The calendar “convergence” that tells the truth
The Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue opens its 2026 Ramadan message with a warm, familiar tone: “Dear Muslim brothers and sisters,” “great joy,” “closeness, solidarity and respect.” Then, almost immediately, it supplies the theological engine driving the entire modern project: the line from Nostra Aetate about believers in a God “who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty… who has also spoken to humanity.”.
The message should present Islam as an object of evangelization, a mission field, and a people to be won to the Kingship of Christ. Instead it presents Muslims as fellow “believers in God” whose fasting is placed beside Lent as if the two seasons are parallel lanes on the same highway.
“This year,” the message says, “Christians observe this period of fasting and devotion alongside you during the holy season of Lent.” The centerpiece is the shared experience of “trial,” “fragility,” “discernment,” and the temptation toward “despair or violence.” And by the end, the Vatican is quoting Fratelli Tutti and announcing, without embarrassment, that “we are truly ‘all in the same boat.’”
You could search for the Cross there, and you would find it mainly as an inspirational symbol. The message should confront false worship and insist on conversion. Instead it offers “dialogue,” and the now-standard slogan from Leo XIV’s World Day of Peace message: “disarmament of heart, mind and life.”
A Church that once sent missionaries now sends greeting cards.
The Ash Wednesday shift: from repentance to “structures”
Now place that Ramadan message beside Leo XIV’s Ash Wednesday homily at Santa Sabina.
The homily begins well enough. Joel’s command to “gather the people” becomes a summons out of isolation. Lent is framed as a communal return to God. There is even a line that sounds like it could have come from an older Catholic world: a people is formed that “recognizes its sins,” and we must “courageously accept responsibility.”
Then the sermon slides into the now-inevitable framework: “Naturally, sin is personal,” Leo says, “but it takes shape… often within real economic, cultural, political and even religious ‘structures of sin.’”
From a Catholic standpoint, sin is a moral act of a rational creature. It belongs to persons, because moral guilt belongs to persons. A corporation does not undergo the particular judgment. “Structures” do not confess, do penance, or receive absolution. They do not have souls. They have paper, procedures, slogans, money, and power. Those things can amplify sin, reward sin, normalize sin, and punish virtue. They can become machines that train people to do evil. But the sin still lives in human acts and choices.
The “structures” language is often used as if it relocates guilt into the atmosphere, into a fog bank hovering above the city. It can be preached as an excuse: you are a victim of the system, so your primary moral task is to fight the system. Repentance then becomes political engagement.
On Ash Wednesday, of all days, that change is spiritually poisonous.
The sermon keeps signaling “community,” “public” conversion, “missionary significance,” restless “people of good will.” It praises young people for seeking “accountability for wrongdoings in the Church and in the world.” It then widens the focus from the soul to the planet. Paul VI is invoked, and Leo turns the ashes into a symbol of global collapse: “a world that is ablaze,” “cities destroyed by war,” “the ashes of international law,” “the ashes of entire ecosystems,” “the ashes of critical thinking,” “ancient local wisdom.”
Yes, these are real tragedies. Yes, war and injustice are evils. But listen to what happens when Lent is narrated this way. The interior drama of the Christian life gets crowded out. The urgent question becomes less “Have I offended God?” and more “How do we rebuild the world?”
The old discipline begins with dust on the forehead and ends with a crucifix, a confessional, and a change of life. The new discipline begins with dust on the forehead and ends with a program.
You can feel the hand of the Vatican II era here: the Church’s speech increasingly resembles the language of global governance, international NGOs, and the modern moral imagination. The homily’s “world that is in flames” may stir emotions. Yet the danger is obvious. If sin is explained primarily as something embedded in “economic, cultural, political… structures,” then the cure will be described primarily in economic, cultural, and political terms.
The cross becomes a backdrop for a campaign.
The Vatican II catechesis: the Church as “sacrament of the unity of the human race”
On the same day, Leo’s General Audience doubles down with a catechesis explicitly dedicated to Vatican II documents, beginning with Lumen gentium.
This is where t he doctrinal stakes surface. Leo describes the Church as “mystery,” then quickly moves to the Council’s favored vocabulary: the Church “like a sacrament,” a “sign and instrument… of the unity of the whole human race.” Differences are “relativized,” what counts is “being together,” the Church is an “effective sign of unity and reconciliation among peoples,” and the horizon widens beyond mankind to “the cosmos.”
This is classic postconciliar ecclesiology: less precision about the Church’s visible boundaries, more emphasis on the Church as an event, an assembly, or a process of gathering. The Church is primarily defined by a universal unifying mission in history rather than by her identity as the one true Church founded by Christ, with a determinate faith, determinate sacraments, and determinate authority.
If you define the Church as the “sacrament of the unity of the whole human race,” you will inevitably preach the Gospel as a unity project and address Ramadan as a parallel “shared journey.” You will speak endlessly of “dialogue,” “reconciliation,” and “disarmament.”
The Catholic faith is not a human unity program. The unity Christ wills is unity in truth, faith, and in submission to divinely instituted authority. When unity is treated as the primary goal, conversion becomes “proselytism,” and evangelization becomes “encounter.”
Ostia Lido: Gaudium et spes as the new homiletic instinct
Three days earlier, at the parish of “Mary Queen of Peace” in Ostia Lido, Leo’s homily on the “new law” of Christ again pivots into Vatican II as the interpretive key. He quotes the opening line of Gaudium et spes and calls it “one of the most beautiful expressions” of the Council, where we can “almost [hear] the beating of God’s heart through the heart of the Church.”
Then the sermon turns toward social diagnosis: violence among youth, substance abuse, criminal organizations, exploitation, “unjust interests,” education, harmony, “disarming of language,” investing “energy and resources.” The pastoral prescriptions are decent in the natural order. A mayor could give a similar speech. A school superintendent could sign it.
But this is exactly the point. The postconciliar instinct is to preach like a moral reformer of society rather than a herald of divine judgment and mercy.
Even when Leo speaks of the heart’s coldness and murderous contempt, he quickly widens back out to social patterns. The sermon never settles into the sharp, terrifying medicine of the saints: death, judgment, hell, grace, confession, penance, the narrow way. Instead it becomes a gentle appeal to build better neighborhoods and overcome hostility with “meekness.”
It is the same word again, in different costumes. Disarm. Dialogue. Reconcile. Unite.
The Church becomes a peace workshop.
The unifying thread: the Synodal Church as a permanent “season”
Put the pieces together and the pattern emerges.
A Ramadan message that frames Muslims and Catholics as co-pilgrims in shared fasting, united in a project of peace and justice, backed by Nostra Aetate and Fratelli Tutti.
An Ash Wednesday homily that relocates Lent’s urgency into a communal program to confront “structures of sin” and rebuild a “world that is ablaze,” with ashes symbolizing ecosystems, international law, and global collapse.
A Vatican II catechesis that defines the Church in terms of human unity, cosmic reconciliation, and a sacramental sign function in history.
A parish homily that reaches instinctively for Gaudium et spes as the emotional proof text and then moves into social remedies, education initiatives, and “disarming language.”
This is one coherent ecclesial worldview. It is the Synodal Church speaking in its native tongue.
In that worldview, personal conversion is constantly absorbed into “journeys” and “processes.” Repentance is never allowed to remain a stark individual confrontation with God. The faith becomes primarily a communal experience. The Church becomes primarily an instrument for human unity. The liturgical seasons become primarily a platform for global moral messaging.
And so Ash Wednesday becomes an opening ceremony for an agenda.
Why the “structures” sermon matters more than people want to admit
Many traditional commentators will shrug at the phrase “structures of sin” as harmless Catholic social teaching language. They will insist that Leo said “sin is personal,” so the rest is merely prudential commentary.
Yet words have consequences. The more the Church preaches in the register of “structures,” the more she trains souls to interpret evil as something external and systemic rather than internal and moral. It becomes easier to rage at “the world” while leaving one’s own vices untouched.
Lent is designed to dismantle self-deception. Leo even quotes Paul VI on “systematic self-deception.” Then he supplies a new mode of self-deception: locate the crisis out there, in the structures and in the systems.
The devil loves a politicized Lent. It keeps the sinner busy.
A final plea, without euphemism
The most alarming feature here is not any single sentence, but the overall direction, preached with calm confidence, day after day.
If the modern Vatican’s speech is increasingly shaped by Vatican II’s self-understanding, then the Church will keep drifting toward an identity where her primary task is to symbolize human unity, facilitate dialogue, and manage conflict. Christ becomes the inspiration for a program rather than the King who commands repentance.
Meanwhile, ordinary Catholics will keep hearing sermons that soothe and generalize while their lives rot in secret. They will be invited to imagine “new paths” for the world, while they neglect the old path of sanctity.
Lent begins with ashes because God wants the truth spoken to the face: you will die, and you will be judged. No structure stands in your place at that hour. The only way forward is repentance, confession, penance, and the hard reordering of a life around Christ.
That is the message the age cannot tolerate.
It is also the message a Church in crisis cannot afford to dilute.
https://bigmodernism.substack.com/p/rome-praises-islam-and-ramadan-for