From Revelation to Conversation: The New Ecclesiology of Leo XIV
By the Titular Archbishop of Selsey
When the Church trades doctrine for dialogue,
she risks mistaking noise for the Holy Ghost.
During his Jubilee of Hope, Pope Leo XIV has sought to cast a universal vision of renewal: a Church of accompaniment, dialogue, and missionary openness. Yet what should have been an anthem of divine certainty has become an ode to uncertainty. The tone of his address to the Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies was not apostolic but anthropological—not the voice of Peter confirming his brethren but that of a moderator convening a forum.
Rome once sent missionaries to convert the nations; now it sends facilitators to listen to them. Once the Church proclaimed that she alone possessed the fullness of revelation, today she hesitates even to say that truth can be known. Under Leo XIV, the “Church of listening” risks becoming a Church of forgetting—forgetting her own authority, her divine commission, and her supernatural identity.
This is the paradox of the modern pontificate. While the Vatican adorns itself with banners proclaiming “Hope,” it offers a hope emptied of content—a hope whose object is no longer salvation through truth but coexistence through conversation. The Apostle’s command, “Preach the word, be instant in season and out of season,” has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s dictum: “Let us listen together.”
The present crisis is not one of governance alone but of essence. What kind of Church believes it must seek the truth when her Founder declared, “I am the Truth”? The danger is no longer external persecution but internal dissolution—the slow surrender of doctrine to dialogue.
A New Gospel of Synodality
On 24 October 2025, Pope Leo XIV stood before more than two thousand delegates in the Paul VI Hall and announced that the Church “is not looking for a uniform model.” He explained that “synodality will not come with a template where everybody and every country will say, ‘This is how you do it.’ It is rather a conversion to a spirit of being Church, of being missionary, and of building up the family of God.”² Later that evening, within St Peter’s itself, he made his most startling declaration: “No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together.”³
Those who applauded heard humility; those who wept heard apostasy. For if the Church no longer claims to possess the truth, she ceases to be its guardian. Leo’s words dissolve the very distinction that defines Catholic identity—the difference between the Church that teaches and the world that must be taught. “No one possesses the whole truth” may sound pastoral, but it negates the promise of Christ that His Spirit would lead the Church “into all truth.”⁴
A Church that must seek truth alongside the world has ceased to be the world’s light. She no longer teaches but consults, no longer judges but surveys, no longer baptises the nations but immerses herself in their confusion. Her new commandment seems to be: “Go into all the world and hold dialogue with every creature.”
From Revelation to Conversation
According to the Synod Office, the purpose of this Jubilee was to “translate the orientations of the Synod’s Final Document into pastoral and structural choices consistent with the synodal nature of the Church.”⁵ Leo described synodality as “a way of being Church… not a campaign but an attitude, beginning with learning to listen.”⁶ He urged patience with those “not yet capable to understand,” encouraged “formation at every educational level,” and praised the “growth of regional groupings of churches as expressions of communion.”⁷
Even the question of women’s participation was reframed not in terms of revealed order but cultural adaptation, as the Pope spoke of promoting “a culture of co-participation” in societies where women “are considered second-class citizens.”⁸ In every line the theological foundation gives way to sociological language. The Church’s identity, once defined by her relation to God, is now described by her relation to culture.
This is the new ecclesiology: revelation replaced by process, doctrine by discernment, faith by feedback. The Church no longer speaks from authority but seeks validation from experience. Her image shifts from the Bride of Christ to a human family endlessly negotiating its terms of cohabitation.
The Warning Voices
Among the hierarchy, the most urgent warnings come from those who remember that the Church’s authority descends from heaven, not consensus. Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong, writing with the clarity of a confessor, warned that “two opposing visions” now compete within the Church: one hierarchical and apostolic, founded by Christ upon the apostles and their successors; the other democratic and undefined, a “people’s Church” inventing its own mission. “If the latter prevails,” he cautioned, “even the doctrine of faith and the discipline of moral life may change.”⁹
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who once headed the very congregation charged with guarding doctrine, went further, describing the synodal process as “a hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ,” designed to prepare Catholics to accept false teaching under the guise of reform.¹⁰ Theologian Larry Chapp, though less severe, noted that a truly synodal Church “would require the rediscovery of the Cross as the only guarantee of unity”—a rediscovery conspicuously absent from synodal language.¹¹
These voices are not reactionary; they are prophetic. They remind the faithful that communion without truth is not unity but illusion. A Church that listens without teaching soon forgets what she was sent to proclaim.
The Voice of Tradition
The perennial magisterium has already spoken against these illusions. In 1906, Pope St Pius X taught in Vehementer Nos that “the Church is essentially an unequal society, comprising two orders of persons, the Pastors and the flock. The duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.”¹² This was not arrogance but humility: the obedience of faith before divine order. The Church’s hierarchy is not a human invention but a reflection of heaven’s own structure, where authority serves truth and truth sanctifies authority.
Leo XIV’s language inverts that divine hierarchy. His “participatory Church” imagines authority that rises from below rather than descending from above. Bishops become moderators, priests become facilitators, and the Pope becomes the chairman of an ecclesial roundtable. The magisterium ceases to be a voice and becomes an echo. The Church that once converted the world now asks the world to help her discern what she believes.
A Crisis of Definition
In former ages the Church resolved tension by defining doctrine. The Councils of Nicaea, Trent, and Vatican I all brought peace through clarity. Today’s Church prolongs tension as a sign of vitality, mistaking unresolved contradiction for the breath of the Spirit. The Church Life Journal at Notre Dame noted the danger: “Critics of the synodal project fear that doctrinal decision-making may become obscure and unaccountable, blurring distinctions between ordained and lay authority.”¹³
It is precisely such obscurity that corrodes faith. If synodality is merely a “way of being,” then truth becomes elastic and unity accidental. Catholic Culture observed that the organisers of the Synod “could not answer basic questions—what exactly will change, or must change—betraying the danger of a Church walking without knowing the way.”¹⁴ The image is apt: a pilgrim people wandering in circles, congratulating themselves on their sense of motion.
Modernism Revisited
The ghosts of Modernism have returned, speaking the language of synodality. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis the idea that truth evolves through human experience, calling it “the synthesis of all heresies.” Leo XIV’s claim that “no one possesses the whole truth” is that same heresy with a smile. It cloaks skepticism in the garments of humility.
Even Commonweal, sympathetic to synodal ideals, admitted that critics of the process are “not entirely wrong to fear that, if the magisterium ceases to claim possession of truth, Catholic identity itself is imperilled.”¹⁵ When even the progressive press recognises that the Church risks forgetting who she is, the warning has become universal.
The Lay Reaction
Among the faithful, reaction has been both articulate and anguished. Many sense instinctively that something essential is being lost. American journalist and traditional Catholic commentator Chris Jackson, writing in Hiraeth in Exile, described the Jubilee liturgy as “a Church that no longer teaches but takes minutes,” a powerful metaphor for the paralysis of authority.¹⁸
At Catholic Vote, Joshua Mercer warned that “synodality, if detached from revelation, becomes a process of perpetual self-reference, a Church listening to herself rather than to God.”¹⁹ Meanwhile, Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture observed that “a Church that listens to everyone will soon obey the loudest,” while Eric Sammons of Crisis Magazine remarked that “the rhetoric of dialogue too easily replaces the duty to proclaim.”²⁰
These lay critics do not speak from bitterness but from love of the faith handed down to them. They long for shepherds who will lead, not facilitators who will facilitate. Their collective anxiety stems from fidelity, not rebellion. They fear that, as one English layman put it after reading the papal text, “the shepherds have traded the crozier for the microphone.”
The Church That Listens to Herself
Synodality has made the Church introspective. Having ceased to listen to the Word of God, she listens now to her own echo. The act of listening—once the path to obedience—has become a substitute for belief. Certainty is portrayed as pride, while doubt is called humility. Dogma is dismissed as rigidity; confusion is rebranded as compassion. Under this logic, the shepherd who refuses to speak is praised as pastoral.
Cardinal Müller’s warning resounds: “Pastoral relativism leads to theological collapse.”¹⁶ When truth becomes pastoral preference, the Church’s moral authority disintegrates. The salt loses its savour. What began as the “walking together” of synodality risks becoming a march into the wilderness, where every voice is equal and none is divine.
A Call to Clarity
If Leo XIV’s words are to bear fruit, it will be only by forcing a return to fundamentals. The Church is not an experiment in religious coexistence but the divine institution of salvation. She does not assemble truth by consensus but receives it by revelation. She does not evolve through dialogue but is purified through conversion.
Pius XI declared in Mortalium Animos that “the unity of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ.”¹⁷ That unity presupposes truth possessed, not sought. The Church that seeks truth as though she did not have it has already lost her faith in the promises of Christ.
Conclusion: Beyond the Babel
We stand again at Babel’s threshold, where the multiplication of voices masquerades as vitality. A synodal Church, ever talking and never teaching, risks becoming a Church “ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The true reform the Church requires is not methodological but moral: repentance, not process; sanctity, not strategy; conversion, not conversation.
If Pope Leo XIV would truly renew the Church, let him begin where all true renewal begins—on his knees before the crucifix. Let him set aside the microphones of dialogue and take up the keys of Peter. The world does not need another symposium; it needs salvation. The faithful do not hunger for a new model of synodality; they hunger for the living Bread of doctrine, the unchanging truth that sanctifies and saves.
Only when the Church rediscovers her voice as the Bride of Christ will the confusion end. Only when she proclaims again that she possesses the truth, because she belongs to Him who is the Truth, will the world once more hear the Word of God in her preaching. The Church must again be the pillar and ground of truth—or she will be buried beneath the ruins of her own synodal Babel.
¹ 1 Timothy 3:15
² CNA, Pope Leo XIV: There’s No Template for Synodality Across All Countries (25 Oct 2025)
³ Vatican News, Jubilee of Synodal Teams: Pope Calls for Humble Search for Truth (24 Oct 2025)
⁴ John 16:13
⁵ Synod Office communiqué, 25 Oct 2025
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ ACI Africa, Pope Leo XIV on Women and Synodality (25 Oct 2025)
⁹ Cardinal Joseph Zen, How Will the Synod Continue and End? (2024)
¹⁰ Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, interview in Die Tagespost (Oct 2022)
¹¹ Larry Chapp, The Pillar (Oct 2025)
¹² Pope St Pius X, Vehementer Nos (1906)
¹³ Church Life Journal, “Should We Be Skeptical About Synodality?” (Mar 2023)
¹⁴ Catholic Culture, “The Dangerous Spirit of Synodality” (Nov 2024)
¹⁵ Commonweal, “Synodality and Catholic Amnesia” (Apr 2024)
¹⁶ Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, interview with Catholic World Report (2023)
¹⁷ Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos (1928)
¹⁸ Chris Jackson, Hiraeth in Exile, “The Synodal Séance” (28 Oct 2025)
¹⁹ Joshua Mercer, Catholic Vote editorial on synodality (Nov 2024)
²⁰ Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture commentary (Nov 2024); Eric Sammons, Crisis Magazine analysis (Feb 2025)
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