Rome dates its propaganda with charming precision. January 8, 2026. Two curial pieces, two polished smiles, one message: the postconciliar project lives; it merely changes its wardrobe. Leo XIV “asks us to reread” Evangelii gaudium and the machine obediently hums. Fernández offers the theological perfume, Baggio provides the managerial blueprint. Together they perform the same trick the system has performed for sixty years: reduce the Catholic faith to a warm nucleus, demote everything that makes it Catholic to “secondary,” then call the demolition “reform,” “listening,” and “mission.”
They claim to be rescuing the heart of the Gospel. They are, in fact, burying it under a therapeutic slogan, a sociological program, and a bureaucracy trained to treat dogma as clutter.
Fernández begins with an order: reread Evangelii gaudium, as though a document’s relevance is created by papal fiat rather than by fidelity to what Christ handed down. He insists it “did not expire,” and then reveals why. The text functions as a permanent solvent. It dissolves the Catholic religion into a “kerygma” narrowly defined, emotionally framed, and strategically insulated from the “doctrines and norms” that the Church once preached as the very shape of the Gospel in history.
He quotes the key line with pride: the exhortation is “not concerned with an obsessive proclamation of all the doctrines and norms of the Church.” That phrase is a confession. In the old world, the Church taught doctrine because souls must know what God has revealed, what the Church infallibly proposes, what sin is, what grace is, what judgment is, what the sacraments do, what the Cross demands, what the commandments bind, what damnation means. The new world hears “doctrines and norms” and reaches for the fainting couch. The physician becomes the villain, the disease becomes “complexity,” and the cure becomes “simplification.”
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