The Spectacle And The Silence: Leo’s Church Puts On Another Week Of Theater

Cupich vs the Mass, climate as dogma, a “gay-washed” Bible, and bishops who still cannot say the word “sin.”

Cupich And The Crime Of Majestic Worship

Cardinal Blase Cupich has located the real crisis of the Church in 2025: the old Mass is too beautiful.

In his Vatican News gloss on Leo’s exhortation Dilexi Te, he says the traditional Roman Rite borrowed “imperial and royal” elements, turning worship into a “spectacle” that blocks “active participation.” The Church, we are told, needs a “simpler and more sober” liturgy freed from “trappings of world power.” The 1970s reforms allegedly purified worship and finally realized Vatican II.

Father Nicola Bux answers with what used to be normal Roman sanity. The liturgy is meant to be a sacred spectacle ordered to God’s glory. Sacrosanctum Concilium calls for “noble simplicity” so the rites can manifest the majesty of God, “noble beauty itself,” not because the Council secretly wanted bare tables. The older Roman Rite already fulfills what the Council said about participation: it draws the faithful into the mystery through silence, gesture, and doctrine. Participation is interior union with the sacrifice of Christ, not constant self-display with a microphone.

Scripture itself presents God as King surrounded by His heavenly court and Christ as King of all creation. Christian worship adopted courtly forms because the Mass is a kingly, high-priestly oblation, not a neighborhood meeting.

The real spectacle is a hierarchy that cannot bear the sight of its own tradition and must denounce it to keep the postconciliar experiment from looking optional.

Creation Is Crying Out, But Apparently Only About Carbon

While Cupich attacks beauty, Leo beams a video sermon into COP30 in Belém, warning that “God’s creation is crying out in floods, droughts, storms and relentless heat.” One in three people, he says, lives in “great vulnerability” because of climate change. Humanity must embrace “cohesive and forward-looking multilateralism” centered on the “sacredness of life” and “the common good.”

The problem is the selective thunder. On abortion, euthanasia, and sodomy, Vatican language is cautious and embarrassed. On carbon, the apocalyptic vocabulary roars back to life. Fire, flood, “crying out,” conversion language once reserved for sin and judgment is deployed for U.N. process, as if the end to fear were environmental collapse rather than the Judgment, and the sin to confess “failing political will” rather than apostasy or sacrilege.

Jubilee Of The Poor, Now With Trans Activism

The same week, Leo hosts a Jubilee of the Poor lunch in the Paul VI Hall. Alongside migrants, the homeless, and the elderly sit about fifty people identifying as “transgender,” including several activists shepherded by Father Andrea Conocchia. He thanks Leo for a “great sign of openness” toward the LGBT world and calls it an opportunity “to walk together” and “recognize ourselves in the ecclesial community.”

Now Leo smiles as he accepts a letter of thanks from “the trans community.” No public call to repentance appears anywhere in the script.

On paper, the Church has called gender ideology an attack on reason and the created order. In practice, the visual catechism preaches something else: activists in defiance of nature seated at papal tables; priests praising “joyful” inclusion; media presenting it as a victory for mercy. Yes, Our Lord ate with sinners. He also told them, “Go, and sin no more.” When Rome gives you the meal without the conversion, it trains you to treat sin as an identity and the Gospel as affirmation.

Ghana: Evangelization Replaced By Development

A quieter scene unfolds when Ghana’s new ambassador, Sir Ben Batabe Assorow, presents his credentials. Leo praises “time-tested relations” and collaboration in education, health, agriculture, and social development, then says the Church does not seek to proselytize but to promote welfare and integral development for all, regardless of religion.

That one sentence inverts the missionary logic of the Church. Ghana is preparing to mark 150 years since the Church was formally established there, the fruit of missionaries who preached, catechized, and baptized. Now Rome rushes to insist she is not there to convert anyone. The apostolic era built churches; the postconciliar era apologizes for having built them.

The Coffee Circle, Synodal Fog, And Zuppi’s “End Of Christianity”

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. bishops gather in Baltimore’s waterfront Marriott – Sheryl Collmer’s “Coffee Circle.” Bishop Strickland speaks briefly about the homosexual revolution, immigration chaos, and episcopal cowardice. The room freezes, then slumps back into business as usual. The conference adopts a “special message” denouncing Trump’s immigration crackdown and “vilification” of migrants, and Leo quickly praises it from Castel Gandolfo. Catholic teaching affirms both the right to migrate and the duty of states to regulate borders for the common good. The rhetoric leans so hard on one side that the other disappears, leaving laymen to navigate real moral questions with only secular “compassion” as a guide.

Meanwhile, Synod Study Group 9 issues an interim report on “controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues” full of phrases about “conversion of thought,” “relational conversion,” and a “paradigm shift.” Hot-button topics like homosexuality will receive “reference criteria” for local discernment, not clear universal answers. Keep the Catechism on the shelf; alter practice on the ground; let synodal fog cover the gap.

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, opening the Italian bishops’ plenary, provides the spiritual spin. “In Italy, Christianity is at an end, but not Christianity itself,” he tells his brother bishops. What is disappearing is an “order,” a Christian social fabric; now faith must be a “personal and conscious decision.” De-Christianization is rebranded as an opportunity. The burning of the house becomes a “chance” for a purer, non-Constantinian faith.

The Catholic American Bible And The Art Of Editing Sin

Back in Baltimore, the bishops also approve the “Catholic American Bible,” a new translation destined for personal Bibles, lectionaries, and the Liturgy of the Hours. It arrives alongside updated texts whose renderings of key passages on homosexual acts become vague “illicit sex,” padded with notes about “uncertain” Greek.

If you want to dull doctrine without rewriting the Catechism, you start by softening the words people hear at Mass and in the breviary.

Conclusion

That is the through-line of the week. Beauty in worship is recast as dangerous spectacle. Climate policy becomes the privileged arena of conversion. Gender ideology gets pride of place at papal tables. Mission is replaced by development, immigration by sentiment, doctrine by process, Scripture by managed ambiguity, and the collapse of Christendom is sold back to us as renewal.

Underneath all the theater, the target is the same: the old, hard edges of the Catholic faith that once built Christendom and now stand in the way of a Church that longs to be loved by the world.

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