No one of sound mind can doubt the issue of this contest between man and the Most High. Man, abusing his liberty, can violate the right and the majesty of the Creator of the Universe; but the victory will ever be with God — nay, defeat is at hand at the moment when man, under the delusion of his triumph, rises up with most audacity.
– Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, “On the Restoration of all things in Christ”
(LifeSiteNews) — It has been reported that in remarks to a delegation of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Leo XIV said that “our task is not to build a Christendom.”
Rev. Prof. Dr. Jerry Pillay, General Secretary of the WCC, relayed that Leo told representatives that “while our task is not to build a Christendom yet Christians must work together in unity to heal and restore the world.”
The World Council of Churches published the statement on its website on February 28. On March 6, the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity published its own report on the meeting and did not deny the words reported by the General Secretary or offer any clarification as to Leo’s meaning.
This makes the remark worthy of further consideration, particularly because, as we shall see, it finds support in other public statements made by Leo.
The statement that “our task is not to build a Christendom” is directly contrary to the “Great Commission” entrusted to the Apostles by Our Lord Jesus Christ before His Ascension:
All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Mt 28:18-20)
The gospel of Jesus Christ demands a transformation of every aspect of human life. It sanctifies not only individuals but also the societies which those individuals form when they come together.
Christendom is the order that results when a body of men, spread across many nations, publicly acknowledge Jesus Christ and the authority of the Catholic Church and seek to bring every aspect of social life into conformity with natural and divine law.
The term has been repeatedly used, throughout many centuries, by popes and ecumenical councils, to describe the Christian social order that resulted from the adoption of the Catholic faith by entire nations from the period of late antiquity onward.
The building of Christendom cannot be separated from the preaching of the gospel. To deny that the Church has the mission to “build Christendom” would be to assert that there are some areas of human life that are not subject to the authority of God or to the transformative action of His grace.
On the contrary, the Catholic Church teaches that every aspect of human life is subject to natural and divine law, and that all men are strictly bound to acknowledge Jesus Christ and submit themselves to the authority of the Catholic Church, not only as individuals but also when they come together to form societies. ((See LifeSiteNews’ series on Liberalism for an in-depth examination of these questions. The series begins here.))
The reality of Christendom
In his encyclical letter Immortale Dei, “On the Christian Constitution of States,” Pope Leo XIII taught:
There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favour of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. ((Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, No. 21.))
He continued:
The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. ((Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, No. 21.))
And in Rerum Novarum, his encyclical “On Capital and Labor,” the same pontiff taught:
Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. ((Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, No. 27.))
The exceptional nature of this civilization flowed from the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ:
Of this beneficent transformation Jesus Christ was at once the first cause and the final end; as from Him all came, so to Him was all to be brought back. For, when the human race, by the light of the Gospel message, came to know the grand mystery of the Incarnation of the Word and the redemption of man, at once the life of Jesus Christ, God and Man, pervaded every race and nation, and interpenetrated them with His faith, His precepts, and His laws. ((Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, No. 27.))
And, in Quadragesima Anno, on the 40th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI affirmed:
At one time there existed a social order, which, though by no means perfect in every respect, corresponded nevertheless in a certain measure to right reason according to the needs and conditions of the times. That this order has long since perished is not due to the fact that it was incapable of development and adaptation to changing needs and circumstances, but rather to the wrongdoing of men.((Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, No. 97.))
That social order was Christendom, and it was brought down by the “wrongdoing of men.”
The rebellion against Christendom
The rebellion against the Christian social order began with the Protestant Reformation, which substituted the principle of private judgement in matters of religion in place of the principle of obedience to the Sacred Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
The conviction that the individual has the right to decide what God has revealed lies at the root of the ideology of liberalism, which is the chief cause of the evils afflicting the modern world, and which now threatens to bring our society to its final ruin. From religious liberalism, other forms of liberalism began to develop from the 17th century onward.
Pope Leo XIII explained that liberalism proclaims, “the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence, and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth.” ((Pope Leo XIII, Libertas, No. 6.))
That is, liberalism is the assertion of man’s independence from any necessary submission to an order existing outside his own intellect and will.
It holds that it is the individual man who must determine for himself what is true and what is good. The exercise of freedom is regarded by the liberal as man’s highest good.
Liberalism takes different forms, depending on the area of human life in which man seeks independence from divine authority. For example:
- Religious liberalism asserts man’s independence from God’s authority in religious matters, that is, it rejects the teaching authority of the Church, positing instead that man may choose for himself what to believe
- Political liberalism asserts man’s independence from God’s authority in the state, that is, it rejects God as the sole source of legitimate political authority, positing instead that the authority of the state is derived from man and from the consent of the governed
- Moral liberalism asserts man’s independence of from God’s authority in determining the morality of human acts, that is, it rejects the obligation to conform all actions to the divine law revealed by God and the natural law written on our hearts, positing instead that we are free to act as we please, as long as we don’t violate the rights of others.
(For a deeper examination of the nature of liberalism, see here, and the series beginning here.)
Developing in the wake of Protestant Revolution, liberalism made itself manifest in England and Scotland in the civil wars and revolutions of the 17th century. The foundation of Freemasonry in 1717, gave it an organized form through which it could corrupt the political and intellectual life of Europe in the 18th century.
In 1776, liberal political principles were enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and in 1787 they took shape as a mode of government when the American Revolution enshrined liberal principles in the world’s first liberal constitution.
Beginning in 1789, liberalism broke out with greater savagery and violence in France. A triumphant Napoleon then imposed liberalism across Europe at the point of the sword, resulting in the destruction of the Catholic order of many states and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. In 1848, the flag of revolution was raised all over Europe, and the Christian order, which had been partially restored after the defeat of Napoleon, suffered further deadly wounds. Meanwhile liberalism had infected Latin America, plunging the continent into a series of revolutions and wars from which it has yet to recover.
The second half of the 19th century saw the triumph of liberal principles in the political and educational spheres in much of the western world, and the rise of socialism and communism as powerful political movements. These ideologies – which are at one and the same time a development liberalism’s errors and a reaction to its consequences – began their fatal advance toward the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise to power of communist regimes in much of the world.
The theory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, was the most significant of a number of new ideas which contributed to a widespread crisis of faith, and strengthened the advance of anti-Christian philosophies and ideologies.
From 1914 to 1918, what had been Christendom tore itself apart, in possibly the most morally destructive war in human history. In 1918, Europe’s last Catholic empire, that of Austria-Hungary, collapsed. The 1920s saw moral collapse, including the first sexual revolution, and the rise of political ideologies – Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism – which, alongside liberalism, destroyed much of what remained of Christian civilization.
In the post-WWII world, attempts by Catholic politicians in the 1940s and 1950s to lead political movements founded on Catholic principles, were swept away in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the documents of which enshrined liberal principles in texts which were presented to the world as acts of the magisterium.
With Vatican II, Christendom – a public social order formed by Christianity – finally ceased to be. Within a decade of the Council’s close, abortion was legal in many European countries, and in the United States, along with liberal divorce laws, contraception, pornography, the widespread of acceptance of homosexual acts, and a myriad of other evils. These have spread to other parts of the once-Catholic world.
Since the close of the Council, the energies of Catholics – reduced to a faithful remnant – have largely been directed toward defending the faith against apostates from the hierarchy, and toward combatting moral evils such as abortion.
The mission of the Church to preach the gospel and build up Christian civilization has been continually hindered by false shepherds who hide the light of the gospel from mankind, with the consequence that most men, women, and children depart from this life without the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Truly, we live at the darkest moment of human history.
‘To restore all things in Christ’
In the face of mankind’s progressive apostasy from God, the Roman Pontiffs never ceased to raise a warning voice and call man back to God.
Beginning in 1738 with Pope Clement XIII’s condemnation of Freemasonry, In eminenti, the popes were tireless in condemning liberalism at every stage of its development.
During the first half of the 19th century, under popes like Gregory XVI (1831-1846) and Pius IX (1846-1878), the Church identified and condemned the errors underpinning the new ideologies. The remarkable, awe-inspiring papacy of Leo XIII (1878-1903) showed mankind the path forward. With great wisdom, this pope resolved fraught questions, in areas including the relationship between labor and capital, between church and state, and between moral obligation and human liberty. Leo XIII also set in motion a revival of philosophy and theology, which was to yield great fruit for three generations from the 1880s down to the 1960s.
Pope Leo XIII was succeeded by a saint. Pope St. Pius X (1903-1914) continued the sacred combat of his predecessors against liberalism and other errors. His greatest gift to the Church was his profound analysis of the heresy of Modernism in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi. This remains one of the most important crucial texts for those who want to gain an understanding of the crisis engulfing Catholics today.
Pope St. Pius X’s first encyclical was E Supremi, “On the Restoration of All Things in Christ.” In this letter, he expressed his feelings on being elected pope:
We were terrified beyond all else by the disastrous state of human society today. For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction? ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 3.))
This “terrible and deep-rooted malady” is the liberalism and Modernism that have now brought us very close to the complete destruction of our society. The situation in 2026 is incomparably than in 1903.
St. Pius X continued:
You understand, Venerable Brethren, what this disease is — apostasy from God, than which in truth nothing is more allied with ruin, according to the word of the Prophet: “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish” (Ps. 1xxii., 17). ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 3.))
The Holy Father expressed his fear that the days of Antichrist were at hand:
When all this is considered there is good reason to fear lest this great perversity may be as it were a foretaste, and perhaps the beginning of those evils which are reserved for the last days; and that there may be already in the world the “Son of Perdition” of whom the Apostle speaks (II. Thess. ii., 3). ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 5.))
He regarded it as his duty, on being elected pope:
(T)o find a remedy for this great evil, considering as addressed to Us that Divine command: “Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations and over kingdoms, to root up, and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant” (Jerem. i., 10). ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 3.))
And he knew what the remedy was:
We proclaim that We have no other program in the Supreme Pontificate but that “of restoring all things in Christ” (Ephes. i., 10), so that “Christ may be all and in all” (Coloss. iii., 2). ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 4.))
[…]
Venerable Brethren, we shall never, however much we exert ourselves, succeed in calling men back to the majesty and empire of God, except by means of Jesus Christ. “No one,” the Apostle admonishes us, “can lay other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.” (I. Cor., iii., II.) ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 8))
[…]
Hence it follows that to restore all things in Christ and to lead men back to submission to God is one and the same aim. To this, then, it behooves Us to devote Our care—to lead back mankind under the dominion of Christ; this done, We shall have brought it back to God. ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 8.))
The “empire of God” and “dominion of Christ” extend to every aspect of human life – nothing escapes the sovereignty of God. Hence His Vicar on Earth continued:
You see, then, Venerable Brethren, the duty that has been imposed alike upon Us and upon you of bringing back to the discipline of the Church human society, now estranged from the wisdom of Christ; the Church will then subject it to Christ, and Christ to God. ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 9.))
This great program of St. Pius X of restoring all things in Christ is nothing other than the building, or rather the restoring of Christendom, as the holy pontiff taught in Notre Charge Apostolique:
We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker – the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO. ((St. Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique.))
The Catholic Church vs the Synodal Church
The program of St. Pius X and his predecessors was also that of his successors. Pope Pius XI (1922-1939), in particular, is known for his proclamation of the Kingship of Christ and for his defense of Our Lord’s “Social Reign.” that is His reign over all aspects of human society, not just over individuals.
In his encyclical Quas Primas, “On the Feast of Christ the King,” Pope Pius XI wrote:
We referred to the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring. And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations … (I)t seemed to Us that peace could not be more effectually restored nor fixed upon a firmer basis than through the restoration of the Empire of Our Lord. ((Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, No. 1.))
The “restoration of the Empire of Our Lord” is precisely what is rejected in the statement “our task is not to build a Christendom.”
If Leo indeed spoke these words – and the Vatican has not denied it – then it is a clear formulation of his refusal, already apparent, to follow the great succession of Roman Pontiffs who have recognized the crisis facing humanity, identified its causes, and worked for the restoration of Christian civilization.
Instead, he has placed himself on the side of the liberals, that is, on the side of those who think that Our Lord Jesus Christ ought not to reign over society.
This is nothing other than a rejection of the very mission of the Church.
Leo XIV has already made his allegiance clear to all who are willing to see.
On May 8, 2025, the day he was elected as the successor of Francis, he stood on the loggia at St Peter’s and declared: “We want to be a synodal church.”
The “synodal church” is a church re-founded on liberal principles. It marks the conclusion of the development and spread of liberalism outlined in this article. Synodality is the denial of the threefold authority of Christ – teaching, governing, and sanctifying – which is exercised in the Church by Her divine founder in favor of a system that derives its authority from the people.
We have a very clear idea of what the “synodal church” is intended to be, because a blueprint for its creation was published by the Vatican under Francis.
The document, entitled “The Bishop of Rome,” was written by Cardinal Koch, the head of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity, and was published with the approval of Francis. Cardinal Koch retains his position under Leo.
This document speaks openly about what it calls the “conciliar/synodal church.”
An analysis of the document published by LifeSiteNews noted that:
Once the orthodox idea of the papacy has been discredited, the path will be open to establish the new “synodal papacy,” which will preside over a new inclusive church void of doctrine or discipline. All the baptized will be invited into this synodal church, without having to abandon their doctrinal errors.
The implementation of the blueprint “would lead to a global ecumenical church void of doctrine or discipline.”
This “synodal church” cannot be confused with the Catholic Church, because it has a diametrically opposed mission.
The Catholic Church has the mission of restoring all things in Christ, so that “Christ may be all and in all”. (Col 3:2) The Catholic Church seeks to build up Christendom, so that every man, woman, and child might be part of the Mystical Body of Christ, and so that every aspect of human life, individual and social, might be sanctified.
The synodal church does not seek to “build a Christendom” but rather pursues a purely human unity, uniting mankind only in pursuit of a temporal political agenda.
No man can serve both of these masters, because their ends are incompatible.
As John Henry Newman wrote:
If St. Athanasius could agree with Arius, St. Cyril with Nestorius, St. Dominic with the Albigenses, or St. Ignatius with Luther, then may two parties coalesce, in a certain assignable time, or by certain felicitously gradual approximations, or with dexterous limitations and concessions, who mutually think light darkness and darkness light.
“Delenda est Carthago;” one or other must perish. ((John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching: Volume 1, Lecture 4.
https://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume1/lecture4.html
One or other must perish.
This was the teaching of Pope St. Pius X who, in his first encyclical, called on Catholics to “use every means and exert all our energy to bring about the utter disappearance of the enormous and detestable wickedness, so characteristic of our time — the substitution of man for God.” ((Pope St. Pius X, E Supremi, No. 9.))
The “synodal church” which seeks to replace the Mystical Body of Christ with a man-centered assembly, aims at the ultimate “substitution of man for God,” the ultimate manifestation of liberalism.
Yet today, many Catholics, out of a well-meaning but misplaced sense of loyalty, offer their obedience to a man whose words, actions, and public profession make it plain that his allegiance is to the “synodal church” and not to the Church founded by Jesus Christ.
Leo told us on the day of election which church he serves: “We want to be a synodal church.”
Let’s do him the courtesy of believing that he told us the truth.
