EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Bishop Rob Mutsaerts says ‘The missing words in the Synod are repentance and conversion’

 

Niwa Limbu.                                     Aug. 22, 2026

Photo: Infovaticana

Bishop Rob Mutsaerts has served as the Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of ’s-Hertogenbosch since 2010. His ministry has been typified by a confidence in proclaiming the truth, notably through his criticism of the 2019 Amazon Synod and his concerns over the lack of evangelical wisdom behind Traditionis Custodes.

He has also been a forceful voice against the tides of Dutch secularism in a country that has experienced some of the more pernicious elements of the trend. In the Netherlands, the lives of newborns and children under 12 can be deliberately ended without an affirmative request from the child under strictly defined circumstances, while euthanasia can be administered to those aged 12 and over in cases of psychiatric suffering. Almost 60 per cent of the country reports no religious affiliation, while Islam is the fastest-growing major religion, with more than twice as many 15–17-year-olds identifying as Muslim (14.2 per cent) as Catholic (6.9 per cent). Against this backdrop, His Grace has worked tirelessly, writing numerous spiritual works and encouraging conversions, work that is bearing fruit in a country that saw a 40 per cent increase in adult baptisms in 2024.

In this exclusive interview, Bishop Mutsaerts shares with AdVaticanum his reflections on a recent open letter he wrote to Pope Leo XIV, his views on the synodal process and how he sees the Church in the Netherlands.

AV: In your recent open letter to Pope Leo XIV, you write that judging the synodal process by its own internal metrics (listening, participation, documents) can produce a positive narrative, but that the real tests are stronger faith, clearer proclamation of Christ, deeper Catholic identity, more conversions, higher Sunday Mass attendance, etc. Could you walk us through how you arrived at that list of criteria?

+RM: The final canon of the Code of Canon Law ends with the famous principle that “the salvation of souls … must always be the supreme law in the Church” (salus animarum … suprema semper lex esse debet, can. 1752). If one evaluates the synodal process, the decisive question is not whether consultations were extensive, people felt heard, committees functioned well, or documents were produced. The question is: has all this made it more likely that men and women will believe in Jesus Christ, repent, receive the sacraments, persevere in grace, and attain eternal life? On that criterion, there are serious grounds for criticism.

AV: You insist that synodality cannot be an end in itself. What do you mean by that, and how should we understand the relationship between the means (consultation, participation, structures) and the true end of the Church’s mission?

+RM: “Walking together” is valuable only if the Church knows where she is walking. The destination is not increased participation but Christ; not ecclesiastical dialogue but holiness; not inclusion as an abstract principle but incorporation into Christ and, ultimately, eternal salvation.

Consultation, participation, pastoral structures and synodal methods all have their place. Once the means start occupying more attention than the end, something has become inverted.

Interestingly, the synodal documents themselves repeatedly acknowledge that evangelisation is the mission of the Church. The European continental document states that the Church’s task is to “proclaim the Gospel” and invite people into communion, and calls for renewed missionary activity in Europe. The disagreement, therefore, is less about the official intention than about emphasis, method and measurable fruit.

AV: In the letter, you state: “Christus heeft geen discussiegroep opgericht. Hij riep apostelen. Hij gaf hun gezag” (“Christ did not found a discussion group. He called apostles. He gave them authority”), and you add that the faith does not arise from the Church first taking an inventory of what people believe and then distilling a common conviction from those experiences. How do you see this principle applying to the ongoing implementation phase of the synodal process, which continues towards an Ecclesial Assembly in Rome in October 2028? Where, in your view, does authentic listening end and the teaching office of the bishops begin?

+RM: A physician listens carefully to the patient, but listening is not the cure. And the Church possesses something unusual among institutions: she has received a Revelation which she did not invent and cannot rewrite. Consequently, there must always come a moment when listening gives way to proclamation of the Gospel. The missing words in the Synod are repentance and conversion.

AV: Is there a necessary contradiction between synodality and tradition? What would a synodality truly ordered towards salus animarum look like in practice?

+RM: There is no necessary contradiction between synodality and tradition. Imagine a synodal Church asking every parish: Why are your baptised teenagers disappearing? Why have confessions collapsed? Where are young families attending Mass? Why? Where are young adults requesting baptism? What brought them to Christ? That would be synodality ordered towards salus animarum. Listening would remain – but we would be listening partly because we desperately wanted to discover how to save souls. And suddenly the entire process would acquire focus.

AV: The Netherlands is widely regarded as one of the most secularised and liberal societies in the Western world. What do you identify as the roots of this crisis in the Dutch Church?

+RM: The Dutch reality provides a sobering test. The situation of Catholicism in the Netherlands is extraordinarily difficult to present as a pastoral success. Dutch statistics report that there were 3.448 million registered Catholics in 2024. Yet the sacramental statistics are even more depressing. From a Catholic perspective, this points towards a catastrophic failure to transmit the faith from one generation to another.

And this is precisely where salus animarumbecomes uncomfortable. If millions remain nominally Catholic but only a tiny proportion regularly encounter the Eucharistic Christ; if baptised children disappear before Confirmation; if Catholic marriage becomes statistically exceptional; then it is insufficient to say that new consultative structures have been created.

More: https://x.com/realadvaticanum/status/2091232471354331205?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w

“Budget fruits you will know them.”

One of the clearest bad fruits of Medjugorje is Ivan Dragičević.

For nearly 45 years, he has claimed that the Mother of God appears to him every single day while his public identity, speaking appearances, and family pilgrimage business have grown around that claim.

Authentic Marian visionaries do not make themselves the center. They tremble, obey, suffer, retreat, and disappear behind the message.

Ivan became a traveling attraction whose appearances were promoted with the expectation that an “apparition” would occur while he was there.

He married the former Miss Massachusetts, has made a fortune off the apparitions, and now lives in a multi-million dollar home in Boston when he is not needed to put on shows and cater to manipulated pilgrims in Medjugorge.

In 2013, Rome intervened.

The CDF warned every U.S. diocese that Ivan was touring American parishes and was expected to receive “apparitions” during his visits. Clergy and faithful were not permitted to attend events where the visions’ credibility was taken for granted.

Think about how spiritually grotesque that is:

The Queen of Heaven reduced to a scheduled feature on a parish-event itinerary as though Ivan could carry a daily apparition from venue to venue while the Church itself still refused to authenticate it.

And the concerns about money are not internet gossip.

Published accounts of the Ruini Commission’s confidential report say it was especially severe toward Ivan, recording grave and substantiated reservations about his credibility and criticizing the visionaries’ ambiguous relationship with money. 

The commercial overlap remains visible.

Pilgrimage companies advertise “Medjugorje with Ivan,” including seven nights in the Dragičević family home, meals, a private chapel, spiritual activities, and opportunities connected with Ivan’s presence and testimony.

Does that prove criminal fraud? No, and I will not claim what I cannot prove.

But it reveals something spiritually ugly: the alleged daily access to Our Lady and the family’s commercial pilgrimage enterprise are not cleanly separated.

The visionary is part of the product.

Medjugorje defenders answer: “But look at the conversions!”

God can draw souls even from confusion. The Rosary works. Confession works. The Eucharist is Jesus Christ.

None of that authenticates Ivan or transforms celebrity, commerce, scheduled visions, and grave credibility concerns into good fruit.

Ivan is not the entire case against Medjugorje. He is one bad fruit among many: conflict with lawful bishops, dubious messages, celebrity visionaries, financial entanglements, and nearly half a century of claims the Church has never declared supernatural. 

I do not believe Our Lady is behind it.

And I love her too much to call this hers.

Source: @BreeSolstad

N.B. Agreed: conversions prove God was at work. They don’t prove the alleged apparitions or the location of conversions was necessary to the working of grace or are the source of it. Bernadette and other approved visionaries withdrew from the world and did not enrich themselves as seers of the apparitions. Bernadette said, “The waters are not for me” after Our Lady told her, “I cannot promise you happiness in this life, only in the next.”

The Feast of the Holy Face

In 1958, a few short months before his death, Ven Pope Pius XII approved the Feast of the Holy Face, enshrining it on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. 

We can consider the Feast of the Holy Face, as one of the final gifts left to the Church by that most holy pontiff.

And considering his great concern about the future of the Church at the end of his life, we should most urgently consider what this meant to him.

So if you are a Pacelli fan, learn about the Holy Face.

Source: auxiliumvolto.com

Fleeing public school indoctrination and language barriers for home schooling

My story about pulling our son out of NC public schools to homeschool him reached far more people than I expected.

So I owe you the full explanation. Fair warning: it's worse than you think.

1) My son was in a class with many kids that could not speak the English language.

Zero English. None. Not a word.

You might be asking yourself... well, how did lessons occur in the classroom?

I'm glad you asked.

In fact, the way the teachers communicated with the Spanish-speaking only students was by using their personal iPhones as translators, speaking instructions into the iPhones, and the iPhones spitting out the Spanish instructions to the Spanish-speaking students, and then the Spanish-speaking students speaking Spanish into the iPhones, and the English questions/answers coming are read out for the teacher.

If you're exhausted just reading that...good. Now hold that feeling.

Imagine you’re an English-speaking student sitting in that same classroom, like my 5 year old son was.

Every lesson is interrupted while translations happen and naturally, the teacher’s attention is constantly divided.

The pace of learning slows DRAMATICALLY for everyone else.

The consequence is that the classroom stops being optimized for the students who can already understand the instruction and instead becomes an exercise in overcoming a language barrier that never should have existed inside an American, English-language classroom in the first place.

A place built to teach kids who are ready to learn quietly becomes a place mostly occupied with bridging a gap in language.

I don't think my five-year-old should spend one irretrievable year of his early schooling waiting at that bridge.

2) I saw the writing on the wall for the future of my county's school system and realized that not only was the future incredibly bleak, but downright aggressively woke in a way words fail to describe.

For multiple months, our school system allowed kids to:

a) Create Anti-ICE protest signs inside of the schools

b) Exit the school grounds, often WITHOUT SUPERVISION by ANYONE

c) Stand along busy highways and scream "FUCK ICE" for a few hours

Most shockingly, it was clearly encouraged by the schools, by leadership, and by many of the teachers.

That was political activism.

It gets worse... for years Buncombe County has forced biological girls to deal with biological males (who call themselves trans) to enter into girls locker rooms and bathrooms.

This has been happening for years and no one dared to try to change or speak up until very very recently... that should tell you a lot about what the school leadership believes and their political bent.

There is an evil lie that I see being spread by many that have condemned our decision to homeschool.

That lie is this:

“Public schools are neutral. By homeschooling, you’re only exposing your child to one side.”

This is a grossly evil lie.

In fact, the opposite is happening.

Schools are not neutral institutions simply because they are publicly funded; every school day has a limited number of hours, and every lesson taught means another lesson isn’t.

There is a finite amount of time in school, everyone understands this, which means priorities matter.

Every hour spent discussing political activism is an hour that isn’t spent on reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, or civics.

So when schools increasingly prioritize activism, identity politics, or current political causes... something else inevitably gets pushed aside.

Guess what? That’s not neutrality, that’s a choice.

What so many parents continue to discover is that their child comes home with a head full of ideas about the world that are purely one-sided because that's all there was time for.

Nuance is lost because nuance is time-consuming.

Is there TIME for nuance when half the class cannot speak English and you're speaking into a translator?

Of course not.

A child who can chant but cannot argue the other side hasn't been educated, they've been conditioned and the conditioners always, ALWAYS believe they're doing the child a kindness.

3) I'm fairly confident that today's school system is not designed for boys at all, it's purely designed for girls.

I'll give an example.

One of the schools in my area noticed that boys were throwing pine-cones (calling them grenades) and playing with sticks (calling them guns and swords).

This made the girls in the class uncomfortable.

So the school banned the boys from playing with sticks or pinecones outside, saying that the boys were playing "violent games" and should stop.

One group's nature (the girls) became the rule.

The other group's nature (the boys) became an problem... and once you see it, you see it everywhere.

Classrooms rewards staying still, staying quiet, non-aggression, obedience.

So ask yourself honestly... if you designed an institution that graded children partly on their ability to sit motionless for six hours, who would you expect to win?

Girls, of course.

Boys "get into trouble" FAR more often than girls, and the "offenses" are things like being too aggressive, not staying in line, fidgeting, or being "defiant" for staying buried in a book instead of the worksheet.

The punishment schools reach for first is often to take AWAY recess, which is literally the physical release every study says he needs, as the penalty for needing it!

At my table, he can stand up when he needs to move. He can go deep on the thing that lights him up instead of being dragged off it. He can build his imaginary armies.

He can be exactly the boy he is and have that be an ASSET instead of someone saying that's a problem.

4) No teacher, no matter how gifted, no matter how well-meaning, walks into that classroom knowing my son the way we know him, and no one ever will.

The single most important qualification for teaching a child isn't a degree or a curriculum or a district budget..

...it's just how much do you actually care whether this SPECIFIC kid makes it?

How far would you go for him?

How late would you stay for him?

How many times would you explain it again and again?

How completely would you refuse to give up on him?

And on that measure, the whole world loses to his mother (who will be homeschooling him), it's not even close.

Nobody on earth will ever love him more than she does.

Nobody will study him, root for him, ache for him, and delight in him the way she does every ordinary day.

There has never been anyone on this earth more qualified to raise my son than the woman whose love for him knows no depths and has no end.

Hope that helps clarify a few things.

@mattvanswol

Time passes and never returns

"Avoid sloth, bad company, dangerous conversations, and games; remembering that time passes and never returns, that you have a soul, and that if you lose your soul you lose all."

-St. Leonard of Port Maurice

“Pride of place”: Gregorian chant is Vatican II

 VATICAN 🇻🇦 

Pope Leo XIV reaffirms ‘pride of place’ of Gregorian chant in Roman liturgy

Pope Leo XIV has reaffirmed the importance of Gregorian chant and sacred music in Catholic worship during a catechesis on Sacrosanctum Concilium. The Pope said music is “not merely decoration” and recalled the Council’s teaching that Gregorian chant should have “pride of place” in the Roman liturgy

@RealAdVaticanum

“The Roman rite as we knew it has been destroyed.”

Joseph Gelineau S.J, an important member of Bugnini's Consilium, (the group that designed the new mass), said in his 1976 book “To tell the truth it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.” At least he was honest.

Source: @iotaunam, Twitter