The Counterfeit Calm: How Leo XIV Is Normalizing Apostasy with a Smile
The Francis regime didn’t end, it metastasized. And the traditional movement is losing its voice just as the crisis enters its final phase.
The danger now is not overt persecution. It’s pacification.
Not rupture, but reinforcement. Not revolution, but the normalization of revolution: quietly, gently, diplomatically.
That is what Leo XIV represents.
Traditional Catholics who breathed a sigh of relief when Francis departed have misread the hour. We are not entering a period of restoration. We are entering the final stage of the Vatican II regime: consolidation. The doctrinal contradictions, moral inversions, and liturgical vandalism that marked the Bergoglian era are not being reversed, they are being stabilized.
The sledgehammer is gone. The cement truck has arrived.
Francis Broke the Glass. Leo Will Install It.
Under Francis, we witnessed the open assault: adultery normalized through Amoris Laetitia. Heresy celebrated through Fratelli Tutti. Sodomy blessed by bishops. Death penalty doctrine overturned. And through it all, the traditional Latin Mass persecuted as though it were a virus.
Now comes Leo. A new tone. A soft voice. A bishop’s smile. And nothing changes.
— Promoted Msgr. Renzo Pegoraro, a long-time collaborator and bioethics liberal, to head the Pontifical Academy for Life; cementing Francis’s legacy of moral ambiguity in Vatican bioethics.
— The Charlotte diocese eliminates the TLM, and Leo is silent.
— A St. Gallen bishop is confirmed, with support for women’s ordination, and Leo nods.
— Leo appoints a woman as secretary of a dicastery overseeing male clergy.
— Francis is praised as being in Heaven and called an intercessor.
— A schismatic is casually referred to as a saint.
And the traditional Catholic world? Shrugs. Adjusts. Analyzes. Hopes.
The New Paralysis
Some of this paralysis is psychological. After years of public warfare under Francis, Leo’s papacy feels like a return to calm. But that calm is counterfeit. It is the calm of a Church that has stopped fighting because the fight was lost behind closed doors.
Francis took the revolution public. Leo is privatizing it; professionalizing it. Now, the heresy comes with footnotes. The sacrilege is synodal. The apostasy is procedural.
And worst of all, the traditional movement, once filled with the spirit of Archbishop Lefebvre, is falling into line. Seduced by the illusion of normalcy. Comforted by aesthetics. Numbed by “prudence.”
This Is Not How Archbishop Lefebvre Fought
Archbishop Lefebvre never would have tolerated what we now excuse.
He spoke out while Paul VI was pope. He resisted under John Paul II. He did not wait to see “how things played out.” He didn’t require heresy to become canon law before calling it what it was. He called the new Mass Lutheran. He said the Vatican II Church was no longer fully Catholic in doctrine or worship. And he did so openly, repeatedly, loudly. Because souls were at stake.
He did not wait for side chapels. He did not settle for whispered negotiations. He did not let his fight be governed by diplomacy or decorum.
Because he knew the truth: if you let modernists set the pace, you’ll never catch up.
Trad Inc. Has Lost the Plot
Today’s traditional Catholic media personalities issue careful “takes,” debate the strategic wisdom of speaking too loudly, and suggest Leo “might be better in the long run.”
Better?
He has already confirmed more of Francis’s worst appointments. He has doubled down on synodality. He retains Traditionis Custodes. He lavishes praise on Francis’s ecumenism and canonizes his errors in spiritual tone.
The left shifted the Overton window. Trad Inc. shifted with it.
Their goal is now survival, not resistance. Access, not truth. Sentiment, not sanctity. We’ve gone from Archbishop Lefebvre calling Rome to conversion to trad pundits begging for “reverent Novus Ordos” and a Latin Mass at 6 a.m. in the basement.
The Next Generation Will Have No Memory of Truth
If Leo XIV reigns for twenty years, and he might, there will be an entire generation of Catholics for whom even the innovations of JPII and Benedict are ancient history and Bergoglian “orthodoxy” is simply the Catholic faith. By then, the mission of restoring the pre-Vatican II Faith and Latin Mass may be remembered only by graying survivors and preserved in quiet corners, like relics in a museum.
By then, it won’t be heresy hiding in ambiguity. It will be the new normal.
Do you want your children to grow up thinking Catholicism means liturgical dance, female preachers, synodal declarations, and rainbow blessings?
Because that is what they will inherit if we remain silent now.
The Calm Before the Collapse
This is not peace. It is the prelude to extinction.
Leo’s Vatican is a regime of optical calm masking spiritual chaos. The poison is no longer administered with a grimace, but with a grin. That makes it more dangerous, not less. Francis was the warning. Leo is the trap.
If you wait until every last vestige of tradition is gone, your voice won’t matter. You will be dismissed as a relic. A curiosity. A holdout from a time the Church is working very hard to forget.
The time to speak is now. Loudly. Publicly. Sharply.
The world does not need another cautious trad whispering complaints in private forums. It needs a thousand Lefebvres. And it needs them now.
The Good News is that Pope Provost will not be reigning for 20 years. The man might be lucky if he has twenty months.
You are entirely correct that the Apostasy has entered a new phase. But the Apostasy entered that phase last year, while most slept.
The FSSP has a Fr Jackson problem. The SSPX has a Fr Rostand Problem. And both organizations have shown that they are part of the problem- organizations that will give Traditional Catholics Bells and Smells- and in the case of the SSPX, maybe some solid dogma once in a while.
Traditional Catholics of all stripes- from the Conservative Bogus Ordo types to the Sedevacantists, are desperately trying to clasp to some sense of normalcy while the Category Seven Geopolitical Storm ramps up. Remember 2020? Those were just the first rain bands. Remember the Great Collapse of 08'? That was the first band of clouds.
Our Lady of Fatima warned of the coming Apostasy. "In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved..."
The Deep Church is much deeper than many would care to believe. Trads of every stripe just want to return to the Pontificate of Pius XII- as though that was the epitome of Christendom. Meanwhile, most do not want to admit the obvious- that the institutions of the Catholic Church are ruled by Satanic Pederasts with an agenda.
Have the promises of Our Lord Jesus Christ failed? Of course not. That is why Our Lady came to Fatima- to confirm what the Prophets have warned about for millennia. Our Lord said the Gates of Hell would not PREVAIL. He DID NOT say they would not fight with every ounce of strength and cunning.
Traditional Catholicism is more than having 10 children and driving an hour to church and watching the incense wafting to heaven accompanied by the ringing of bells. It is the spirit of the Martyrs, the realization that this World is all so much smoke and mirrors compared to eternity. And it is the realization that only at the Foot of the Cross will we ever be truly and lastingly happy here below.
This is obviously, as the author has pointed out, the consolidation of the Spirit of Vatican II, and the Traditional Organizations have all said loud and clear that they want a place under the Big Tent. Only the Sedevacantists are content to be marginalized- although they realize their day is coming. Every time Pope Provost puts his foot in his mouth it is a big boost for the Bottom Line.
Wake up. The "Conclave" was simply a formality. Pope Provost was probably selected, not by Pope Frantic, but by the men giving him orders. Pope Frantic, Pope Provost, and, for that matter, SuperTrump, are every bit the puppets that Joe Biden obviously was.
Once a person recognizes the length, depth, and breadth of the current apostasy, and how it had been planned at least as far back as the days of Canon Roca and Leo XIII, he can understand why Our Lady came to La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima.
Get those heads out of the seven day news cycle, and start comprehending prophecy in the Light of Eternity.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, Yesterday, Today, and Forever, the Same.
Great post.
The SSPX waived the white flag in 2012, but it had been stealthily reaching out to Rome since Lefebvre’s death)and had moles working in that direction at the top even before then).