From Canterbury to Germany, Leo XIV keeps honoring frauds, rewarding rebels, and dressing the public humiliation of Catholic truth in the language of charity.
There are moments when the postconciliar crisis shows itself as a program. Leo XIV’s message to Dame Sarah Mullally was one of those moments. He addressed her as “Archbishop of Canterbury,” spoke of the “weighty” office to which she had been chosen, acknowledged her responsibilities across the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, prayed that the Holy Spirit would guide her in serving “your communities,” and then concluded with the line, “Dear sister,” asking that she be made “fruitful in the Lord’s service.” That is the language of public ecclesial recognition.
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That is why this matter is so repellent. Leo XIII settled the central issue long ago in Apostolicae Curae: Anglican orders are “absolutely null and utterly void.” Even John Paul II later declared in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and the CDF ruled that this teaching must be held definitively. Once those two points are in place, the rest follows with brutal clarity. A woman cannot be a bishop. An Anglican minister cannot be treated as possessing valid Catholic orders. Yet Leo XIV chose to speak as though a female head of an invalid communion were a genuine ecclesiastical counterpart with a real spiritual office to exercise.
The defenders of this kind of language always retreat into the same excuse: diplomacy, goodwill, fraternity, the demands of ecumenical contact. But diplomacy has a border. Courtesy is one thing. Sacramental and ecclesiological make-believe is another. The old Catholic instinct knew the difference. The new one seems determined to erase it.
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