Building Peace Without Christ

Father Nicola Bux on what Donald Trump has not understood and what Pope Leo has yet to say regarding the Church’s role in peace

Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt (1606–1669) (Wikimedia Commons).

Here below is a guest commentary by Father Nicola Bux, a priest of the Italian Archdiocese of Bari, a professor of theology, and a former consulter to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith:

Popes from John XXIII to Leo XIV have, in different ways, separated the question of peace from the concrete reality of the Church; as a result, their appeals for peace risk becoming utopian — aspirations that lack the means necessary for their fulfilment.

This separation appears when peace is framed primarily as a political or humanitarian goal: ending wars, encouraging dialogue, and fostering cooperation among nations. These aims are good, but when they are presented without reference to the Church’s essential mission — the conversion of persons and peoples to Christ — they lose their foundation. Peace becomes an external arrangement rather than the fruit of an interior transformation.

The Gospel presents a different logic. After His Resurrection, Christ gives peace to His Apostles and immediately commands them to make disciples of all nations (Mt 28:19). The universality of this mission shows that peace is inseparable from the spread of the Gospel and the establishment of the Church. The Church is not merely a promoter of peace; she is its source in history, because she is the body of Christ, who is Himself our peace.

The early Christians understood this unity clearly. For them, peace and communion were inseparable realities. In the Church, divisions of language, ethnicity, and nation were overcome through a shared life in Christ. The inscriptions “pax” and “irene” on Christian tombs expressed the conviction that peace was fulfilled in communion with God and His people. Peace was not an abstract ideal but a lived experience grounded in faith.

When this connection is weakened, the pursuit of peace becomes superficial. Symbolic gestures and diplomatic efforts may express goodwill, but they cannot resolve the deeper disorder within the human person. As Isaiah teaches, “the work of justice will be peace” (Is 32:17), and justice depends on right relationship with God. Without conversion, there is no lasting moral order, and without moral order, peace cannot endure.

For this reason, the Church’s mission is indispensable. Faith comes from hearing the Gospel, and from faith comes conversion — a real change of life. Where this occurs, reconciliation, justice, and solidarity become possible. The spread of the Church is therefore not opposed to peacebuilding; it is its necessary condition. To speak of peace without proclaiming Christ is to propose an effect without its cause.

This helps explain why many modern appeals to peace appear ineffective. They call for universal fraternity without addressing how human beings can truly become brothers and sisters. Detached from the transformative power of the Gospel, such appeals remain aspirations rather than realities.

At the same time, charity requires recognizing that God can act through those outside the Church. Scripture shows this in figures who prophesy or act in God’s name without belonging to the visible community of believers. Political leaders, too, can contribute to peace in partial ways. Yet their role cannot replace the Church’s mission. When the Church adopts primarily political categories or is perceived as just another diplomatic actor, her identity is obscured and her message misunderstood.

This confusion is evident in contemporary tensions between political figures and the papacy. When the Pope is treated chiefly as a head of state, his evangelical mission is reduced to diplomacy. Conversely, when the Church does not speak clearly about conversion and moral truth, some believers seek clarity elsewhere, even in flawed political alternatives. This dynamic reveals a weakening in how the relationship between peace and the Church is understood.

The remedy is not to abandon calls for peace, but to ground them once more in their true source. The Pope and the bishops must place at the center the call that begins the Gospel itself: conversion to God. Peace will not come simply through negotiation or the balancing of interests, but through transformed hearts.

Only in this way can appeals for peace avoid becoming utopian. When peace is understood as the fruit of communion with Christ, and when the Church is recognised as the place where this communion is offered to all, it becomes a real — if never complete — possibility within history. The more the Church fulfils her mission, the more the conditions for peace take root in the world.

Father Nicola Bux, Bari, April 18, 2026

https://open.substack.com/pub/edwardpentin/p/building-peace-without-christ?r=2x82t4&utm_medium=ios

Belgian national broadcaster apologized for airing show glorifying violent Christian icinclasm

BREAKING 🇧🇪 

The anti Christian Belgian radio hosts who SMASHED statues of Jesus and Our Lady have had a belated and half hearted apology issued on their behalf: 

'Eva and Dries apologize. The video was intended as a humorous act, and they underestimated how sensitive religious symbols can be. They understand that this was hurtful to some people and would make different choices today.

VRT considers it important that all its employees show respect for every religion. Our aim is not to compare religions, but to treat everyone's beliefs with care'

@CatholicArena

https://x.com/dvanlangenhove/status/2036309156437827937?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w

@colmflynnire

The Good Shepherd Does Not Flee

Good Shepherd Sunday for Catholics Living Among Wolves, Hirelings, and the Ruins of the Postconciliar Church

CHRIS JACKSON APR 19 The Earth Is Still Full of the Goodness of the Lord The liturgy for this Sunday begins with a sentence that almost sounds too bright for times like ours: “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord, alleluia.” To many traditional Catholics, that can feel hard to say with a straight face. The sanctuaries have been stripped, the liturgy has been gutted in most places, bishops speak the language of managers and public relations men, Leo continues the conciliar program under a different personality, and the media class that once styled itself as vigilant now grows strangely timid when vigilance is needed most. Everywhere one looks, there is compromise, evasion, theatrical concern, and spiritual cowardice. Yet the Church places this antiphon on our lips anyway. Why? Because Christian hope does not begin with favorable appearances. It begins with God. The earth is not full of the goodness of bishops. It is not full of the goodness of chancery officials, conference statements, Catholic influencers, or controlled opposition in tailored jackets. It is full of the goodness of the Lord. If our peace rests on the visible health of the ecclesiastical landscape, then we will have no peace at all. If it rests on the unchanging goodness of God, then we may be bruised, betrayed, isolated, and yet not conquered. The Introit lifts our eyes above the chaos by reminding us who made the heavens in the first place: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made.” The same divine Word who created all things is not baffled by the present crisis. He is not improvising, wringing His hands over Rome, over episcopal corruption, over the collapse of discipline, over the fraudulence of official optimism. He knows exactly what He is doing. The world fell through pride. It is raised by the humility of the Son. That is the theme of the Collect, and it cuts against the whole spirit of the age. The conciliar revolution was drenched in pride. Pride in dialogue. Pride in adaptation. Pride in novelty. Pride in man speaking to modern man in a new language. Pride in dismantling inherited forms so that the Church might finally become intelligible to the world. And what has that pride produced? Emptying churches, doctrinal confusion, vulgar liturgy, and a hierarchy increasingly unable even to name its own disease. Meanwhile the prayer of the Mass points us elsewhere. The fallen world was lifted up not by aggiornamento, relevance, or managed ambiguity, but by the humility of Christ. That is where traditional Catholics must live. We must live inside the humility of the Son of God. That is where the Church survives her own eclipse. Christ Suffered for Us, Leaving Us an Example The Epistle from First Peter is one of the most needed passages for our time because it gives suffering a shape. It tells us what Christ did in the middle of injustice. “Who when He was reviled, did not revile: when He suffered, He threatened not, but delivered Himself to him that judged Him unjustly.” This does not mean passivity in the face of error or bowing before men whose office or costume is used as a shield for destruction. The same Christ who suffered silently before His execution also called hypocrites whitewashed sepulchres and drove money changers from the temple. The point is deeper. He did not allow the malice of His enemies to dictate the form of His soul. He remained what He was while they revealed what they were. That is the battle for traditional Catholics right now. The danger is not only that corrupt churchmen and their apologists will wound the faithful. The danger is that the faithful, worn down by years of outrage, will become inwardly deformed by the very ugliness they oppose. One begins by resisting lies and ends by losing peace. St. Peter will not let us go there. “By whose stripes you were healed.” The Church is healed by the wounds of Christ. If we lose sight of that, even our best polemics become spiritually thin. The issue is not merely that modern churchmen are wrong. The issue is that souls need the medicine of Calvary, and the world has been fed slogans in its place. The Apostle also says something tender and severe at once: “For you were as sheep going astray: but you are now converted to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” Men fail. Offices are abused. Public reputations swell and collapse. Media figures posture and then fall quiet when the cost of speaking rises. Bishops alternate between grandstanding and surrender. But the Bishop of your soul is not one of them. Your soul is not finally entrusted to the diocesan machine, Roman press releases, or to a class of commentators who have learned how to monetize indignation while rationing truth. Your soul belongs to Christ. The Good Shepherd and the Hireling Good Shepherd Sunday is always beautiful. In our times it is also savage. “The good Shepherd giveth his life for his sheep. But the hireling… seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and flieth.” Our Lord does not speak here in abstractions. He gives us a permanent law of discernment. How do you tell the shepherd from the hireling? Watch what happens when the wolf appears. The shepherd stays. The hireling calculates. The shepherd bleeds. The hireling issues statements. The shepherd risks himself for the flock. The hireling protects his platform, his access, his reputation, his relationship to power, his place at the table, his future invitations, his fragile standing inside approved circles. That text does not apply only to bishops. It applies just as sharply to the broader Catholic public square. We have seen plenty of men who built their brands on sounding alarms under one regime suddenly discover the virtues of patience, nuance, deference, and strategic silence under another. They can still diagnose danger when it costs little. They become wonderfully complex when the target is too close to home. The wolf is plainly in the field, but the hireling has a podcast to protect. Our Lord says the reason is simple: “He hath no care for the sheep.” Not enough care, perhaps, to risk anything real. Enough to perform concern. Enough to maintain the tone of seriousness. Enough to lament division in the abstract. But not enough to stand between the wolf and the flock. Traditional Catholics should hear this Gospel as both warning and consolation. The warning is that not everyone who speaks constantly about the crisis is a shepherd. Volume is not courage nor is visibility fidelity. Many men are brave only within controlled limits. They will denounce enemies far away and whisper about the ones standing over them. The consolation is greater. Christ knew there would be hirelings. He described them ahead of time. He was not surprised by clerics without backbone, official guardians who abandon the sheep, or by religious voices that prefer the safety of ambiguity to the cost of plain speech. The presence of hirelings does not prove that Christ has abandoned His Church. It proves that He told the truth about the kind of men who would infest her visible structures. This is one reason traditional Catholics must stop expecting emotional stability from the institutional Church as she now appears. Expecting maternal clarity from a system now dominated by bureaucrats, careerists, ecumenists, and liturgical vandals is like expecting clean water from a poisoned well. You may still find remnants, still find grace, still find fragments of fidelity, but you should not be shocked when the dominant voice is false, compromised, or evasive. Our Lord already told us what hirelings do. “I Know Mine, and Mine Know Me” After exposing the hireling, Christ returns to the heart of the mystery: “I am the good Shepherd: and I know Mine, and Mine know Me.” This is the line that gives peace to Catholics who feel scattered and forgotten. The postconciliar crisis has done more than corrupt institutions. It has produced loneliness. Many traditional Catholics feel as though they are living in fragments. The nearest reverent Mass may be far away. Friends grow weary. Families do not understand. Priests who once sounded steady begin trimming their words. One diocese suppresses. Another tolerates. A third smiles while slowly strangling what remains. Everywhere the pressure is the same: stop noticing, stop comparing, stop speaking, stop resisting, stop remembering. But Christ says He knows His own. He does not know them merely as members of a crowd. He knows them in particular, in their fidelity, in their grief, in their efforts to keep the faith when nearly everything around them has been redesigned to weaken it. He knows the mother trying to hand on catechism from the old books because the parish program is spiritual oatmeal. He knows the father driving long distances for the old Mass. He knows the young Catholic who has discovered tradition and now sees the wreckage with painful clarity. He knows the priest who says what he can and suffers for it. He knows the layman who feels stranded between official propaganda and trad-world evasions. None of these souls are anonymous to Him. And just as importantly, “Mine know Me.” That is the crucial thing in an age of confusion. The sheep know the Shepherd’s voice. They know that the voice of Christ does not sound like the slogans of the modern Church. It does not sound like sentimental humanitarianism. It does not sound like therapeutic accompaniment without judgment. It does not sound like endless dialogue with the world while the sanctuary burns. It does not sound like the reduction of religion to community, migration policy, ecology, process, inclusion, or mood management. The faithful know His voice because it has a certain ring. Majesty. Clarity. Sacrifice. Command. Mercy that heals by conversion, not mercy that flatters corruption. It means the present confusion, however widespread, is not ultimate. The instinct that draws Catholics to the old Mass, the old doctrine, the old devotions, the old moral seriousness, is sheep recognizing the Shepherd. To Thee Do I Watch at Break of Day The Offertory is one of the loveliest cries in the whole Mass: “O God, my God, to Thee do I watch at break of day.” That is the posture of the remnant. Not frenzy. Vigil. The faithful remnant in every age has had to learn how to live before dawn. There are moments in history when the sun seems high and Christendom appears solid and flourishing. Then there are ages like ours, when one keeps watch in darkness, with only the promise of morning and the discipline of prayer. This Sunday teaches us how to live in that hour. We watch at break of day by refusing spiritual amnesia. We remember what the Church was, what she taught, what she prayed, what her saints believed, what her liturgy formed in souls. We watch by refusing to call ruin renewal, refusing the narcotic of official language, and by holding fast to the treasure handed down, even when the men charged with guarding it have squandered their inheritance. But we also watch with uplifted hands. The Offertory pictures worship. If traditional Catholics are to endure, they must remain supernatural. The crisis has dragged many into a habit of permanent surveillance, where every day becomes another hunt for scandal, another exercise in confirming how bad things are. Much of that work has its necessity. Yet if it is not carried inside prayer, sacrifice, and liturgical life, it hollows the soul. One can become expert in cataloguing corruption and still forget how to adore. The altar saves us from that deformation. The sacrifice of Christ, represented in mystery and accomplished with power, is the center that the revolution could not destroy. Men altered rites, diluted language, and scattered the flock, but they did not become masters of grace. Christ still feeds His sheep. Christ still applies His Passion. Christ still gives healing blessing through the holy offering. The Secret says exactly that. What the sacred mystery signifies, it truly accomplishes. That is why the old Mass has always been more dangerous to the revolution than a thousand essays. It forms souls that cannot be easily managed. It teaches sacrifice instead of performance, adoration instead of activism, hierarchy instead of egalitarian chatter, mystery instead of self-expression. It puts God back at the center, and once that happens the whole conciliar apparatus begins to look thin and contrived. Having Received the Grace of a New Life The Postcommunion brings the whole Sunday to rest in thanksgiving: “Grant unto us… that having received the grace of a new life, we may ever glory in Thy gift.” That is the final note. Gift. Traditional Catholics are often tempted to think only in terms of deprivation. We have lost this. They took that. These bishops are corrupt. Those priests are compromised. The media class is cowardly. Rome is diseased. Much of that is true. But Eastertide forbids us to end there. The faithful are not merely people who have been robbed. They are people who have been given something that the thieves cannot touch. A new life. That life does not depend on the smile of a bishop, the favor of Rome, or the honesty of Catholic celebrities. It comes from the risen Christ. It flows into souls through grace. It deepens in prayer, sacrifice, doctrine, penance, and reverent worship. It survives catacombs. It survives exile. It survives the collapse of institutions. It survives even long periods in which the official face of the Church appears disfigured and hostile to her own inheritance. So this Sunday does not ask traditional Catholics to pretend that things are fine. They are not fine. Wolves, hirelings, and scandal are real. Silence in the face of corruption is real. But none of those things are final. The final thing is that Christ knows His own. He has not fled. He has not negotiated with the wolf. He has not forgotten the sheep scattered across dioceses, chapels, living rooms, and lonely roads. He still gathers. He still heals. He still feeds. He still watches over the souls entrusted to Him. And when the world seems overrun by bad shepherds, that is precisely when the faithful must cling more tightly to the one Shepherd who lays down His life and never abandons His flock. https://open.substack.com/pub/bigmodernism/p/the-good-shepherd-does-not-flee?r=2x82t4&utm_medium=ios

Review: “The Hail Mary Project”

Like @BishopBarron points out, Project Hail Mary is drenched in Christian imagery.

A man named Grace inhabits the Hail Mary.

"Hail Mary, full of Grace..."

That's not an accident.

Wonderful film.

@GiancarloSopo

I just saw the much talked about film “Project Hail Mary.” It's very entertaining and uplifting and features a fine performance from Ryan Gosling. But what most intrigued me were the powerful Christian themes at play in it. The title, of course, refers to the Hail Mary pass in football, since the adventure undertaken is a fairly desperate attempt to save the planet. But it also becomes eminently clear that the reference is not just to football but to the Blessed Mother herself, for the Gosling character is undoubtedly a Christ-figure. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but it involves a willingness to sacrifice one's life utterly in order to deliver the entire human race from disaster. It is, of course, no accident that Gosling's character is called Ryland Grace, for throughout the movie, his presence and actions constitute undeserved favor to others. A particularly intriguing character in the film is a sober German scientist who relentlessly presses Grace to make the supreme sacrifice, even when he is unwilling. She represented for me the great moral demand that presses upon us throughout our lives, continually summoning us to self-gift. A last observation: Jesus had a second in command whom he called Peter (the Rock); Ryland Grace has a very unusual sidekick whom he calls “Rocky.” I'll leave it at that.

I know lots of people say that Christianity is in irreversible decline and that we are inhabiting, at least in the West, a post-Christian society. I'm not so sure. Like it or not, we remain a Christ-haunted culture—and a film like “Project Hail Mary” makes this clear.

@BishopBarron

Pope Speeches Not About Trump

N.B. Pope makes point that his speeches prepared well before Trump eruption, but delivered after, are not about Trump. Lambastes “commentary on commentary”.

The Pope in flight: "A certain narrative has spread, not entirely accurate, due to the political situation that arose when, on the first day of the trip, the President of the United States made some statements about me. Much of what has been written since then is nothing more than commentary on commentary, in an attempt to interpret what was said.” An example is the speech delivered at the Prayer Meeting for Peace, on April 16. A speech that “had been prepared two weeks earlier, well before the president commented on me and on the message of peace that I am promoting. Yet, it was interpreted as if I were trying to debate with the president again, which is not at all in my interest. I come to Africa primarily as a pastor, as head of the Catholic Church, to be with, to celebrate with, to encourage and accompany all African Catholics.”

Vatican News Source via @matteomatzuzzi on Twitter/X

Leo Denies Loaves and Fishes Miracle For the Second Time; Catholic Media Silent

 N.B. If generosity is a miracle, go be a Muslim …

As Leo repeats his modernist reading of John 6, Rome probes Benedict’s resignation, pro-lifers demand repentance, and new questions swirl around the January consistory.

CHRIS JACKSON APR 18

The Miracle Leo Keeps Explaining Away We already saw this pattern in my June 23, 2025 piece, Bread Without Doctrine: Leo XIV’s Corpus Christi and the Vanishing Reality of the Eucharist, where I reported that Leo had been turning Eucharistic theology into a language of solidarity, distribution, and communal sharing rather than sacrifice and supernatural reality. What happened in Douala on April 17, 2026 was a second offense, cleaner and blunter than the first. In his homily at Japoma Stadium, Leo said that “the multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing: that is the miracle.” That sentence does not merely stress charity flowing from the miracle. It relocates the miracle itself. The wonder is no longer Christ’s sovereign act over nature. The wonder becomes the crowd’s social behavior. Bread appears, in effect, because people finally learn to stop clutching and start sharing. Christ becomes less the divine Lord who multiplies and more the moral facilitator who teaches redistribution. This was not a one-off improvisation. On June 30, 2025, in his message to the FAO, Leo had already said that “the real miracle” in the multiplication narratives was to show that hunger is overcome by sharing rather than hoarding. So now the line has been spoken twice, once in an international social setting and once in a liturgical homily on John 6. At that point defenders can stop pretending this is a clumsy phrase. It is a theological habit. Why This Is Not a Catholic Reading of John 6 The problem is not that Christians should share bread. Of course they should. The problem is that John 6 is not narrated as a lesson in crowd ethics. It is narrated as a miracle of Christ. The text says the people received “as much as they wanted,” and the fragments filled twelve baskets afterward. The Church’s catechetical tradition has treated the multiplication of the loaves as a true miracle and as a prefiguration of the Eucharist’s superabundance. The Catechism does not say the crowd’s generosity is the miracle. It says the miracles of the multiplication of the loaves prefigure the Eucharist. The miracle is the sign. The sign points beyond itself. Leo’s reading inverts the whole order of the passage. In Scripture, Christ acts first and charity follows. Grace descends and abundance results. The disciples distribute because the Lord has already made provision. Leo reverses the sequence. Sharing becomes the cause and abundance the result. That is ideological ventriloquism. It reads a modern social ethic back into a text whose force lies precisely in the divine intervention of Christ. Even Leo’s own conciliar Compendium of the Catechism says Jesus performed signs and miracles “to bear witness” that the Kingdom is present in him. Vatican I likewise taught that divine revelation is made credible by “external signs,” and Pascendi restated that condemnation against those who would reduce faith to internal experience and subjective religious sentiment. Once the miracle is no longer an external sign wrought by Christ, but a symbol generated by human sharing, the whole Catholic structure of miracle begins to collapse. Why the Error Is Modernist This is exactly where modernism lives. Modernism does not always stride into the sanctuary waving a banner that says, “I deny the supernatural.” It often works more elegantly. It keeps the biblical scene, keeps the religious language, keeps the pastoral application, and quietly evacuates the miracle. The event remains in the text, but its supernatural content is drained away and replaced with a humane message palatable to modern ears. St. Pius X described the modernist method with unnerving precision. The divine fact is pushed out of history and into the realm of faith language, symbolism, sentiment, and interior meaning. The critic, he says, strips away whatever surpasses man in his natural condition. That is exactly what Leo’s formulation does to John 6. The miraculous multiplication is no longer the stubborn fact that forces you to reckon with Christ’s divinity. It becomes a pious emblem of fraternity. The bread still circulates. The divine vanishes. And notice how perfectly this fits the postconciliar instinct. The old Catholic instinct looked at the miracle and said: behold the Lord who commands creation, the same Lord who gives His flesh as food and whose sacrifice alone saves. The new instinct looks at the miracle and says: behold the community organizing itself around a moral insight. One approach ends at adoration. The other ends at an NGO. The Eucharistic Damage The damage does not stop at biblical interpretation. John 6 is not just any chapter. It is one of the Church’s great Eucharistic texts. The Catechism explicitly links the multiplication miracle to the Eucharist’s superabundance and then moves directly into Christ’s Bread of Life discourse and the institution of the Eucharist as the memorial of His death and Resurrection. When Leo reduces the sign to social sharing, he weakens the very bridge the Church has always used to lead souls from the miracle of the loaves to the mystery of the altar. This is a doctrinal deformation. Once John 6 is domesticated into a sermon about equitable distribution, the Eucharist itself slides toward symbolism. The altar becomes a table of inclusion. The sacrificial character recedes. The supernatural abundance of grace is translated into human fellowship. My June 2025 article saw that trajectory already. Douala confirms it. The same Leo who once wrapped Corpus Christi in the language of sharing has now taken the biblical miracle itself and done the same surgery to it

As seen on Twitter

 

Oh, the irony …