Last week, my inbox was inundated with people writing about the recent concert in St. Peter’s Square. For those who missed it, the “Grace for the World” concert was held on September 13th, and it remains available on demand on Disney+ for all its subscribers.
I did not see the concert, and I won’t be paying Disney money to view it. I did, however, trawl through the media reports and discovered some names I had never heard before.
Perplexing choices for performers
First, there was someone whose stage name is “Jelly Roll,” a rapper who was once convicted for aggravated robbery and drug dealing, but by age 39 had decided to become an “unconventional Christian.” His Wikipedia entry mentioned that he had once performed with Snoop Dogg.
I had heard of Snoop Dogg, but only because he was once denied entry to Australia by the late Kevin Andrews, then the Minister for Immigration. I googled “Kevin Andrews and Snoop Dogg” and found the 2007 story where Kevin, who was a devout Catholic, defended his decision to stop Snoop Dogg from entering Australia with the argument: “He has a whole string of convictions. He doesn’t seem the sort of bloke we want in this country.” Bravo, Kevin Andrews!
Then I discovered the name “Bam Bam.” Another Google search revealed that Bam Bam is a Thai rapper and singer based in South Korea, and a member of the South Korean boy band Got7. I then Googled “Bam Bam and drugs.” The top hit was a statement from Bam Bam explaining the meaning of his song “Bags Packed.” He said, “In all honesty, this track is about taking mushrooms. I was visiting my family, who live in Bali, and we ended up having a party at home. My mum gave us all a bunch of mushies and the rest is a bit of a blur. All I know is that I woke up and I had written this song. Seems to go alright. Haha. Somehow, in my tripped-out state, I managed to subconsciously write it to be very ambiguous.” On the same page, Bam Bam also explained that another of his songs, “She Wanna Get Down,” was “just a song about having sex with someone you really want to have sex with.”
By now, I had decided that I needed to get out of Bam Bam’s page before I found myself having to explain to some Human Resources compliance officer why I am not guilty of using my work computer to access pornography. I returned to a secular newspaper report on the concert and found some more new names. The first was Pharrell Williams, who reportedly sang a song called “Happy.” I googled the lyrics and found them to be beyond banal, including the line—“clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth”! To my ears, that sounded more like Buddhism than Catholicism. According to another newspaper report, Williams shouted to the crowd: “In this historic moment, I ask you to choose grace. Choose curiosity. Choose them until they become contagious. And, together, we will flood the world with this light and this love.” Grace was otherwise reportedly defined as “the light within us.” What curiosity has to do with anything, apart from being a danger to cats, I do not know.
The final name I dared to investigate was Karol G. Her Wikipedia entry mentioned that she is a Colombian singer and that one of her top hits was something called “Pineapple.” I then ventured onto YouTube and watched the first 20 seconds or so of her Pineapple video. It began with her in a jungle, wearing not very much, stroking a python, and gesturing towards her private parts. I did not need more than the first 20 seconds of that to be convinced that the people who had written to me from internet space to download their sense of despair had a point.
The secular newspaper reports also mentioned that the concert featured some Catholic classics, like Andrea Bocelli singing Schubert’s Ave Maria, and there was a contribution from Fr. Marco Frasina, who is the director of the Pastoral Worship Center at the Vatican. Frasina is one name I did not need to Google. I particularly like his Ci chi separerà (“Let nothing separate us from the love of God”) and Aprite le porte e Cristo (“Open the Doors to Christ”)—the latter composed for the beatification Mass of John Paul II. I assume that his contribution would have been quite different from that of Karol G. et.al.
What was the point and purpose?
So, what was this event? Who was it for? What was it meant to achieve? Did someone really think that inviting people from the seedier quarters of the entertainment industry to sing in St. Peter’s Square would convert them to Christ, or convert their followers to Christ? And if not, why have it? Why pay the Church’s money to people for some non-edifying performance (Bocelli’s Schubert recital and Frasina excepted) that scandalizes faithful Catholics?
To me, as someone who remembers the 1970s, this has the hallmarks of a warmed-up correlationism—the idea that the best way to evangelize the world is to correlate the faith to whatever is regarded as fashionable.
To illustrate the concept of correlationism for students born decades after the 1960s, I show them a YouTube video clip of the hymn Sons of God that was featured on the 1966 recording of The Mass for Young Americans. In the video, a bunch of teenage girls wearing mostly shorts and t-shirts, though in one case, a skimpy nightdress, are dancing around a wood singing the hymn while strumming guitars. In one scene, a McDonald’s hamburger carry bag is lying on the ground, and a cat is crawling out of it. At the end of the clip, the girls’ guitars are resting against the trees in the woods. There is nothing in the video that is remotely Eucharistic, even though the hymn was written to be sung at Communion. There is no monstrance, no host, not even some grapes and sheaves of wheat. The clip simply features girls looking alluring while playing guitars. Somehow, Eucharistic communion is being “marketed” by an association with attractive girls, cute cats, McDonald’s burgers, and above all, guitars!
If we apply 1960s correlationism to an analysis of what recently happened in St. Peter’s Square, the reasoning is something like this: if Bam Bam is “cool” and the Church invites Bam Bam to sing in its headquarters, then people who think that Bam Bam is cool will then think that the Church is cool, and once they think that the Church is cool, they will all start queuing for baptism.
The sociologists, however, tell us that it doesn’t work this way. Those parts of the Church where correlationism most flourished, like Belgium and Germany, are now spiritual wastelands. Quite apart from whatever criticisms one may make of it theologically, it just does not attract people to the Church, and the youth are turned off by it. A young Cardinal Ratzinger once called it “infantile claptrap” and noted that the Church is not a haberdashery shop that updates its windows with the arrival of each new fashion season.
Moreover, just because people are young does not mean that they are stupid. They can tell when they are being infantilized, and they deeply resent it. They run away because they long for something truly beautiful and truly transcendent. Some become Nietzscheans and console themselves listening to Wagner, others become rad trad rebels, and yet others just feel sad and do not know where to go. Some also find an experience of the transcendent in what Bam Bam called “mushies.”
A fruitless exercise in gradualism?
Another reading of the St. Peter’s Square concert is that it was an exercise in what is called “gradualism.” This is the idea that you cannot wean neo-pagans off their idols by simply presenting them with the alternative of Christ. The concept is often used in the context of the problems faced by missionaries in parts of the world where there is no Christian heritage. A century ago, it was not unusual for missionaries to find themselves in a situation where they were trying to evangelise pagan people who followed practices like polygamy. The missionaries would say that they could not just walk into a jungle and start telling men with several wives legitimately recognized by tribal law to suddenly become monogamous. Which of their various wives would they dump? What would happen to the children of the dumped? Thus, the missionaries had to gradually wean the younger generations off the pre-Christian practices.
In recent times, it has been suggested that the same attitude should be taken toward the neo-pagans in first-world countries. Instead of being repelled by people who merch cheap sexual intimacy to masses of youth who know nothing higher, the idea is that ecclesial leaders should offer hospitality to the neo-pagan pop culture leaders and make them feel loved. Here, the mentality is something like, if we make them feel welcome and loved, then maybe they will not hate us so much, and indeed, maybe they might even come to agree with us in time.
The buzzword associated with gradualism is “accompaniment.” Someone who is a practicing Catholic is needed to accompany the pagans on their journey to Christianity; otherwise, they go nowhere. They accept the hospitality but remain pagans.
If gradualism is the justification for the St. Peter’s Square concert, then it raises the question: Has some ecclesial leader been appointed to help Pharrell Williams understand that Christ, not happiness, is the Truth? And will there be ecclesial leaders keeping in touch with Williams and company to answer their ongoing theological questions, assuming they have some? And what pastoral care will be offered to the scandalized Catholics, including the scandalized Catholic youth, who followed the whole show and who are aware of how far it sank below baseline standards of Catholic culture? Who will be consoling them and counselling them against despair?
Yet another possibility is that it was all just a bureaucratic misadventure—what British Army Officers call a SNAFU—same as normal, all a FU! Snafus occur quite often in large organizations. There only needs to be one maliciously intentioned person in the decision-making process. Busy ecclesial leaders sign off on things that underlings have organized without really knowing what they are agreeing to—without knowing anything about Bam Bam or Karol G.
I have no idea of the dynamics that brought the concert into being, and the above three scenarios are simply justifications or mitigations that occur to me as possibilities.
Christ needs to be at the center
What I do know is that if we ask, “What should we do about it?” the answer is that we should bellow out that truth, beauty, and goodness are inseparable. We can’t have one without the other two! And this means that we cannot have beauty and goodness if we want to sideline Christ.
Moreover, just shouting out words like “joy,” “peace,” “love,” and “grace” achieves absolutely nothing if the joy is not legitimately the fruit of the Holy Spirit, if the peace is not the peace of Christ, if love is confused with non-spousal sexual entanglements, and if grace is so misunderstood as to be described as something we choose for ourselves, rather than being, as the Church teaches, a gratuitous divine gift.
The person who understood better than any theologian of his generation how profoundly puerile the correlationist approach to evangelization is was Joseph Ratzinger, and April 2027 will mark the centenary of his birth. Perhaps what we need now is to focus on preparing for this anniversary by thinking of ways in which, in his memory, we can organize concerts that truly showcase Catholic culture and eschew what he described as infantile claptrap.
(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site in slightly different form and is posted here with kind permission.)
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It’s like putting China in the World Trade Organization believing they would convert from Communism.
A perfect summation.
Welcome to the New Age Catholic Church (NACC). Our mission is to fulfill the desires of all who come into contact with the NACC . We will conform our Sacramental Liturgies to whatever anyone proposes. The teachings of the NACC are fungible; they are meant to reflect whatever you want them to be. The teachings of the NACC can shift from moment to moment. This is a Church for everyone. It is meant to be a Church similar to Burger King i.e. “Have it your way!”
Masonic at its core.”And ye can be like gods, declaring what is Good and what is evil”, so as to worship a supreme being who you, yourself have created out of a dogma of self love based upon your belief about Love, Life, And Marriage, not upon The Revelation Of The Word Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Incarnate.
Bullseye!
It is much simpler. To understand the meaning of the concert one should simply recall the end of which event it marked. It was a pop-proclamation of “one world one faith whatever” that unites us all apparently, with an “icon” of Pope Francis made with drones flying in the sky reminiscent of similarly giant and flying portraits of Stalin and Mussolini. Noteworthy, one of the major speakers called to love etc. without “constraint of religions”, another, a Catholic priest, managed to squeak something similar without even mentioning Christ.
I read the message of the Vatican as “We will be anything you want us to be; Christ makes you feel uncomfortable – we will leave Him aside”. Actually, they already left Him some time ago and this is why it is so meaningless and suffocating. It is a parallel reality under the same roof, of one Church. It is now in every local parish, to various extent and it will grow. My personal problem with it is that I find it unbearable to the point of making attendance of Mass a struggle which I have never known before.
Dear Anna,
Your experience of struggling to get through New Mass 2025 takes me back to 1989. As a diocesan seminarian for the UK, I found myself forced to suffer obligatory Experiemental masses including the distribution of the blessed sacrament to visting anglican heretics and the director of studies’ distribution (hand only) of crumbling unleavened bread cake. How much Landed on the floor? I believe tragically he will know in the end.
The heart-wrenching pain of the permanent effort to break Catholicism left me no choice but to save my faith and leave.
I had duly hidden a copy of Ratzinger Report under the matress as instructed in that place. What joy when PpBXVI was elected! And then, he closed that place down.
Married today with a family, I discovered Traditional Latin Mass after Summorum Pontificum in 2007.
Anna, I look back at Novus Ordo seminary in just anger: anger at what they were doing to Holy Mother Church back then in secret, and anger at what they presume to do today.
Survive Catholicism is still out there… and within the arms of Holy Mother Church. We love the Church and suffer to see her so abused by Modernist Churchmen.
She however is resplendant, and will survive their lawless betrayals. To leave the Church like 500.000 Germans is to give up the hope of our fathers, and throw in the towel to the Modernists. We must find a corner, a niche in which we can remain loyal and faithful and pray for better days.
God bless Anna, I always enjoy reading your comments.
I can relate to what you wrote. The conviction I came to is that when one perceives a sacrilege (like “Clown Mass” for example) one must not participate. I.e., I would definitely get up and leave if our priest appeared in a clown costume. To remain, to me, is to join in the mockery of Christ and His Sacrifice, of the Eucharist. Here is my (slowly crystallizing) personal criterion: do not join with those who do not care about the Person of Christ. If those “clowns” (for example) believed in the reality of Golgotha, they would never dare to engage in their “performances”. The answer then is (as you wrote) to find a niche where Our Lord is not being mocked.
However, I began sensing that “the corner” practice is no longer working. At least for me because I feel that the poison which can be described as “Christ is optional; we can play Him as needed” is now permeating the local churches, in one form or another to various degrees. “Christ is optional” means “we do not see Christ as the Person, living Person” i.e. a covert denial of His reality (which is being transmitted into the world by His Church – a mind-blowing madness!). As a result, the Church is becoming depersonalized, numb to Christ and to people as well; forgetting its source, it becomes very shallow. Paradoxically, no matter how much the Church is trying to cater to everyone, it is becoming more and more impersonal. That impersonal attitude finds its expression from the top to the bottom, in the Vatican and in the life of parishes; one cannot do away with Christ and to preserve His image within themself. In a giant delusion, the Church is throwing away its very source of personhood, Christ, for the sake of “becoming so listening and so personal”. In an absurd leap, the Bride denies her Bridegroom for the purpose of “conveying” His qualities to the world.
And so, we have the Church which is rapidly becoming impersonal and thus anti-image-of-Christ within a human soul = anti-Christ (I am speaking about the poison which is now there). I go to the Church for the purpose of receiving my Bridegroom in communion BUT I am painfully aware of the environment which is spiritually/psychologically contrary to Him, via forgetting Him/making Him unimportant. It is an insane splitting that creates an inner conflict. And so, I experience the contradiction: Our Lord in communion is giving me life – the poisoned Church is deadening my soul to the point of impossibility to feel anything for Our Lord in communion.
It may be difficult to grasp that “depersonalization”/not seeing the other, the Person of Christ and a human person, which I described. I will give an example of a modus operandi which Our Lord described in his parable of two sons, one refused to work in a vineyard but repented later and went; another said “yes, father” but did not go. A modern (tending to universal) version of it is chronic agreement (of a priest including the Pope) with someone who pointed at the sacrilege “Yes, you are right, yes, it is a disrespect to Christ, yes I will fix it” but not fixing as if nothing was ever said. A priest here does not see a person in a parishioner and in Christ both; via saying “yes” and doing nothing he, in a sense, denies the reality of a distress of a parishioner with a sacrilege; denies the reality of Christ (only real Christ would be offended by a sacrilege); denies the reality of a relationship with Christ; finally, denies his own reality as a priest (a priest/the Pope is supposed to be concerned both with parishioners and with respect for Christ).
If you still cannot see how saying “yes, yes” and doing nothing denies the reality, compare it with a straightforward “no, I will not”. That “no” does not deny the reality of a relationship (however twisted and improper) because there is still something real there; it leaves room for a change of heart unlike “yes, yes” which is totally unreal.
Because the Church is a Relationship, first with Christ, then between its members, making those relationships unreal means stripping off everything but Christ in the Chalice.
Anna, thank you for your beautiful response.
Just as Christ was within and beyond Mary, so Holy Church is both within and beyond each believer. Herein lies the source of our ecclesial angst during what appears to many of us as Modernist heresy.
Christ in Mary makes Mary our true Church as communicant, and I believe this is the essence of the Message of Fatima and what Carrie Gress (2017) describes as The Marian Option.
Rosary is to the faithful what the Mass is to the priest: we offer rosary. Fatima adds sacrifices with the Rosary making it an expiatiary prayer thus capable of casting out demons. Francesco wears a rough cord under his clothes, for example. In so offering Rosary we are in a special way in communion with Christ in Mary as Church.
When the priest has forgotton the essence of the Mass – the return to Calvary in which the faithful participate with Mary and as St John at the foot of the cross – our duty is to seek out a priest who remembers. And at once to remember our call to the arms of expiatiary Rosary from Fatima. It is thus that we can contribute to the casting out of demons and rebuilding of the embattled Church within and beyond us.
God bless Anna
Rosary and Traditional Latin Mass are intertwined in such a way that they complete the Church
Amen Anna.
The Church establishment, especially its hierarchs and “the Vatican royal court” and their 2 most recently elected pontiffs Francis, and now Leo (new-cult-pontiff 2.0) are “great respecters of persons” except for the person who is Jesus. As such, they relentlessly distance themselves from Jesus.
The dynamics of this work against the faithful, as you observe, and simultaneously against the separate-from-Jesus-hierarchs.
This is the spiritual reality exposed by Fr. Robert Imbelli in his essay “No Decapitated Body.” I will post it shortly.
When Jesus brought the Gospel to Israel, Caiaphas, the Sadducee apostate (who denied the resurrection of the body) was High Priest of the Temple.
In a similar way, we now worship in a Church whose hierarchs, like Cardinal Walter Kasper, outright deny the resurrection of Jesus, and get promoted after denying Jesus’ resurrection, and elect their favored candidates as Pontiff.
But a word to us goes out, from The Man they deny: “Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
Anna:
As promised in my earlier post to you, here is the superb essay by Fr. Robert Imbelli, entitled “No Decapitated Body.”
https://archive.stpaulcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/nova-et-vetera-18-3/articles/02-nv-18-3-imbelli.pdf
I know from your devotion to THE PERSON JESUS, that you will appreciate this essay by Fr. Imbelli, who shares the same powerful respect for Our Lord Jesus, who you and all faithful revere as our Savior and King.
Thank you, Chris, I had problems with getting an access to it over there but found it elsewhere and downloaded.
These lines definitely spoke to me:
“In sum, the Christological deficit of Liberalism leaves a Christian congregation bare of its Lord, a headless body of believers that may poignantly echo Magdalene’s lament: “They have taken the Lord and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2).”
With one correction: in our current situation we are not missing the body of the Lord. It is in the Tabernacle and we can even receive it. What we are denied though is the living, Resurrected Christ the Person present in the attitude of the Church, conveyed via the homilies and so on. While having the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, the Church psychologically “deadened” him, reducing Him to a mere dead body. I think our situation then is far worse than St Mary Magdalene’s who wanted to find the Body of the Lord to bury properly. We want the living Person but are given the (deadened via an attitude) body. And this is truly unbearable.
The Vatican and its inhabitants are drunk on the zeitgeist. According to Pew Research only nine percent of Roman Catholics surveyed believe in the Most Holy Trinity — essentially denying the divinity of Jesus Christ — and the Vatican is putting on a light show with bad music — with a gigantic drone portrait of the deceased South American Jesuit to boot.
I hoped we might be seeing some evidence of reform with the new pontificate, but those hopes are fast evaporating. What will it take to get the lads to abandon this absurdity? What does it take to get them to get off the juice?
This is an example of “gradualism” in the other direction — the gradual erosion of Catholicism to banal, vulgar secularism, being perpetrated by a mixture of fools and the ill-intentioned within the Church in Rome and around the world.
Dear DKMayer, very nice, but:
“Fools” is too generous.
They have a sharpened-steel focus on destroying faith in Christ Jesus our LORD and in His New Tetament Apostolic witness, obliterating obedience to GOD’s commandments, and eradicating our Gospel Good News of Eternal Life with King Jesus Christ and all those who love Him.
Increasingly bold, they even admit to following the prince of this world, the father of lies, of robbery, murder, and destruction. Shameless.
Rather than ‘gradual’, this octagenarian sees a gathering tsunami of ungodly and immoral rebellion against GOD and all that is true, lovely, & worthy.
Under the microscope, what do we find?
A growing, post-WWII alliance between Marxists, Freemasons, & Satanists of every cut, who have forged an occult alliance against The LORD & His Annointed.
Penetration & subversion of the Church & its leaders has proceeded apace – that applies to Protestant & Pentecostal churches, too.
Are there instructions to help a remnant stay faithful to Christ Jesus?
Saint Peter affirms this (see 1 Peter 5:8-11):
“Be calm but vigilant, because your enemy the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to eat.
Stand up to him, strong in faith and in the knowledge that your fellow believers all over the world are suffering the same things.
You will have to suffer only for a little while:
the GOD of all grace who called you to eternal glory in Christ will see that all is well again:
He will confirm, strengthen, and support you.
His power lasts for ever and ever. Amen.”
A fourth possibility: “acoustical graffiti”…
In 2017 why engage with Benedict XVI about theological truth when you can get away with trivializing it? Inside the Vatican, too many business-as-usual roundtablers just moving things along because they no longer remember how to just say “no”? Too many of C.S. Lewis’ “men without chests”?
Graffiti–after the kissing cardinal squared the circle on blessing “irregular couples” as “couples,” now in St. Peter’s Square, acoustically, the sky is the limit.
Yes, correlationism and gradualism don’t work. Neither does the moniker utilized by many dioceses and apostolic orders: “meet them where they are at”.
I will propose what a holy priest once suggested over dinner to my wife and I: meet them where Christ is at. And I will add my own ending: and take them to the heights.
This article very much begs the most important question: how to engage young people, whose parents are uncatechized or mis-catechized.
The only way we get anywhere in finding the answer is if we ourselves are inoculated with a serum of Truth first for young people are experts in seeing through phony sentimentalism and seeing dichotomies if a disciple is a sellout to the modern culture.
What young person sincerely seeking the good, true, and beautiful, would become more interested in the Faith by witnessing a rock concert on holy ground? They often seek a lost virtue of distinction: that the Christian should look and act different from their pagan and secular wayfarers. The secularite should witness joy and peace exuded by the Faithful in family life, the public square, and every social arena the Faithful might frequent. This converts!
Ave Maria!
I agree with Tracey Rowland that the reigning Catholic Church establishment, a career-long confection by a cohort of complete frauds such as McCarrick and Kasper, and represented by their hood-ornament-pontiffs Francis and apparently Leo (aka Francis 2.0), are capable of nothing more than infantilizing junk cult-ism, so aptly summed up by their celebrity-psycho-sexually-obsessed Eminence Fernandez in charge of PR for their junk replacement cult, and his magnum opus: “Heal Me With Your Mouth, The Art of Kissing.”
They are fit for nothing except to be confronted and told they are ridiculous.
The Catholic church has been practicing gradualism since the end of Vatican 2. There seems to be an attitude that if the church just sails with the popular current of the the moment and hops on to the cultural Zeitgeist, that millions will be attracted to the church. So, how has that worked-out? Millions have left. Meanwhile, TLM masses are packed with young single people and married couples. The very mass some bishops are trying to suffocate. I would be happy just to have a reverent Novus Ordo mass without pounding drums and jangling guitars.
With development of doctrine comes development of culture .
Alas Truth, Beauty and Goodness, where have you gone?
🎼We are the world. We are the children. Blah, blah, blah…We’re saving our own lives. It’s true we’ll make a better day. Just you and me.🎤 Perhaps there should be Vatican Karaoke Night with Cardinal Tegale?
First we had the concert with Imago Franciscus drone display and then the Borgo Laudato Si kickoff! Yeah, now we have an integral ecology palace!
On a personal note, is the author leading the new Notre Dame Summer Program? https://studyabroad.nd.edu/programs/castel-gandolfo-summer-integral-ecology-at-the-borgo-laudato-si/
Not your deal? Bummer. I wonder if the students will get to bless baby icebergs and shake a blue sheet like a troubled ocean with washed up celebrities and prelates? Perhaps there will be a Dancing for the Planet competition? That would be fun! Or there could be the Pachamama Games. Participation awards could include rainbow crucifixes with F#&! The Rules tote bags or Pachamama statues. Though come to think of it, all of this could be more work than a ND student should do in the summer for credit…
“It’s true we’ll make a better day. Just you and me”
If ever I might have been tempted to go along with with all of the “cool and trendy” hype around We Are the World, that line stopped it cold.
Never mind theology, it’s bad grammar. It should be “you and I.” One wouldn’t say “Me will make a better world.”
Even when I was much younger even than that and they showed us that dreadful “Free to Be…You and Me” in elementary school, I couldn’t take any of it seriously. “You and me are free to be you and me?” Please. Obviously it is supposed to be “You and I.”
Grammar: Protecting people from mushy thinking for decades!
Too funny!!!
Correlationism, understood as a philosophy of mind, seeks to understand, even correlate to the world through what the mind appreciates. It’s an esoteric Kantian approach to reality focused on what the mind elicits rather than the reality itself. Ms Rowland insightfully describes it as to elicit, or to correlate with whatever is fashionable. Without rational assessments of what these fashions mean, the fullness of what they convey.
From the perspective of largely elderly, insulated men it’s apt to appear relative to reality – although as perceived on the surface. Another perspective congruent to a world and Church of changing perspectives is what Snoopy Dog and like entertainers, researched by Rowland, convey relative to the ecclesial mindset of the old boys at the Vatican? Inclusiveness rather than exclusivity is the path chosen by the not so old boy who holds all the messaging cards, Leo XIV.
To date, a Church that in relation to the world is increasingly ideologically inseparable.
Here’s more infantalized cult imagery from the Vatican City Drone Show, the floating head of its “Imagine-Ware-Pontiff-Francis,” link below:
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/d774a3c6-f0ec-4e47-89a8-ce4f1c2eead0_4928x3280.jpeg
Let us all pray to Pachamama, as the late Pontiff Francis and his Italian Bishops Conference urged us to pray, in their April 2019 Journal Mission:
“Pachamama of these places, eat and drink our sacrifices as you will….”
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=43919&repos=4&subrepos=2&searchid=2568565
The likeliest purpose for the concert was to promote and solidify the legacy of Pope Francis, as represented by “Fratelli Tutti.” Hence the giant drone-generated “head of Francis” floating over the Vatican. Planning for an event of that size had to have started while Francis was still alive, so we may assume that the outcome reflects his wishes. Last week, there was another “legacy of Francis” event promoting “Laudato Si” where the now infamous melting block of glacial ice was center stage. Both events were cheesy, especially the “Laudato Si” event and (I believe) had everything to do with keeping Francises vision alive and making it appear to still be part of the future of the Church.
The Vatican is still largely staffed by people who Francis appointed and/or promoted, like Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, who is Vicar General for the Vatican City State, president of the Fabric of Saint Peter, and president of the Fratelli Tutti Foundation. They are invested on maintaining the status quo, because if things change, what happens to them?
[I apologize if this posts several times but the “Post Comment” button does not seem to be responding.]
Nothing says “relevant to youth” more than the opinions of relevancy for youth held by a bunch of Italian curial careerists and papal curialist yes men.
I was going to thank straight-talking Tracey Roland for the memorable descriptor, “infantile claptrap”.
The problem is, post-Christians are not pagans. They are in many ways opposites, headed in opposite directions. The approach toward evangelizing them should be very different.
I heard that the Vatican is sponsoring an ocean-going pilgrimage cruise to an iceberg in the North Atlantic. This will be held next April 15, 2026 (that date is historically significant). On board the oceanliner will be Pope Leo, the Kissing Cardinal, McElroy, Cupich and all the other woke Cardinals in the NACC (New Age Catholic Church). Guests of honor will be the new bishop of Milwaukee and Charlotte. Special Masked Ball Dances will be led by James Martin featuring musicians from the New Ways Ministry Orchestra which will play the Pope’s favorite tunes. Sign up now.
The name of the ship will be Titanic II
I am drawn to that magnificent lodestar provided to us by the Apostle Paul in Philippians 4:8. It is not merely a suggestion, but a divine architecture for the discernment:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Paul offers us a spiritual compass, one that points unerringly not toward the fleeting whims of the world, but toward the very heart of God, who is the source of all Truth and Goodness.
In this single, concentrated verse, we find the criteria for Christian consciousness. It directs the way in all our evaluations. For what is honorable if not that which reflects the dignity of the soul? What is just if not the right ordering of love? What is pure if not the untarnished mirror of God’s grace?
The Apostle beckons us to use our minds—that divine gift—not as a dumping ground for the trivial and the transient offered by the world, but as a contemplative garden where only the blossoms of excellence and beauty are permitted to take root. To ponder these things is to align our very being with the beatific vision, ensuring that every judgment we make, every step we take, is guided by the light of Christ Himself.
Dear Michael B., thank you, that is beautifully relevant and basic to our life in Christ.
I think Saint Paul would want to add one, non-negotiable rider:
“Unless you possess The Holy Spirit of Christ, you do not belong to Him!”
If we have not been filled with GOD’s Holy Spirit, are actively being formed in cooperation with The Holy Spirit, discovering the life-changing power of One who teaches us all things, who reminds us of Jesus’ commands, who counsels us, engifts us, advocates for us, helps us, comforts us, and fructifies our faith, we’ve missed the boat, no matter how religiously pertinaceous we might be.
Surveys show that many of us flout GOD’s commandments, do not believe in The Holy Trinity or in The Real Presence of Christ in The Holy Eucharist, would never think of proclaiming the glorious Gospel of Life Eternal, and provide very strange reasons as to why we occasionally attend Holy Mass!
That’s a vicious circle, because unbelief & disobedience grieve and quench The Holy Spirit, who is the GOD-given source of our ongoing faith & obedience. Deadly!
When we think of being filled with GOD’s Holy Spirit we’re not referring to one-of sacraments or pentecostal/charismatic experiences. We’re talking about the death of our old life and the flourishing of GOD’s life in us.
See John 3:7 –
“Do not be surprised when I (Jesus) say: you must be born from above.”
Obviously, being born is not a matter of religious imagination, nor of a consensus opinion. There’s nothing more solid that being born!
Our birth in The Holy Spirit is an on-going, perseveringly Christ-following reality. It can’t be faked nor mistaken for something else. And it makes ALL the difference . . .
Lord have mercy.
The church seems to think that the looser the rules the better. Whereas polls are showing that many young people want something concrete with guidelines and rules to live up to in order to gain structure in their lives. I heard the younger generation has had a spike in religious interest, some of it prompted by the late Charlie Kirk, who made no secret of his belief in Christianity.
So, to our new Pope , and our priests and Bishops, start speaking up about having a moral center, sexual morality, confession and how it can help re-orient your life, doing unto others instead of focusing just on yourself, the 10 commandments even! Use social media to get the word out. Thats where to reach the unchurched young people.
Following on from beloved Greg Sheridan’s exhortation to boldly take our Catholic faith out into the community, here is a web link to a proper example in Amsterdam (of all places!).
Spirit-Filled Worship on the Streets of Amsterdam – Presence Revival – The Netherlands
Contrast with the populist mockery in Rome that dear Tracey reports.
A Holy Spirit-inspired example that I eanestly pray we adopt in my parish of Sandgate, Archdiocese of Brisbane, & throughout all of Oz.
Could we, for once, be obedient, listen & follow:
“What I (Jesus) tell you privately . . shout from the rooftops!”
Please find a couple of hours to experience it all & sing along – feel Pentecost right here and now – feel your heart aflame!
“I (Jesus) have come to bring fire on the earth!”
So, lets PRAY with our priest and gather all who are willing – & DO IT! So as to give Glory to GOD and to save & incorporate all who are willing – at any cost . . . Not through us, but through CHRIST in us!
Always seeking to hear & lovingly follow our King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
Thank you, Dr Rice, for this and all your helpful and inspired comments.
You remind me of a business trip I made years ago to Brisbane staying in a hotel with a wonderful view of the Pacific. A great spot to begin my day there with Sacred Scripture and prayer.
Come Holy Spirit!
Distinguished LJ!
You wrote: “So, to our new Pope , and our priests and Bishops, start speaking up about having a moral center, sexual morality, confession and how it can help re-orient your life…”
You seem to be assuming a lot here — specifically, that our new pope and most of our bishops actually believe what the Church teaches.
I’m afraid I’ve seen little evidence of that being the case.
Praise GOD for this inspired & beautifully accessibly literate observation by dear Professor Tracey Rowland.
“Moreover, just shouting out words like “joy,” “peace,” “love,” and “grace” achieves absolutely nothing if the joy is not legitimately the fruit of the Holy Spirit, if the peace is not the peace of Christ, if love is confused with non-spousal sexual entanglements, and if grace is so misunderstood as to be described as something we choose for ourselves, rather than being, as the Church teaches, a gratuitous divine gift.”
Another Holy Spirit-inspired Aussie (almost a Catholic!) has given us this “Come Into The Light” exhortation that needs to be on ‘repeat’ in the headphones of all those pagan Vatican fixers:
TAYA – Come Into The Light (Lyric Video)
Responding to beloved ‘Anna’, of October 7th 2025:
“. . in our current situation we are not missing the body of the Lord. It is in the Tabernacle and we can even receive it. What we are denied though is the living, Resurrected Christ the Person present in the attitude of the Church, conveyed via the homilies and so on. While having the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, the Church psychologically “deadened” him, reducing Him to a mere dead body. I think our situation then is far worse than St Mary Magdalene’s who wanted to find the Body of the Lord to bury properly. We want the living Person but are given the (deadened via an attitude) body. And this is truly unbearable.”
An understanding among many Catholics and other good Christians, that we only receive our LORD Jesus Christ in the Holy Body & Precious Blood of our Holy Eucharists, falls short of New Testament revelation.
In truth: Jesus & His Apostles teach us that both Christ & His Father take up a dwelling within all of us who lovingly obey GOD’s commandments. The Holy Spirit of GOD anoints those whose hearts are set on lovingly obeying the 10 commandments as completed by the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Romans 8: 9 – “Unless you possess The Holy Spirit of Christ, you do not belong to Him!”
If we’ve not been filled with GOD’s Holy Spirit, are actively being formed in cooperation with The Holy Spirit, discovering the life-changing power of One who teaches us all things, who reminds us of Jesus’ commands, who counsels us, engifts us, advocates for us, helps us, comforts us, and fructifies our faith, we’ve missed the boat, no matter how religiously pertinaceous we might be.
When we think of being filled with GOD’s Holy Spirit we’re not referring to one-of sacraments or pentecostal/charismatic experiences. We’re talking about the death of our old life and the flourishing of GOD’s life in us, as made evident by our obeying the commandments & witnessing to The Gospel.
See John 3:7 –
“Do not be surprised when I (Jesus) say: you must be born from above.”
Obviously, being born is not a matter of religious imagination, nor of a consensus opinion. There’s nothing more solid that being born!
Jesus & The Father dwelling in us and our birth in The Holy Spirit are an on-going, perseveringly Christ-following reality that can’t be faked nor mistaken for something else. And it makes ALL the difference . . .
So, dear Anna, what does it mean when we – who, through Christs’ ministry have been born of The Holy Spirit – assemble to celebrate Holy Eucharist? Since Jesus Christ already dwells richly & pertinaciously within us, what are we actually doing?
Our personal infilling by GOD (through our faith and obedience) needs a communal celebration. Being in GOD, we are also in one another as parts of Christ’s Body. Thus: we gather and share His Holy Body – a sign of our corporate obedience, even as Jesus was obedient to The Cross. We share His Precious Blood – a sign of our corporate intention to love without limits, just as He poured out His sin-cleansing Blood for us who believe.
With this our heart’s purpose when we participate in Holy Eucharist, it will always be a LIVING witness to The LORD, no matter if liturgical, homiletic, theological, or psycho-social deficiencies marr the Mass.
It’s a fact: poor aethetics deter many. But they won’t if we truely know who we are in Christ Jesus and what it is we have gathered to do.
Yet: an assembly lacking corporate OBEDIENCE and communal LOVE will attract Christ’s swinging reproval (see Revelation chapters 2 & 3).
Hoping this is helpful.
In the grace & mercy of King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty
I had such high hopes for Pope Leo and he just continues to disappoint in the areas where he displays modern tropes or trappings that fail miserably to support traditional Catholic traditions, beliefs, and practices. This event was seemingly planned by people who don’t hold the Church in high esteem and don’t value the Lord our God as our Creator and King. I thought the blessing of the ice block was a cringeworthy spectacle but this is worse.
I don’t want the Catholic Church to be modern and woke! We were served with traditionalism for many, long centuries and then we had Vatican 2. This has been serving us well until the wokeness of Francis. Young people who are coming to the faith are saying they want traditional values and structured worship. These “modernish” displays do not reflect the heart of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, nor Father God.
Hi, dear Earlene K. What you say makes such good sense.
I’d want to add that faith-inspired worship leaders like Matt Maher, Matt Redman, Taya Grukrodger, and others are a new phenomenon. They specialise in getting the theology right (that pleases oldtimers like me!).
They use a wide range of classical musical instruments, as well as guitars. They reach across cultures & generations. Children & youth love to sing along & move with the music & lyrics.
Here’s a link to a very new example that exhorts us all:
“Don’t you want to praise The God of Grace”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kmZ9n5PBfs&list=RD6kmZ9n5PBfs&start_radio=1
Many of our Catholic congregations NEED that exhortation, don’t you think?
Surely 1,000 times better than dear Tracey’s accont of Rome’s fiasco!
Always seeking to hear & follow King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty
Our GOD can do all things – imagine this brandnew song from CityAlight booming out over Saint Peter’s Square . . . with heavenly Saint Peter and the Holy Angels joyfully singing along together with all of our youths alight; the fountainhead of many future vocations . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLUvUtbp2I
I love the Ordinary Form of the Mass in my own dear heart language, which is American English.
I remember that while my late husband and I were still Evangelical Protestant, we attended a friend’s wedding that was in a traditional Catholic church and feature the Latin Mass. Both my late husband and I were quite intelligent college graduates, both in tech positions–but we had NO IDEA what was being said or done, and there were no notes to explain any of it. After that ceremony, we left shaking our heads. (By the way, sadly we lost all contact with those friends, and I didn’t meet up with them at our 50th high school reunion, which I attended by myself this past summer).
I personally think that it is important to UNDERSTAND the Gospel of Christ in my own dear heart language. For those who understand Latin, bless you and keep on with the Church that is dear to YOUR heart! But many of us don’t understand Latin or any foreign lanaguage, even if we are fairly intelligent.
My late husband and I remained Evangelical Protestant for most of our married life until 2000, when we had a horrific experience in an Evangelical Free Church and abandoned “church” for a full year for the first time in our lives. It took us that long to recover from our experience at that church (and I will not enter an Evangelical Church again!), and although I didn’t give up on the Bible and prayer, I was terrified to go back to any church.
But at the end of that year, we knew that we needed to be in a church of God’s people, so we considered (without attending) all the churches close to our house–in order: the Unitarians, the 7th Day Adventists, the Latter Day Saints, the United Methodists (who were flying rainbow flags in their yard!), and finally, the Catholic Church. We knew that the first four churches were out of the question for us and any sincere Christian. But the Catholic Church…well, we had nothing against Catholics. We had worked side by side with them during various prolife activities and marches. And we liked Pope John Paul II.
So we attended the Mass at this parish with no intention to join. The Mass was in our own dear American English–but we were still totally confused and had no idea what was happening! So we made an appointment with a priest, and the dear man spent two hours with us writing out by hand what every part of the Mass was about and which parts we as non-Catholics could participate in.
As for “banal music,” when the congregation sang, “Here I Am, Lord,” (in American English) which I had never heard or played before in spite of years of accompanying various Protestant worship services on the piano–I started crying because the lyrics of this song, often labelled “banal” by Catholics, touched me where I needed to be touched, and let me know that God still wanted me, but coming home to Catholicism!
We joined the RCIA program and were confirmed in 2004 and loved our church and our Lord more than ever! Our daughters and son-in-law converted, too–one a year after we converted, and the other, along with her husband and baby, converted a year after my husband (her daddy) died of COVID in 2020.
I’m glad that the Latin Mass is becoming available to those who love it. I respect and honor the Latin Mass and those who attend–I even was the accompanist (piano) for the Latin Mass school choir in my former city! Please, don’t knock the Ordinary Form of the Mass in American English and other commonly-used languages in the world, and don’t mock or disdain music that is not chant or in Latin and therefore, not your preference. These songs and hymns and the instruments that accompany them, along with the people who sing them, are a blessing and an instrument that has helped to lead many non-Catholics home to Catholicism, including me and my family.