The report on Leo XIV’s years in Peru is supposed to be flattering. It presents a young priest and later bishop who saw women as the sustaining force of parish life, gave them a more active place, worked with them in “equal responsibilities,” and helped them become “protagonists” capable of leading processes once associated with priests or religious.
Traditional Catholicism never denied that women often sustain parish life in countless indispensable ways. They teach children, preserve family piety, support priests, beautify churches, assist the poor, transmit devotion, and hold together the ordinary fabric of Catholic civilization. The Church has always honored holy women for exactly that reason. But honoring women is not the same as clericalizing them by another name, and it is certainly not the same as dissolving the distinct office of the priest into a sort of team-based pastoral management structure.
What is being praised here is not feminine sanctity, but institutional role transfer.
Notice the vocabulary: “co-responsibility,” “equal responsibilities,” “formation project,” “pastoral reform process,” “lead processes.” This is not the language of sacrifice, sanctification, or hierarchy. It is the language of administration. It is the language of a bureaucracy teaching itself to feel spiritual. It turns the parish from a sacred society ordered around the altar into a collaborative platform in which authority is diffused, functions are redistributed, and the old distinctions are treated as obstacles to participation.
That is why these stories always get celebrated by the same people. They do not simply want women to be appreciated. They want the last remnants of paternal, sacrificial, hierarchical Catholic life softened into a horizontally organized community where everyone accompanies, coordinates, and facilitates. Once that happens, the priesthood itself is subtly reimagined. A priest is no longer chiefly the man set apart to offer sacrifice and govern souls with authority; he becomes the animate center of a process that increasingly does not need him for much besides symbolic presence.
The line attributed to Prevost, “Neither do we… We will learn with you,” is presented as charming humility. In reality it captures the whole postconciliar disaster in miniature. The Catholic priest is not sent to discover the faith by trial-and-error with a committee. He is ordained to hand on what he has received, to teach with authority, and to form the faithful according to an objective deposit. A church that glories in “we will learn with you” soon finds itself unable to say, “This is what God has revealed, and this is what the Church commands.”
Then, inevitably, the vacuum is filled by programs, plans, and facilitators.
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