Posted on 09/14/2026 6:26:19 PM PDT by ebb tide
There are careless phrases, and then there are phrases that tell you how a man sees the Church.
“The Church is called to disappear so that the Kingdom may grow.”
That sentence belongs to Father Mario León Dorado, the 52-year-old Spanish Oblate whom Leo XIV has just appointed coadjutor archbishop of Rabat, Morocco. The Vatican announced the appointment on September 12. Dorado has governed the tiny Apostolic Prefecture of Western Sahara since 2013 and has served this year as apostolic administrator of Rabat. As coadjutor, he is being placed in line to succeed Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero.
This is worth dwelling on because Dorado’s sentence was neither fabricated by a traditionalist blogger nor excavated from some adolescent Facebook post.
He wrote it as a missionary.
And the surrounding context makes it worse.
The Church Is Supposed to Disappear?
Dorado’s 2022 reflection dealt with missionary life among Muslims and the problem of evangelization versus proselytism. After discussing the need to approach the religious experience of the other, he turned to ecclesiology:
“The Church is called to disappear so that the Kingdom may grow.”
He explicitly compared this to John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” The “experience of John the Baptist,” Dorado concluded, “is the experience of the Church.”
No.
John the Baptist is not the Church.
John was the forerunner. His public mission receded when Christ appeared because the One whose coming he announced had arrived.
The Church is Christ’s Bride and Mystical Body. Christ did not establish her as scaffolding to be dismantled once humanity learned to get along. He sent her to teach all nations, baptize them, transmit everything He commanded, and endure until the consummation of the world.
Even Pius XI, writing in Mortalium Animos, stated the matter with a clarity that now sounds almost alien: the Church was founded to continue Christ’s saving work through history and “could not cease or be extinguished.”
There is a possible theological defense of Dorado’s phrase. At the final consummation, the Church’s sacramental economy belongs to the pilgrim state; the Kingdom reaches fulfillment in glory.
Except Dorado was writing about missionary practice in the Sahara.
The Last Judgment was not the subject.
Muslims were.
And that changes the meaning considerably.
In another 2022 interview Dorado described evangelization as helping “the Spirit to build the Kingdom of God,” while identifying dialogue and encounter with Muslims as the defining feature of North African Catholicism. He spoke of friendship as the foundation of interreligious dialogue. Again, friendship with Muslims is obviously no sin. Charity toward them is obligatory. What disappears from the foreground is the older missionary urgency: bring them to Christ and His Church.
That omission keeps showing up in Dorado’s record.
Apparently Islam Has Saints Now
In 2018 Dorado wrote about the forthcoming beatification of the nineteen Catholic martyrs of Algeria.
Then he placed beside them 114 Algerian imams murdered for refusing to endorse Islamist violence.
He called those imams another 114 “authentic Muslim martyrs.”
That could perhaps be dismissed as loose secular usage. Newspapers call almost anyone murdered for a cause a martyr.
Then Dorado added this:
“Perhaps they will all help us with their example and intercession.”
Intercession.
Now we have left the newspaper vocabulary behind.
A Muslim imam may behave heroically. A Muslim murdered because he refuses to bless terrorism can display genuine natural virtue, courage and moral integrity. Catholics can honor that courage without pretending Islam suddenly acquired a canonization process.
Martyrdom in the Catholic sense concerns witness to the true faith.
Intercession concerns the communion of saints.
Yet Dorado glides from murdered Catholic martyrs to murdered Muslim clerics and then speaks about their intercession as though the theological distinction were merely impolite.
This is where interreligious dialogue starts eating Christian categories from the inside.
The words stay.
Their meaning changes.
Then Came Abu Dhabi
Dorado’s enthusiasm continued after Francis traveled to Morocco in 2019.
Writing about the visit, he highlighted the program Francis had already set out in Abu Dhabi: “the culture of dialogue as the path; mutual cooperation as the code of conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard.” Dorado treated the Abu Dhabi document as laying out the direction of the mission.
That document contains the notorious assertion that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions” are “willed by God in His wisdom,” placing religious diversity in the same sentence with differences of color, sex, race and language.
Catholic apologists spent years explaining that Francis surely meant God’s permissive will concerning false religions.
Perhaps.
The document does not say permissive.
And Dorado’s subsequent theology hardly sounds like a man anxious to preserve the distinction.
His North African episcopal region also became one of the conspicuous exceptions to African resistance against Fiducia supplicans. In January 2024 the bishops of CERNA said that when persons in an “irregular situation” present themselves together asking for a blessing, it can be given provided confusion is avoided. Western Sahara belongs to that conference.
Now Leo has picked Dorado for Rabat.
Personnel is policy in clerical clothing.
And Look at the Diocese He Is Inheriting
The appointment arrives under another cloud.
Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, the current Archbishop of Rabat, stepped away from public ministry in July after accusations from several adult women prompted a preliminary Vatican investigation. AFP reported allegations from at least five women. López Romero denies assault, violence and sexual harassment, and no finding against him has been announced.
Those allegations tell us nothing about Dorado’s guilt or innocence in anything. They should remain exactly what they are: allegations under investigation.
The institutional moment still matters.
Rome had an opportunity to signal a course correction in Rabat.
Instead Leo selected a missionary whose published ecclesiology includes the disappearance of the Church, Muslim “martyrs” who may intercede for us, enthusiasm for Abu Dhabi, and a pastoral environment comfortable implementing Fiducia supplicans.
If this is the correction, I would hate to see continuity.
Rome’s Interfaith Chief Says We Need Other Religions to Broaden Truth
Then Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad arrived in Buenos Aires.
Koovakad is no freelance ecumenist. He is Leo’s prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.
At the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina on September 11, he told his audience that believers of different religions “need one another in order to broaden the horizon of the Truth,” invoking Francis’s famous image of the polyhedron, which supposedly incorporates the totality of perspectives without excluding anyone.
That sentence is extraordinary.
Catholicism can recognize truths possessed by non-Christian people. Of course it can. A Muslim can know that God exists. A Hindu can articulate some genuine moral insight. A pagan philosopher can reason his way to truths of natural theology.
Those things are true because they conform to reality.
Catholic revelation does not become more complete when contradiction is added to it.
Islam denies the Trinity.
Judaism denies that Jesus is the divine Messiah.
Hindu traditions can contain understandings of God, man and salvation irreconcilable with Christianity.
How exactly do mutually contradictory religious claims “broaden” the Truth?
Twenty-six years ago, even Dominus Iesus insisted that interreligious dialogue could never reduce the proclamation of Christ as the unique Savior and that other religions leave their adherents, objectively speaking, in a “gravely deficient situation” compared with the fullness of the means of salvation in the Church.
Koovakad’s vocabulary travels in the other direction.
He also said that religious liberty acquires a theological foundation only if we recognize “the action of God in the other religions.” He invited the religions to collaborate in building the “City of God.” Vatican News presented that as the headline.
The City of God.
Augustine must be spinning hard enough to power North Africa.
Someone Should Tell Cardinal Koovakad What Nehemiah Actually Did
The comedy gets darker.
Koovakad built his address around Leo’s proposed “way of Nehemiah.” Different religions, he said, should imitate Nehemiah by working shoulder to shoulder, valuing diversity, listening to everyone and rebuilding the City of God together.
Has anyone in the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue recently read Nehemiah?
Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem precisely to protect the identity of God’s people.
When outsiders proposed a conference, Nehemiah refused to abandon the work.
By chapter 13 he is purifying the Temple, enforcing the Sabbath and driving out religious compromise. The biblical text records separation from foreign elements and his fury over marriages that threatened Israel’s fidelity to the covenant.
One can argue about how Old Testament disciplinary measures apply under the New Covenant.
What one cannot plausibly do is turn Nehemiah into the patron saint of the interfaith polyhedron.
Yet this is where Roman religious dialogue has arrived: even biblical figures who zealously guarded revealed religion can be conscripted into a theology of collaborative pluralism.
Pius XI saw precisely where this mentality leads.
In 1928 he warned against gatherings built upon the notion that differing religions could meet on a common spiritual basis. The danger, he said, was the false opinion that religions are all, in different ways, good and praiseworthy manifestations of man’s movement toward God. He called that path a distortion of revealed religion.
Ninety-eight years later the Vatican’s interreligious chief tells us we need other religions to broaden our horizon of Truth.
Development, apparently.
Meanwhile, the Pastor of St. Peter’s Thinks the Devil Is “Quite Likeable”
Then there is Fra Agnello Stoia.
He is not some random Italian priest. Vatican News identifies the Conventual Franciscan as parish priest of St. Peter’s Basilica, a position he has held since 2021.
An undated video circulating this week shows Stoia saying, in Italian, that he finds the devil “quite likeable,” that the devil is “certainly not as bad as people make him out to be,” and that perhaps he “adds a little spice to people’s lives.”
Scripture’s description of Satan is rather less cuddly.
Christ calls him a murderer from the beginning, a liar and the father of lies. St. Peter warns that the devil prowls like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. The Catechism calls Satan “the Evil One,” the seducer through whom sin and death entered the world.
“Quite likeable” does not appear in the traditional dossier.
Even Francis, hardly anyone’s idea of a medieval demonologist, repeatedly warned Catholics never to converse with the devil because he deceives and destroys.
Yet the priest entrusted with the parish attached to the tomb of St. Peter can apparently joke that Satan gets bad press and adds spice to life.
Cute.
There are Christians being persecuted, addicts discovering how much “spice” temptation adds to life, marriages destroyed by vice, souls trying desperately to escape habitual mortal sin, and the Vatican basilica’s pastor has a comedy routine for the adversary.
Again, the scandal lies partly in instinct.
Older Catholicism instinctively took evil seriously.
This clerical culture is forever trying to make terrifying things friendly and sacred things casual.
The Same Religion Keeps Emerging
Dorado says the Church must decrease until she disappears.
Koovakad says contradictory religions are needed to broaden the horizon of Truth.
The pastor of St. Peter’s jokes that the devil is rather likable.
At first these seem unrelated.
They share a habit.
Catholic distinctions are treated as somehow embarrassing.
Church and world. True religion and false religion. Missionary and non-Christian. Saint and admirable unbeliever. Christ’s Kingdom and generic fraternity. God and Satan.
The hard edges keep getting sanded.
Then everyone wonders why ordinary Catholics can no longer explain what the Church claims to possess that the world does not already have.
A sedevacantist looks at this and reaches an obvious conclusion.
A conservative Catholic searches for context.
A recognize-and-resist traditionalist constructs another distinction.
I understand all three reactions.
What becomes increasingly difficult is pretending there is no ecclesiological problem to explain.
Christ did not found a debating society whose final achievement would be its own disappearance.
He founded a Church.
And if the men claiming to govern that Church increasingly speak as though its mission is to dissolve itself into the universal fraternity of mankind, Catholics are entitled to ask a question far more serious than whether one quotation was awkwardly phrased.
Who taught them this religion?
And where, exactly, did ours go?
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An undated video circulating this week shows Stoia saying, in Italian, that he finds the devil “quite likeable,” that the devil is “certainly not as bad as people make him out to be,” and that perhaps he “adds a little spice to people’s lives.”
Ping
I hope to God he didn't say this.
It will take a Biblical Hercules to clean out the Augean stables that the Vatican has become--Michael the Archangel, or Christ Himself.
The Vatican will be turned into a Snackbar.
I, for one, WELCOME our new Muslim overlords. At least they don’t push degeneracy and apostasy down the people’s throats. And they don’t have homosexuals! None! Nor “international banker types”.
GPT summary for Freeper day drinkers:
The article argues that several recent statements and appointments within the Catholic Church under Pope Leo XIV reflect a growing emphasis on **interreligious pluralism at the expense of traditional Catholic distinctions**. It focuses on Archbishop-designate Mario León Dorado’s statement that “the Church is called to disappear,” his description of murdered Muslim imams as “martyrs” who might intercede, Cardinal George Koovakad’s claim that different religions help “broaden the horizon of Truth,” and a St. Peter’s Basilica priest’s remark that the devil is “quite likeable” and adds “spice” to life. The author sees these comments as evidence that distinctions between Christianity and other religions, and between good and evil, are being deliberately softened. The article is **strongly critical and traditionalist in its interpretation**, rather than a neutral news report.
Y’all go just as many weirdos as the church that Talarico attends.
GPT summaries are for weak people who can’t think for themselves.
You forgot your /SARC tag.
Are you ready to convert, or DIE?
Just curious.
Muzzie imams love their little dancing boys.
What are YOUR thoughts about this guy?
Yeah that’s my take too. I don’t know what it takes for someone to say enough I’m outta here but I would have left long ago. Granted there’s a lotta inertia involved here.
Or people who don’t have time to read the whole thing
OK, so it’s for lazy, weak people who can’t read or think for themselves.
Gay.
DENOMINATIONS ARE OF SAND, IT IS YESHUA ALONE WHO IS THE ROCK, for ALL truly born again believers of ALL denominations.
Who taught them this religion?
And where, exactly, did ours go?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Rhetorical questions for sure because everyone who cares already knows the answer. The creation of the new religion and the destruction of “ours” was initially orchestrated by Satan and his minions who commenced their operations AT THE VATICAN on 11 October 1962.
The Vatican will be turned into a Snackbar.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Until it becomes a mosque!
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