Pope Leo opens first consistory with strong emphasis on synodality, Vatican II

[Stone]

Vatican II is God: The Consistory Begins
A consistory framed by Vatican II, curated by the Curia, front-loaded with synodal process, and headlined by a cardinal pushing women deacons and “Soho” hospitality

Chris Jackson | Jan 8, 2026

The Council as canon

This consistory opens the way a religion opens: with its sacred text, proclaimed as the key to everything.

Leo XIV does not treat Vatican II as one council among many, held inside a long Catholic memory and judged by what the Church already received. He treats it like the hinge of history, the moment the Church “begins,” the point where the past becomes raw material and the future becomes mandate. He reads Lumen gentium as program, not as reference. He frames it as light. Then, almost immediately, he announces a whole catechesis series dedicated to Vatican II, presented as permanently relevant, permanently urgent, permanently required for reading the world.

That is why the atmosphere feels frightening. This is not mere emphasis. This is enthronement. A council becomes the interpretive tribunal. Everything earlier remains permitted as quotations, provided it gets translated into the conciliar dialect and fitted into the approved frame. The vocabulary does the policing. The priorities enforce the boundary. The “new ecclesial season” becomes a line you are expected to accept as a fact of nature, like gravity, as though Catholic identity started in the 1960s and any path back must count as rebellion.

Once a council functions this way, it stops being a chapter. It becomes genesis. It becomes the alpha and the omega. It becomes the book that rewrites the shelves.


The consistory as onboarding

With that premise set, the rest follows with mechanical consistency. The meeting becomes less a governing act rooted in the perennial Faith and more a guided exercise in the postconciliar method: shared language, shared themes, shared process, shared mood. The Church gets told to evangelize by “attraction.” The cardinals get arranged around tables. The regime gets what it came for: alignment.


Vatican II as the navigation system

In the opening speech, Leo XIV reads Lumen gentium 1 at length, leans hard into the Church-as-sacrament formula, then stitches Isaiah, the Council Fathers, and “the pontificates of Paul VI” and “John Paul II” into one seamless narrative of light radiating outward. The storyline is familiar: the Council “paved the way” for a new season; the present calls for “signs of the times”; the mission is to illuminate the world.

Even the cadence signals the regime. Not the old Catholic reflex of guarding worship, doctrine, discipline, and the priesthood as the nerve center of the Church’s life. The center shifts to the Church’s relationship to “the world,” then to unity projects, then to the social imagination of “fraternal” order. A Church that speaks like this starts treating the altar as one department among many, and every department answers to “mission” defined as broad human uplift.


“Attraction” as the operating principle

Leo XIV highlights the post-Aparecida slogan with approval: “The Church does not proselytize… she grows by attraction.” He repeats the now-standard clarification that “it is not the Church that attracts, it is Christ,” then translates that into the preferred moral register of the hour: charis, agape, love as the credible witness, love as the only thing “worthy of faith.”

The speech even gives the era its bookends. Francis begins with Evangelii gaudium and concludes with Dilexit nos, framed as a coherent arc: the announcement of the Gospel, then the love of the Heart of Christ. The interior logic is clear enough. Evangelization becomes a mood, a welcome, a posture, a radiance. The hard edge of conversion, repentance, discipline, fear of God, the narrow gate, the mortal stakes of sacrilege, the duty to worship as God commands, all of that becomes secondary content, often treated as an obstacle to “attraction.”

A Church that measures success by “attraction” quickly learns to hate friction. Doctrine creates friction. Liturgy creates friction. Moral teaching creates friction. So friction gets managed.


The Radcliffe problem is the point

Enter the meditation, delivered by Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, the same figure spotlighted during the Synod on Synodality, kept in the same symbolic role at the start of this consistory. Reports about the day describe his remarks as mild. The timing does the work. The day before, he is quoted favoring swift ordination of women to the diaconate. Then he stands in the hall to set the tone.

The interview material circulating alongside the consistory frames Leo XIV as continuity with Francis plus improved temperament. “He listens,” “he mediates,” “he gathers people in.” The pitch is not doctrinal clarity, but managerial competence.

Then come the admissions that remove any remaining ambiguity about what “welcome” means in practice. Radcliffe speaks warmly about the “Soho masses” for the homosexual community, insisting the message was simply “You’re welcome.” He entertains the idea of a homosexual pope as a non-issue, shifting the moral axis from objective order to subjective “love,” as though sin becomes irrelevant once the right emotion gets named.

This is the age’s most reliable trick. Swap ontology for sentiment, swap moral law for hospitality language, swap repentance for belonging, then call anyone who resists “clericalist,” “rigid,” “pharisaical,” “political.” The system keeps its saints’ names and discards their theology.


Table talk: synodality everywhere, liturgy nowhere

The consistory’s structure tells its own story: round tables, groups, facilitation, reporting. Leo XIV names four themes for reflection, including liturgy, then immediately narrows the real focus to only two topics for “specific treatment.” Reports from inside the room claim a visible lack of priority for liturgy and a confused sense of the Church’s identity. This fits the pattern. Synodality occupies the room like oxygen; worship becomes a line item.

A Church that downgrades liturgy never stays neutral. The vacuum fills with novelty, performance, and the tastes of the class that runs the committees. The same week, the general audience launches a Vatican II catechesis series. The same week, an extraordinary consistory gets packaged as a therapy session for “estranged” cardinals who need to feel “happy,” since “a miserable Church can’t preach the Gospel.” The Church becomes an affect-management project. Joy becomes a KPI.

Catholicism becomes less like a fortress and more like a wellness brand.


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