The Week Rome Laughed: De Niro’s Rosary, a Bishop Blesses Sodomy, and $760,000 of USCCB Cash to Abortion Allies

Celebrity photo-ops, doctrinal minimalism, episcopal scandal, socialist slush funds, an “Amazonian Rite,” and the slow euthanasia of rural parishes. Otherwise, a quiet week.

Cinema Paradiso Catholicism

Robert De Niro got his Vatican moment. Smiles, small talk, the Sala del Tronetto, and a gift Rosary. Rome excels at this kind of theatre. The city crowns a Hollywood legend with the Lupa Capitolina, he drops a line about Rome as a living work of art, and the cameras purr. Meanwhile, the same house that can choreograph a flawless photo-op cannot manage to defend the most exalted Marian title in the tradition or keep Sunday Masses open in Iowa. The contrast is the point. A Church that performs impeccably for VIPs but blanches at confessing hard doctrine is a Church that knows how to look Catholic without the inconvenience of being Catholic.

Mater Populi Fidelis: A Velvet Knife for Marian Doctrine

The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer publicly rebuked the Vatican’s new doctrinal note Mater Populi Fidelis, which declares it “inappropriate” to call the Blessed Virgin Co-Redemptrix. Issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and signed by Leo XIV, the note claims to protect Christ’s primacy but in truth panders to Protestant and Jansenist sensitivities. The Redemptorists countered that it bears “the hallmarks of Jansenistic thinking,” a cautious, minimalist piety toward Our Lady masquerading as orthodoxy. No Catholic ever thought Mary rivaled Christ. Co-Redemptrix simply names her free cooperation in His Passion, meriting de congruo by sharing His sufferings. Drop the title and you don’t refine doctrine; you erase memory. Change how the Church speaks about Mary, and you change how the faithful imagine the Cross.

NOTE: The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer are currently being persecuted by Rome and their own bishop for their courageous stand against all of Leo’s errors. If you would like to be generous and donate, they would greatly appreciate it and can very much use it. You can give at this link: Papastronsay.com/benefactor

The McElroy Affair: A Hierarchy That Won’t Even Deny

A Washington priest goes public with allegations that Cardinal McElroy lived a double life, naming names and decades. Evidence remains to be seen; the cardinal’s office won’t respond. Silence may be prudent when accusations are tawdry, but the faithful have endured too many taught lessons in clerical omertà to chalk this up to decorum. If Rome can find time to muzzle the word “Co-Redemptrix,” it can find the breath to say yes or no about a prince of the Church. The laity are not asking for gossip. They are asking for shepherds who either defend their innocence plainly or face their accusers under oath.

Follow the Money: $760,000 from USCCB to an Abortion-Allied Network

The amount is $760,000. That’s how much the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, funded by parish second collections and run by the USCCB, has given the United Workers Association (UWA) across sixteen grants since 2004, including a fresh $25,000 grant for 2024–2025. Who is UWA? A Baltimore-based organizing outfit that doesn’t just dabble in politics; it incubates and fiscally sponsors projects that preach “healthcare as a human right” while explicitly folding in abortion and “gender-affirming care.”

Two of its vehicles are Healthcare Is a Human Right–Maryland and Put People First–PA. The first platformed abortion as a Medicare benefit and celebrated knocking down the Hyde Amendment. The second marched with Planned Parenthood, cheered Argentina’s abortion liberalization, and agitates for publicly funded sex-change procedures; UWA even serves as its fiscal sponsor and routed more than half a million dollars to it in recent years. The same network partners with socialists and calls to defund police while enjoying the bishops’ checks. After two decades, “we were misled” is no longer a serious answer. If collection-plate alms can be laundered into a program that normalizes abortion and mutilation, the problem isn’t vetting; it’s will.

Every parishioner deserves to know this number—$760,000—and where it went. Ask your pastor how CCHD is handled locally, read the fine print on second-collection envelopes, and redirect your giving to priests and works that actually uphold Catholic moral teaching. If the shepherds won’t guard the purse, the sheep must.

Building the “Amazonian Rite” While Parishes Die

Leo elevates Benedito Araújo, a longtime promoter of the Amazon project that promises inculturation with a side of liturgical invention. For years we have heard that the “Spirit opens new paths.” The old path (Roman liturgy, unashamedly Roman, guarding a Roman faith) apparently no longer inspires. So we construct rites by committee while participation collapses in the pews. Inculturation has become the liturgical wing of horizontalism: a rite that affirms the people as they are, not a cult that converts them into what they are not yet. The result is predictable. Where worship stops being sacrifice and starts being self-expression, the people quietly stay home.

Dubuque Downsizing: When the Only Growing Sacrament is Funerals

The Archdiocese of Dubuque plans to compress 161 parishes into about 28 pastorates and end weekend Masses at 83 churches. The numbers are brutal. Only 37 percent of capacity used. Nearly half the attendance gone since 2006. The official explanation is the priest shortage and demographic drift. True, as far as it goes. But you cannot spend sixty years convincing Catholics that the Mass is mostly a communal meal, the sacraments are optional accessories, and doctrine bends to biography, then feign surprise when no one rearranges a weekend for it. Rural churches are not closing because the countryside forgot God. They are closing because the shepherds forgot what God’s worship demands.

“There Is No Fear in Love,” Even in the Bedroom

Bishop Francesco Savino, vice president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, told an interviewer that adults in homosexual relationships “should not be denied the opportunity to be loved and to love, even on an intimate, sexual level,” and that to deny this “right” is simply wrong. Rome then sent him to celebrate the Jubilee Mass for LGBT pilgrims, where rainbow fans and a rainbow cross filled a Jesuit church while the message traveled worldwide. The Catechism still insists homosexual acts “can never be approved,” yet the practical catechesis of bishops and media says the opposite. Doctrine remains on paper; the pastoral wink rules the parish. The faithful understand which one governs; and so do their children.

The scandal lies not merely in what Savino said but in who empowered him to say it. This was no offhand remark from a marginal cleric but a declaration from a papal ally, vested with authority and dispatched to preach inclusion as orthodoxy. When a bishop of such rank calls sexual sin a “right” under papal blessing, the heresy becomes institutional. The rainbow cross carried through the church was not a plea for mercy but a banner of conquest. The revolution no longer asks permission from Rome; it celebrates Mass on her altars while the Vatican’s silence functions as the new imprimatur.

The New Ecumenism: Bowing Before Buddha

While bishops in the West close parishes and redefine sin, the Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, spent his Sri Lankan visit touring the Kelaniya Raja Maha Buddhist Temple, exchanging pleasantries with monks in saffron robes “in a spirit of fraternal dialogue and mutual respect.” The press office framed it as a gesture of peace; in reality it’s the same old post-conciliar choreography; cassocks before idols, diplomacy before doctrine. The spectacle of a successor of the Apostles standing reverently before pagan shrines has become so routine that no one in Rome even blushes. The early martyrs refused to burn a single pinch of incense; their heirs now call it bridge-building.

The Pattern, Not the Headlines

Put the week on a single page. Celebrities embraced. Mary reduced. A cardinal under a cloud that no one will dispel. Bishops funneling funds to movements that unmake nature. New rites promised for new peoples who no longer attend old Masses. Rural churches going dark. A prelate blessing what Scripture condemns while Rome beams. And abroad, the Church’s diplomats paying homage in Buddhist temples under the banner of “mutual respect.” The apostles once shattered idols; their successors now smile for photos beside them.What appears as chaos is really choreography. The post-conciliar project moves with the same logic year after year: de-sacramentalize worship, psychologize morality, bureaucratize charity, and aestheticize the papacy. The flock thins, but the program advances.

What Faithful Catholics Can Actually Do This Week

Begin with the Rosary that the cameras love to film and the revolution hates to hear. Confess and communicate at the most reverent liturgy available to you. Fund priests and communities that keep the perennial Faith and refuse to tithe toward their dismantling. Teach your children the old catechisms that bind the mind to revelation rather than to the spirit of the age. Document what your diocese funds and where your parish’s dollars go, then act accordingly. And speak, calmly, factually, relentlessly, until silence stops being mistaken for consent. Rome will not rescue your parish. Rome will pose with your actor. You are responsible for guarding your corner of the Church until God raises true shepherds again.

De Niro walked away with a Rosary. Keep yours close, too, because only one of you knows what it’s for.

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