it is this: the Church already has purification, already has sacramentals, already has exorcisms, already has a complete supernatural grammar for cleansing, blessing, and protection. A bishop is configured to Christ the High Priest; he does not need to be spiritually “prepped” by a parallel religious worldview in which cleansing is mediated through a tribal ritual act. When a Catholic bishop submits to that, even performatively, it broadcasts a catechesis: that Catholic sanctification is compatible with non Catholic spiritual power. It trains people to treat competing religious claims as merely different costumes for the same invisible force.

Then the same man went on, in December 2023 as bishop of Tampico, to publicly situate his diocese inside the Fiducia Supplicans regime: blessings for same sex couples can be given, he insisted, while denying “marriage” is being blessed. That is the signature postconciliar double speech. The act is performed. The symbolism is denied. The faithful are told not to believe their eyes.

And the syncretic pattern did not remain a one off anecdote from 2012. Additional reporting claims Mazatec “purification” rites surfaced again in connection with his March 2025 assumption as coadjutor in Morelia, involving green branches and leaves. Even if you set that later claim to the side and focus only on the 2012 reporting, the point remains: the Church of Vatican II keeps treating spiritual boundaries as rude, while treating boundary breaking as “culture.”

So when Rome elevates this profile to one of Mexico’s most important sees, the signal is not subtle. It tells the clergy and the laity what the system rewards. You can implement the new moral détente. You can play games with religious symbolism. You can blur Catholic categories into “spirituality.” Then the bulletin will still be stamped, dated, and published, as if nothing of consequence happened except a routine succession.

Sicily’s Synodal Listening Session With LGBT Activists

On January 13 in Palermo, during the winter session of the Sicilian Bishops’ Conference, the bishops formally received a delegation from Cristiani LGBT+ Sicilia and a parents’ group called In Viaggio per Emmaus, framing it as “listening and dialogue” within the implementation of Italy’s synodal process. The official statement leaned hard on the stock phrases: dignity, respect, “paths of faith,” and “suffering often caused” by closed doors or indifference in Christian communities. The bishops expressed hope that “through the presence of LGBT Christians, doors may be reopened.”

The problem is not that bishops met people who struggle. The problem is the doctrinal grammar embedded in the way they narrated the meeting.

First, notice where the moral weight lands. The statement does not treat disordered acts, habits, or identities as the wound. It treats the community’s “closed attitudes” as the wound, and it treats the Church’s boundaries as the cause of “suffering.” That framing performs a quiet inversion. The moral law becomes the harsh object people suffer under, and the pastoral task becomes reducing the friction created when the law is actually felt. Once that inversion is accepted, everything else follows. “Accompaniment” becomes a substitute for repentance. “Welcoming” becomes a substitute for conversion. “Dialogue” becomes a substitute for instruction.

Second, the language collapses the classic Catholic distinction between the person and the act. Yes, every person has dignity. Catholic moral theology never needed synodal committees to discover that. What it also insists upon is that dignity does not sanctify behavior, and that friendship with God involves conversion away from grave sin. The press-release idiom tends to treat “before any label there is always the person” as the end of the argument, when it is only the beginning. In practice it trains everyone to treat moral descriptions as cruelty and doctrinal clarity as “labels.”

Third, the parents’ group is described as helping parents “accept their children, overcoming homophobic attitudes and behaviors.” That is not neutral phrasing. It imports the moral categories of the secular therapeutic state directly into ecclesial speech. “Homophobia” is not a theological term. It functions as a moral club, a way to reframe disagreement with acts and lifestyles as irrational fear and prejudice. Once that word is installed, the Church’s perennial teaching becomes pathologized by definition. The parent is coached away from concern, away from correction, away from the difficult work of love that includes warning. “Acceptance” becomes the telos. A Catholic parent hearing that language from bishops will intuit the message instantly: stop treating sin as sin, stop naming it, stop resisting it, stop “closing doors.”

Fourth, they explicitly located the encounter under Italy’s synodal implementation. That matters because synodality is functioning less like a method and more like a solvent. It dissolves the Church’s older posture, which spoke with authority about the moral law, and replaces it with a perpetual listening posture in which every boundary must justify itself to the feelings of the boundary crosser. It is governance by optics. It turns bishops into facilitators. It turns doctrine into “discernment” that never ends.

Fifth, the “historic” label is its own warning sign. In the current Church, “historic” almost always means a threshold has been crossed, then celebrated before anyone is allowed to ask what was surrendered. A meeting can be “historic” while remaining spiritually disastrous, especially when the price of the headline is silence about chastity, silence about repentance, silence about the reality that certain acts bar a soul from grace unless forsaken.

The end state is not an explicit denial of Catholic teaching. It rarely needs to be. The end state is a pastoral regime where teaching remains technically “unchanged” on paper while public ecclesial speech trains the faithful to experience that teaching as a form of violence. A Church that speaks this way will still recite principles in catechisms and documents. In real life it will treat those principles like embarrassing family history and will call the people who remember them “closed.”

The Pattern: A Church That Manages, Not Governs

Put the pieces together.

A consistory structured to minimize frank speech.

A prelate embarrassed by a bell that names abortion’s victims.

A dicastery staff list that normalizes pluralism and spiritual technique as “helpful.”

A metropolitan archbishop elevated with syncretic baggage treated as quaint local color.

A regional bishops’ conference “listening” to LGBT activist groups under synodal implementation.

The post Vatican II establishment calls this “pastoral.” The older Catholic instinct recognizes it as abdication. The Church did not survive by hosting workshops. It survived by teaching, judging, sanctifying, and guarding worship from contamination. Once those verbs are replaced with “dialogue,” the institution becomes a public relations organ with sacraments attached.

The tragedy is not confusion. Confusion is the tool. The tragedy is a system built to keep Catholics from ever forcing clarity, and to keep bishops from ever paying a price for refusing it.

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