Pope Leo’s Rimini Meeting: Everyone Is Welcome, Except Traditional Catholics

Leading up to Leo XIV’s August 22, 2026 visit to the Rimini “Meeting of Friendships Among Peoples,” Vatican News provided the background for the event:

“The history of the Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples, also known as the Rimini Meeting, dates back to the late 1970s. Among a group of friends in Rimini who shared a Christian experience, a desire arose to discover and bring to others what was beautiful and good in contemporary culture. Thus, in 1980, the Meeting was born. From the beginning, it was intended to be a place where people from different cultures and religions could meet, a space for building peace, coexistence, and friendship among peoples. At its foundation is the conviction that people are united by a desire for truth, goodness, beauty, and justice. Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of the Communion and Liberation movement, referred to this common ground as the ‘elementary experience.’”

So the purpose of the meeting is to promote the peaceful coexistence of different religions and cultures. The analysis that follows explains why Traditional Catholics are truly unwanted in this “meeting of friendships.”

As the Vatican News story proceeded to relate, Leo was the second pope, after John Paul II, to attend the meeting. Although Benedict XVI and Francis did not attend the meeting, they both supported the Communion and Liberation movement and its Meeting of Friendship Amongst Peoples. An article from Communion and Liberation describes the movement’s affection for Francis in particular:

“We were sincerely grateful for every opportunity we were given to share our experience with Pope Francis, while we sought to make our own the concerns he conveyed to us through his broad messages. The peripheries, the changing times, dialogue. In 2019, our visit to Egypt to meet with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, took place in the light of and in the wake of the meeting a few months earlier between Pope Francis and Al-Tayyeb, which resulted in the signing of the historic ‘Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.’”

Thus, we can see that the Communion and Liberations movement (approved by the Vatican) fully embraces Francis’s Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together (known as the Abu Dhabi Declaration), which includes this erroneous statement about God willing the diversity of religions:

“Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”

Given the existence of a plurality of religions, we can obviously say that God permits such a situation, such that it is His “permissive will.” However, it is scandalous for Francis to have signed a document asserting that God wills that situation, because such a statement only makes sense in terms of an assertion that God “positively wills” the diversity of religions.

This context helps us better understand Leo’s address to the Meeting of Friendships Among Peoples, in which he quoted his own words from October 2025 to praise the Synod on Synodality and exhort Catholics to listen to the wisdom of non-Catholics:

“‘In recent years, we have rediscovered the synodal and missionary dimension of our being Church, which calls us first and foremost to learn to listen to one another. The gift of listening is something that, I think, we all recognize, but which has often been lost in some sectors of the Church. We must continue to discover how precious it is, starting with listening to the Word of God, listening to one another, listening to the wisdom we find in men and women, in members of the Church and in those who are seeking the truth, but who are not yet, and perhaps never will be, members of the Church’ (Address to the participants in the Jubilee of the Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies, 24 October 2025).”

While it is not heretical to merely suggest that we listen to the wisdom of non-Catholics, there is a blasphemous suggestion that non-Catholic religious ideas can somehow supplement Catholicism, as though the Holy Ghost withholds some truths from the Church that He has provided to non-Catholic religions.

We can begin to see further indications of this blasphemous orientation by considered Leo’s praise of the Communion and Liberation movement’s founder, Fr. Giussani:

“Dear friends, the disarmed beauty of this Mystery [of the Incarnation] demands that we take ‘the educational risk’ that Fr. Giussani spoke to you about. He intuited that ‘the educational method most capable of producing good is not one that lives by escaping from reality, to affirm the good separately, but one that lives by promoting the good in the world.’ And he insisted: ‘In the world means in confronting the whole of reality, a risky confrontation, if you want to call it that; but it would be better to say a demanding one.’ Brothers and sisters, let us now take on this responsibility, which is a commitment to Christ and a commitment to our world!”

What is the risk of which he speaks? The quotation in this passage comes from Fr. Giussani’s book on education, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny. It is worthwhile to consider the context from which Leo pulled his quotation:

“The more an adolescent approaches adulthood, the more we should use the educational method of guiding him or her toward a personal and increasingly independent encounter with the entire surrounding reality. Here the educator’s balanced moderation takes on its ultimate importance. Indeed, the evolution of the adolescent’s independence is a ‘risk’ for the intelligence and heart — and also for the egotism — of the educator. . . . The appeal to tradition may be formulated in various ways, but it must be quite clear that the true concept of tradition is that of representing values to be rediscovered in new experiences. If history and existence are vehicles of values to be rediscovered in new experiences, who must make the discovery? The parent? The teacher? No, that would be traditionalism. It is the young person who must have the experience, because this is how his or her freedom will come to be. Above all else, educators must bear in mind this love for freedom to the point of risk.”

While many faithful educators would doubtlessly agree with the idea that adolescents ought to be exposed to the secular world in which they will need to live, it is clear from this passage that there is a “risk” that the student’s Faith will be compromised or lost altogether. This risk is even more immediate and pronounced given the fact that Leo and his predecessor have insisted that we must try to learn from the religions of non-Catholics.

We can also look to the preface of the Fr. Giussani book from which Leo quoted, to see the following praise for Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, one of the leading figures of the St. Gallen Mafia that lobbied for the election of Francis:

“‘There is a goal,’ Kafka said, ‘but no way.’ This is another important passage. Faith is the way to what reason searches for more than any other thing. Ultimately, what is reason looking for if not the meaning of life, the meaning of existence, the meaning of everything? And all of contemporary philosophy is resigned to saying: could there be a meaning? The three hundred people who walked with our great Cardinal Martini represented three hundred different religions, but all of them expressed the presence of a meaning — just like the line from Kafka. The meaning exists but is so mysterious that we don’t know how to think of it — there is no way!”

The reference here is to Cardinal Martini’s promotion of ecumenical gatherings of various religions, which harmonizes with everything else we have considered so far in connection with Leo’s address to the Rimini “Meeting of Friendships Among Peoples.” The overall message seems clear: Leo believes we are all seeking truth — Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus, etc. alike — and we should learn from each other on this faith journey, even if it involves the risk of losing the Faith.

This being the case, it is not surprising that Leo used the occasion to renew the Vatican’s long-standing opposition to proselytism:

“We are understanding this ever better, within historical circumstances that reactivate the most human questions and an infinite desire for meaning, justice and peace. Thus, a certain loss of influence, which we adults have perhaps feared and fought, should have revealed to us that we can more esteem the power of the Gospel, of the bonds it generates, of the logic it ignites, of the life it gives rise to. As my Predecessors have repeated many times, ‘the Church does not proselytize. Rather, it develops by attraction.’ It is the attraction for a way of inhabiting the world, about which Fr. Giussani provocatively asked: ‘Can one live like this?’”

Leo and his predecessors tell us that it is generally good to be in the Church, but we should not go around trying to tell others that God really wants them to be Catholic. This distinction stands in direct contrast to Church teaching going back to Our Lord’s words to His Apostles:

“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.” (Matthew 28: 19-20)

Even if Leo cannot openly renounce the Great Commission, he and his predecessors have thoroughly undermined it by direct attacks on proselytism as well as the promotion of false ecumenism.

For those who might not understand why the Vatican does not want us to follow Our Lord’s command, Leo provided at least part of the answer:

“Open yourselves to true catholicity, broadening your bonds beyond any overly narrow affiliation. May the Movement, the groups, and the communities be a springboard from which you can dive into the whole of reality. Resist anything that would distance you from brothers and sisters of different cultures, sensibilities, and backgrounds, especially the poorest. Instead, go out and reach out to everyone!”

The goal is not to honor God and save souls, but to unite all mankind in a godless mass of people seeking truth. Any religion is fine so long as nobody insists that Catholicism is the one true religion.

For a view of what the Catholic Church actually teaches, we can look to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s The Mystery of Jesus:

“In our Faith, it is not permitted to separate the Persons of the Blessed Trinity. That has ramifications. For instance, it cannot be said, as we often hear nowadays, that we have the same God as the Jews and the Moslems. People talk frequently about ‘the three great monotheist religions,’ placing them on the same level, as if we adored the same God! But by the very fact that the Jews reject Jesus Christ, by the very fact that the Moslems do not recognize the divinity of our Lord, neither the one nor the other adores the same God we do. It is absolutely impossible to say that they have the same God as we, because it is not true.” (p. 131)

These ideas are now forbidden because they might offend non-Catholics. So the truth is no longer welcome. As Archbishop Lefebvre described, the “modern heresy” has been installed in place of Catholic truth:

“This is truly the modern heresy, which can be designated by a new term, for it really seems to be a new heresy in addition to modernism, liberalism, and all these old errors. It seems to me that this new heresy can be called ecumenism, false ecumenism. If there were to be a true ecumenism, it would have to be defined. False ecumenism has it that the Catholic Church is not the only true religion. Men of the Church have invented a new ecumenical Church which placed itself on the same level as other religions, which accepts all errors, and by that very fact secularizes all the states. The reign of our Lord Jesus Christ vanishes.” (p. 105)

Archbishop Lefebvre said these words during spiritual conferences in Ecône in the late 1970s, long before we had heard of Jorge Bergoglio or Robert Prevost. This modern heresy of false ecumenism has been the driving force of the entire Vatican II revolution. So there is no real mystery as to why the Vatican had to oppose Archbishop Lefebvre.

This helps us understand one of the greatest ironies in all of salvation history, which we see playing out before our eyes: the Vatican claims to be Catholic but accepts every religion in the world other than actual Catholicism. For this reason, all people can be “friends” with Leo in Rimini other than Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and other Traditional Catholics. We do not know why God is permitting this diabolical disorientation, but it could scarcely be more clear that we must reject it. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

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Neither Catholic nor Orthodox, but merely pointing out that there is a church as Apostolic and as old as the Catholic Church that appears to me as an outsider to be closer in spirt and practice to traditional Catholicism than the present-day Church. (I grew up attending a lot of Latin Masses).

Vatican II encouraged openness to manifestations of other cultures, but specifically required that no article of the deposit of faith be transgressed by doing so. There was no room for false ecumenism. This is the malignant progression of “the spirit of VII” the euphemistic cover used the last fifty years for subversion.

I read something in the introduction of this that all of us are seeking truth. It would seem to me that many have a different idea about what really constitutes truth.

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