Editorial: “The truth of the Lord endureth for ever.”
— Psalm 116:2, Vulgate
There are ages in which truth is attacked directly, and others in which the attack proceeds by subtler means. Truth is not always denied; sometimes it is qualified, reframed, renamed, contextualised, pastoralised, historicised, or surrounded by such a thicket of verbal distinctions that ordinary men begin to wonder whether anything can finally be known with certainty. Our age increasingly belongs to the latter kind. The characteristic falsehood of the present moment is not always the bald declaration that truth does not exist, but the insinuation that truth must forever remain negotiable.
Against this, the Psalmist speaks with divine simplicity: Veritas Domini manet in aeternum — the truth of the Lord endureth for ever. Not for as long as it commands a majority; not until the next synod; not while governments tolerate it, academics approve it, bishops defend it, journalists understand it, or populations find it congenial. Truth endures because its source is not consensus but God, Who neither changes nor deceives. The central concern of this edition of Nuntiatoria is therefore not merely the existence of error, but the extraordinary confidence with which contemporary institutions behave as though truth itself could be modified by language, sentiment, policy, diplomacy or fashion.
The previous edition proceeded from the elementary metaphysical affirmation res sunt quod sunt: things are what they are. Reality is not abolished by preference. A thing does not cease to possess its nature because men dislike the consequences of acknowledging it. This edition advances the argument. If things are what they are, then truth is the conformity of the mind to what is, and revealed truth is the conformity of the creature to what God has disclosed. Thus the deeper principle behind Christian realism is not simply that reality resists manipulation, but that truth has an endurance which no ecclesiastical fashion, political ideology or cultural revolution can finally defeat. Veritas Domini manet in aeternum.
This tension between enduring truth and fashionable reinterpretation runs throughout the subjects considered in these pages. It appears first in the contemporary corruption of language. Familiar Catholic words are still employed, but their practical meaning is often quietly displaced. “Pastoral” may come to signify the suspension of moral clarity; “accompaniment” may become a method by which the demand for conversion disappears; “dialogue” may mean the indefinite postponement of judgment; “discernment” may become a means of legitimising conclusions already desired; and “synodality” may be invoked with such elasticity that almost any institutional novelty can be justified beneath its banner. Yet Catholic truth is not preserved merely by retaining Catholic vocabulary. Catholic words must continue to mean Catholic things.
The problem becomes especially visible in the progressive accommodation of sexual identity politics within Christianity. The traditional Christian understanding of man was at once more demanding and more humane because it refused to reduce a human being to his appetites. Catholic moral theology distinguishes temptation from consent, inclination from act, act from identity, weakness from guilt, sin from sinner, compassion from approval and charity from affirmation. Those distinctions protect human dignity because they insist that no man is reducible to his desires.
The contemporary ideological model reverses that anthropology. Desire becomes identity; identity acquires a claim to recognition; recognition develops into a demand for affirmation; and refusal to affirm is redescribed as harm. Once those premises are admitted, explicit doctrinal repudiation becomes almost unnecessary. A Church may continue to insist that doctrine has not changed while its pastoral gestures, liturgical improvisations, institutional language and public priorities progressively teach the faithful that the old moral distinctions no longer matter.
For that reason, developments within Anglicanism ought not to be regarded by Catholics with sectarian satisfaction. They are warnings. Similar dynamics are visible within contemporary Catholicism in the German Synodal Way, in controversies surrounding Fiducia Supplicans, in the contested pastoral consequences of Amoris Laetitia, and in an ecclesiastical rhetoric that increasingly prefers the vocabulary of inclusion, welcome and accompaniment to the traditional vocabulary of conversion, penance, grace and sanctification. The question is not whether sinners should be welcomed. The Church exists for sinners. The decisive question is whether welcome still leads to repentance.
Truth does not become uncharitable merely because it wounds the conscience. The physician who refuses to name the disease does not become compassionate; he becomes useless. There are wounds inflicted by cruelty, but there are also wounds inflicted by truth, and the latter may be the beginning of healing. The Christian pastor therefore does not love the sinner by hiding from him the reality of sin, but by proclaiming both the seriousness of sin and the immeasurable abundance of grace.
This same inversion of charity is examined in our treatment of emotionalism, one of the defining pathologies of contemporary Western culture. Modern man is increasingly encouraged to treat feeling not as something requiring discipline but as a source of moral authority. If a proposition causes distress, the proposition itself becomes suspect; if contradiction feels hurtful, contradiction is redescribed as violence; if affirmation feels kind, affirmation is presumed to be good. The heart, in this anthropology, becomes sovereign.
Christianity teaches something radically different. The heart is not sovereign. The heart is fallen, and therefore it must be converted. Its affections must be purified, educated and ordered towards the good. Christianity does not teach man to ask truth to conform itself to his interior desires; it teaches him to conform his desires to truth.
For precisely this reason, the traditional dedication of August to the Immaculate Heart of Mary provides not an ornamental devotion beside the controversies of this edition, but their theological answer. Mary’s Heart is immaculate not because it is intensely emotional, but because it is perfectly ordered towards God. She receives the word of God, keeps it, ponders it and obeys it. Her fiat is the definitive contradiction of modern subjectivism: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum — be it done unto me according to thy word. She does not ask revelation to accommodate itself to her wishes; she orders her whole being to revelation. The crisis of truth in the modern world is therefore, at its deepest level, a crisis of obedience.
That crisis appears in another form in the Church’s continuing accommodation with Communist China. The appointment of bishops within structures deeply entangled with the Chinese Communist state cannot finally be treated as though it were merely a problem of diplomatic technique. It raises questions about the very constitution of the Church. A bishop is not an official manufactured by the state and later rendered Catholic by administrative agreement. The episcopate belongs to the divine constitution of the Church and cannot be separated from apostolic succession, ecclesial communion and freedom from subordination to political ideology.
Benedict XVI’s reservations regarding the structures of the state-controlled Church in China were therefore not merely political. They were ecclesiological. He understood that a Catholic episcopate cannot be conceived as though its essential meaning were compatible with political structures that treat religious authority as subordinate to the state. Prudence may require patience, diplomacy and even temporary compromises of administration, but prudence does not possess the power to reconcile contradictory principles. Political regimes rise and fall. Concordats are signed and broken. Governments change. The divine constitution of the Church does not.
The same demand for conceptual precision governs our treatment of the Society of Saint Pius X. Few ecclesiastical controversies suffer more from imprecise language. It is easy to pronounce the word “schism” and imagine that all theological and canonical questions have thereby been settled. Yet the Church’s own tradition distinguishes illegality from schism, disobedience from repudiation of authority, canonical irregularity from formal separation, validity from liceity, material conduct from formal adherence, and objective wrongdoing from imputability.
The actual relationship between the Society and Rome has for decades been considerably more complex than the rhetoric of total separation suggests. Roman authorities have granted faculties, recognised or regularised particular sacramental acts, engaged in doctrinal negotiations, received recourse, dealt with marriage questions and reserved matters, and repeatedly distinguished between attendance at SSPX chapels and formal adherence to schism. These facts do not regularise the Society’s canonical position, nor do they justify every decision taken by its superiors. They do, however, demonstrate that ecclesiastical reality cannot responsibly be reduced to polemical shorthand.
There is, in this respect, a limited but illuminating parallel with the Old Roman Apostolate. The two histories are not identical and ought not to be conflated, but both illustrate a difficult ecclesiological truth: Catholics may exist in objectively irregular circumstances without that irregularity automatically resolving every question concerning faith, sacramental life, ecclesial intention and communion. Such cases demand distinctions, historical knowledge, canon law and theology. They cannot be understood by slogans alone.
This brings us inevitably to the question of papal heresy, apostasy and the omission of the Pope from the una cum. The doctrinal and disciplinary crises of recent decades have understandably driven many Catholics back towards the classical theological discussions concerning the possibility of a Pope falling into heresy. Those discussions are genuine and cannot be dismissed as though serious Catholic theologians had never considered the question. Yet neither can they be converted into a mechanism by which every priest or layman becomes competent to declare the Roman See vacant.
Catholic theology does not require us to pretend that error becomes truth merely because it proceeds from a Pope. Nor, however, does it permit private judgment to usurp the judgment of the Church. Between papolatry and sedevacantism lies the much harder path of Catholic realism: the recognition that the Petrine office is divinely established, while the personal acts, policies, prudential judgments and non-definitive teachings of a particular pontiff do not all participate equally in the charism of infallibility.
This distinction is not an evasion. It is a safeguard against two symmetrical errors. The first makes the Pope into an oracle whose every utterance requires intellectual surrender; the second makes every individual Catholic into a tribunal capable of depriving the Pope of office by private judgment. Both errors misunderstand the nature of the Church. Truth does not depend upon the excellence of the man who occupies Peter’s chair. Popes die, pontificates end, policies are reversed, emphases disappear and ecclesiastical fashions are forgotten. Veritas Domini manet in aeternum.
It is in this light that the recent interventions of Cardinal Robert Sarah deserve both gratitude and scrutiny. Few contemporary prelates speak more movingly about silence, transcendence, liturgical orientation, sacred reverence and the spiritual impoverishment produced when worship is reduced to communal self-expression. Much of what Cardinal Sarah says deserves to be heard precisely because much of it is true.
Yet that truth creates its own demand. There remains an uncomfortable disparity between the clarity of his diagnosis and the restraint of his public resistance when decisive moments have arisen. He has spoken powerfully about the traditional liturgical inheritance while continuing ordinarily within the reformed liturgical settlement. His voice was not conspicuously raised in support of Cardinal Zen’s grave warnings concerning synodality. He has often seemed more circumspect than many admirers hoped amid the consequences of Amoris Laetitia, the controversy surrounding Fiducia Supplicans, and the continuing marginalisation of the traditional Roman liturgy.
The question is not whether Cardinal Sarah is sincere. His sincerity need not be doubted. The question is whether truth, once recognised, imposes obligations upon those who hold ecclesiastical office. There comes a point at which lamentation must become witness, at which private conviction must become public confession, and at which a bishop must be willing to incur the cost of defending what he says he believes. That is not activism. It is one of the burdens inherent in episcopacy.
Our examination of the disappearance of Latin from the working intellectual life of the hierarchy concerns the same crisis from another direction. A Church may become estranged from truth not merely by denying propositions, but by losing access to the civilisation in which those propositions were articulated, debated and handed down. Latin was never simply a ceremonial ornament of Roman Catholicism. It was the common intellectual language of theology, canon law, liturgy, magisterial teaching and clerical formation. Augustine, Aquinas, Trent, the Roman Missal, the great canonical collections, papal bulls and theological disputations belonged to a common linguistic world.
A hierarchy increasingly dependent upon translations for access to its own inheritance is not simply experiencing a decline in linguistic competence. It is undergoing a rupture of memory. Translation may convey information, but it does not entirely reproduce intellectual habitation. A cleric who cannot read the Church’s foundational texts in the language in which they were composed is inevitably more dependent upon the interpretative priorities of those who translate, summarise and mediate them.
This matters because every revolution begins by weakening memory. Novelty triumphs most easily where the past can no longer answer back. A Church that loses her tongue risks losing the ability to hear her own ancestors. The truth remains, but the capacity to recognise that truth may diminish when memory is severed from its sources.
The controversy surrounding Don Lorenzo Milani also concerns ecclesiastical memory and the uses to which it may be put. Historical figures are frequently transformed after death into symbols of causes more comprehensive than their own lives. Difficulties are softened, ambiguities explained away, favourable episodes magnified and inconvenient ones relegated until history becomes hagiographical construction.
The renewed promotion of Milani therefore deserves scrutiny not because everything in his priesthood was deficient, but because ecclesiastical rehabilitation is never culturally neutral. The relevant question is not simply whether good things may be found in his life. Good things can be found in many complex figures. The question is why this particular figure is being elevated now, which aspects of his legacy are being privileged, and what conception of the priesthood and of the Church his present admirers intend him to symbolise.
The Church proposes saints because she proposes forms of life. Formal canonisation is therefore never merely antiquarian, and cultural canonisation is no less significant simply because it precedes the juridical act. When controversial figures are repeatedly presented as heralds of a new ecclesial future, Catholics are entitled to ask what precisely is being recommended for imitation.
The controversy involving Professor Jason Arday moves the same question into the academy. Universities exist because truth can be approached through evidence, argument, criticism and disciplined intellectual disagreement. Once claims begin to derive authority from the identity of the claimant rather than the strength of the evidence, academic inquiry is already compromised.
Contemporary identity politics frequently produces precisely this confusion. Biography becomes epistemology; criticism becomes prejudice; disagreement becomes injury; representation becomes moral authority. In such an environment, institutions that speak incessantly of diversity may become curiously intolerant of the diversity upon which scholarship most depends: diversity of thought, interpretation and argument.
The university cannot remain a university if some conclusions become institutionally sacred before inquiry begins. Truth does not require protection from questions. Falsehood often does.
Something more sombre appears in the controversy surrounding the death of Ann Widdecombe and the public remarks that followed it. A civilisation reveals itself not only in the treatment of its heroes but in the treatment of its enemies. Political disagreement may be fierce, but the death of an opponent ought to restore some sense of proportion. The dead cannot answer, and therefore to convert a death into an occasion for ideological sneering is not bravery but a collapse of moral restraint.
Christian civilisation insists that political opponents remain human beings before they are political categories. Every man bears the image of God. Every man must die. Every soul will be judged. Death therefore exposes the absurdity of imagining that political tribe, ideological fashion or public applause constitutes the final measure of a human life.
The slogans end. The campaigns end. The applause ends. The soul remains. Here, too, Veritas Domini manet in aeternum carries eschatological weight. Truth outlives not only institutions but men, and every man must finally encounter the truth from which he spent his life either learning or fleeing.
Against these controversies stands the magnificent figure of Saint John Mary Vianney, whose feast is observed on 9 August according to the traditional calendar. The Curé d’Ars provides a rebuke to almost every contemporary theory of ecclesiastical renewal. He did not transform his parish through endless consultation, therapeutic language, demographic analysis or programmes designed to discover which doctrines his people might find more acceptable. He prayed, fasted, preached, catechised, offered the Holy Sacrifice and spent vast portions of his life in the confessional.
He spoke of sin because sin was real. He spoke of Hell because Hell was real. He spoke of grace and mercy because they were real. He demanded conversion because he loved souls. He understood that the priest’s task is not to reconcile Christianity to the preferences of his congregation, but to reconcile his congregation to God. His pastoral method was therefore severe only to those who confuse love with indulgence. The very multitudes who eventually came to Ars testify to the enduring attraction of sanctity when sanctity is permitted to remain itself.
Saint John Vianney also demonstrates a principle urgently needed by churchmen today: credibility does not arise principally from rhetorical sophistication but from conformity between doctrine and life. Men believed Vianney because he believed what he preached, and because the cost of his own life demonstrated the seriousness of his conviction. Truth spoken without sacrifice may remain truth, but truth embodied in sacrifice acquires an authority no strategy can counterfeit.
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost supplies the final Gospel image for this edition. Christ encounters the deaf and dumb man, withdraws him from the crowd, touches his ears and tongue, looks towards Heaven, sighs and says: Ephpheta — be opened. The miracle is physical, but its spiritual significance is unmistakable. Before man can speak rightly, he must hear rightly.
That is precisely the crisis of our age. We are surrounded by words but starved of meaning. We speak ceaselessly but hesitate to name obvious realities. We possess more information than any previous civilisation, yet increasingly lack the habits of mind necessary to distinguish evidence from narrative, argument from assertion, compassion from sentimentality, authority from power and truth from consensus. Even within the Church there sometimes appears a strange inversion: remarkable confidence in speaking where ambiguity is fashionable, coupled with remarkable hesitation where clarity may prove costly.
The Ephpheta therefore becomes a prayer for the Church herself. Open our ears that we may hear what has been handed down; loose our tongues that we may confess it without shame; purify our hearts that we may prefer truth to comfort, fidelity to applause, and God to the spirit of the age.
The Catholic method has always been fundamentally receptive. Saint Paul says: Tradidi quod et accepi — I delivered unto you that which I also received. The Church does not invent revelation; she receives it. She does not manufacture sacramental reality; she safeguards it. She does not revise the moral law according to the emotional climate of successive generations; she teaches it. She does not create truth by consensus; she bears witness to Christ, Who is Truth.
This is the great consolation contained within Nuntiatoria CXVIII. We have not been given the impossible task of manufacturing truth amid confusion. We have been given the demanding but intelligible task of remaining faithful to it. Institutions may fail; prelates may equivocate; governments may pressure the Church; academics may surrender intellectual liberty to ideology; ecclesiastical diplomats may mistake accommodation for prudence; cultures may rename vice as virtue and virtue as cruelty. None of these possesses the power to alter the nature of reality or revoke what God has revealed.
The obligation of the Catholic is therefore both more difficult and simpler than modernity imagines. We must know the truth, love the truth, speak the truth and live according to the truth. Where we have failed, the Christian answer is not to demand that truth itself be modified, but to repent. The confessional, not the committee, is the divinely appointed response to the contradiction between God’s law and the sinner’s life.
The Immaculate Heart of Mary shows us this obedience. Saint John Vianney shows us its pastoral power. The Gospel’s Ephpheta reminds us that truth must first be received before it can be proclaimed. The whole Catholic tradition testifies that sanctity begins when man ceases to ask reality to submit to him and instead submits himself to God.
This is why the Church can survive every crisis. Her indefectibility has never depended upon the brilliance of administrators, the courage of every bishop, the consistency of every Pope, the approval of governments or the stability of Christian civilisation. Her foundation is Christ. Human institutions change because men change. Christ does not.
Thus the words chosen as the motto of this edition are not merely a literary theme. They are a profession of faith, a principle of resistance and a source of consolation. They rebuke every attempt to make truth subordinate to fashion, and they console every Catholic who fears that confusion has become permanent. Confusion is not permanent. Error is not permanent. Ideologies are not permanent. Pontificates are not permanent. Governments are not permanent. Empires are not permanent.
VERITAS DOMINI MANET IN AETERNUM.
The truth of the Lord endureth for ever.
Everything else passes.
IN THIS EDITION
- THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHURCH AND THE PATRIOTIC CHURCH: The Lesson Rome Forgot
The Vatican–China agreement raises concerns over ecclesiastical independence, echoing historical tensions from revolutionary France. The arrangement seeks to normalise episcopal appointments amid state oversight, with the critical question being whether it ultimately secures Church governance or cedes authority to political powers, risking the essence of Catholic ecclesiology. - A Victim with Christ: St John Mary Vianney, Confessor — 9 August
Saint John Mary Vianney exemplifies a true priesthood, embodying the Catholic Church’s teachings through his dedication to confession, penance, and prayer, despite facing numerous challenges. His commitment to spiritual service and zeal for the salvation of souls highlight the significance of holiness, emphasising that true pastoral effectiveness stems from personal sanctity and unwavering charity. - 09.08.26 Nuntiatoria CXVIII: Veritas Domini manet in aeternum
The editorial discusses the timeless nature of truth in the face of modern reinterpretations and societal changes. It argues that truth, rooted in divine revelation, transcends consensus and cultural shifts. Highlighting the distinctions in Catholic teaching amidst contemporary moral uncertainties, it emphasises the Church’s duty to uphold and proclaim enduring truths, urging fidelity to God over societal approval. - ORDO w/c 09.08.26
The content outlines the liturgical calendar for specific days in August, highlighting feast days, classes of celebrations, and associated prayers. Notable events include the feast of St. Lawrence and the Vigil of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It provides details on liturgical colours and specific commemorations. - Rome’s Red Line Runs Through Écône, Not Beijing
Pope Leo XIV recently appointed two bishops in Inner Mongolia, highlighting the ongoing Vatican-Beijing agreement. Concerns arise regarding the bishops’ ties to a structure that prioritises Communist Party ideology over traditional Catholic doctrine. Critics argue that these appointments undermine ecclesiastical independence, contrasting sharply with the Vatican’s strict stance towards traditionalist groups like Écône. - THE SOCIETY IS NOT THE SCANDAL: The SSPX, Rome, supplied jurisdiction, and the myth of the “parallel Church”
The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) faces accusations of being a “parallel Church,” which simplistically addresses a complex crisis within the Catholic Church. While acknowledging its irregularity, the SSPX maintains that it operates under extraordinary necessity, recognising the Roman authority. The recent severe actions by Rome do not negate its historical dealings with the SSPX, which illustrate a nuanced relationship rather than outright separation. - Emotionalism: The Bane of Modern Life and the Insensibility of the Present Generation
The modern emphasis on emotionalism has led to a society increasingly shaped by feelings rather than reason. While people are highly attuned to their emotions, this sensitivity often results in moral insensitivity and dependence on external validation. True compassion requires a discernment of truth and the courage to prioritise the greater good over immediate feelings. - HATRED WEARING THE VESTMENTS OF VIRTUE
The reactions to the deaths of controversial figures Rod Liddle and Ann Widdecombe illustrate a worrying trend in society where ideological categorisation overshadows humanity. Celebrations of their deaths reveal a moral failure to uphold compassion, highlighting the risks of identitarian politics that dehumanises individuals based on their beliefs and reduces sympathy accordingly. - The Canonisation Before the Cause: Fr Lorenzo Milani, Leo XIV, and the Manufacture of a New Catholic Hero
The article discusses the potential canonisation of Fr Lorenzo Milani by Popes Francis and Leo XIV, highlighting the rhetorical shift portraying him as an exemplary figure despite past controversies. It questions the implications of this rehabilitation for ecclesial memory, the priesthood’s identity, and the Church’s response to modern social issues. - The Legend Cambridge Chose to Believe
The controversy surrounding Professor Jason Arday, who recently resigned from Cambridge amid investigations into his qualifications, raises critical questions about institutional credulity and the potential consequences of prioritising inspiring narratives over rigorous verification. Allegations of exaggeration regarding his achievements have led to calls for accountability and scrutiny of the appointment process at Cambridge. - When Rome Can No Longer Read Rome
The decline in Latin proficiency among the College of Cardinals undermines the Catholic Church’s connection to its own liturgical, legal, and theological sources. With over 65% reportedly lacking adequate Latin skills, Church leaders become reliant on translations, risking misinterpretations and a loss of doctrinal clarity essential for governance and tradition. - Ephpheta — Be Thou Opened: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost highlights the integration of key doctrines such as grace, baptism, and Christ’s resurrection. The Gospel features Christ healing a deaf-mute, symbolising the transformation through grace. The liturgy emphasises opening spiritual senses and the necessity of divine assistance, reminding believers to be receptive to God’s voice before responding in faith. - When Peter seems to fail: Heresy, the Papacy, the una cum and the limits of private judgement
The article examines the complex issue of whether a Pope can be deemed a heretic and the implications for his authority within the Church. Traditional Catholics face dilemmas as recent doctrinal ambiguities challenge established beliefs. It argues for careful distinction between material and formal heresy, cautioning against simplistic conclusions regarding papal validity without clear evidence. - August beneath the Immaculate Heart of Mary
August is dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, culminating in the feast of the Assumption. This month invites contemplation of Mary’s virtues, including her purity, compassion, and unwavering fidelity. Devotion involves deeper introspection, encouraging the faithful to align with Christ’s teachings and embody true obedience, charity, and sorrow for sin.
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