Vatican’s ‘Venite ad me’ Document: Seven Troubling Changes to the Understanding of Faith

On October 22, 2026, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published a series of “considerations” entitled “Venite ad me. Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change”.

As the document itself specifies, it is neither a magisterial document nor a Doctrinal Note, but belongs to a new genre of pontifical document that would bear the name – precisely – Considerations, whose purpose would be “primarily to stimulate ecclesial reflection and pastoral commitment.”

At the will of the Pope and the Dicastery, therefore, this document in no way claims to bind the faithful. Fortunately, we might add, given what it contains.

1. The Terminological Manipulation at Its Foundation

Although the title speaks of the “transmission of the faith,” the document specifies from the outset that “the reflection contained in these Considerations concerning the fides qua precedes the question of the transmission of the depositum fidei, which this document does not claim to address exhaustively.”

Taking up a well-known theological distinction that goes back to Saint Augustine and subsequently to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the document distinguishes between fides qua and fides quae. The problem is that, as is unfortunately typical of Modernism, the authors of the document assign a new meaning to a traditional term.

The expression ‘fides quae creditur’ (Latin for “the faith that is believed”) is retained here in its classical sense: in the document too, it refers to the deposit of faith, to the doctrinal content to which the Christian must give the assent of the intellect. We can translate it as: objective faith.

The opposite, however, occurs with the expression ‘fides qua creditur’ (Latin for “the faith by which one believes”). The authors of the document modify the classical meaning of this expression to serve their own purposes. According to scholastic doctrine, in fact, this expression refers to subjective faith, which does not mean what each individual believes, as though everyone could believe differently from their neighbor, but rather the theological virtue itself, that is, the habit infused by God into each believing soul (cf. S.Th. I-II, q. 55, a. 1, ad 1).

Subjects may possess different degrees of fides qua, not because some believe in articles that others do not believe in (it is enough to deny one article of faith to lose theological faith and become liable to the charge of heresy), but because this virtue, like every habit, may be more or less deeply rooted in the subject.

Its rootedness depends on the presence or absence of psychological impediments. Among such impediments is not mortal sin, which never destroys faith but only charity (except when the sin itself has faith as its object, as in the case of heresy or apostasy). To give a striking example: the more lustful a person is, the more inclined he will be to impede the rooting of the theological virtue of faith, because the impulse of disordered pleasure will drive the intellect away from revealed morality insofar as it prevents the attainment of that pleasure. Lust and faith act as two indirectly opposed habits, and sooner or later one will yield to the claims of the other. The great heresies, in fact, arise from men’s pride and sensuality before they arise from merely intellectual reasons.

According to the authors of the document, however, the expression ‘fides qua’ refers to the “experience of faith,” that is, the “encounter with Jesus Christ” and the “fulfillment” of the welcoming of “God’s unconditional love into our hearts.” This is a typically Modernist conception. Indeed, among the cornerstones of Modernism we find sentimentalism, according to which what one “feels” takes precedence over what one “knows” or “must believe,” and experientialism, that is, the primacy of personal experience over the doctrine handed down by the Church (the much-hated Apostolic Tradition): if personal experience suggests something that contradicts the deposit of faith, experience must prevail.

For the Modernist, moreover, faith is not the assent of the intellect to the truth revealed by God, but a feeling, a desire for divinity that emerges from the subconscious. For this reason, in Modernism and now in everyday language, faith and trust are used as synonyms (“keep the faith”).

This understanding of faith also underlies modern ecumenism: if a non-Catholic “feels” that his own religion allows him to remain in contact with God, no one has the right to question his feelings and experience. Not even the Pope. The document thus shares this underlying framework and starts precisely from this point: subjective experience precedes and takes precedence over the objective content of Catholic doctrine.

2. The Erroneous Idea of Divine Love Without Conditions

The text identifies the absolute center of Jesus Christ’s “unprecedented” Revelation in the fact that “God is forever and for everyone love” and “mercy for all,” going so far as to affirm that “there is no human reality marked by failure or sin that cannot be restored to its original purpose.” Later, the document explicitly characterizes God’s love as “unconditional.”

This, however, is false. Classical Catholic doctrine teaches that God’s love and mercy can never be separated from justice. Indeed, mercy and justice are two different perspectives on the same object, which is God’s own essence. They are not two independent characteristics in God, because God is simple and does not possess multiple virtues that He exercises at different times (unlike the human being, insofar as the latter is a composite being): God is a pure and eternal act, immutable, and there is no change whatsoever in Him.

Furthermore, when we speak of “love” in reference to God, we are not referring to a feeling, as in the case of human love, but to God’s will, which is always directed toward the good of all His creatures. Benevolence. God’s love is clearly defined by Saint Paul: “God wills everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). It does not follow from this definition that all men are saved and, therefore, God’s love does not save everyone “unconditionally.”

The document appears to confuse (as is very common among Neo-Modernist theologians) “gratuitous” with “unconditional.” God’s love (just like redemption) is gratuitous, but it is not without conditions.

“Gratuitous” means that (1) the gift of redemption and grace is not something owed by God; and that (2) man, wounded by original sin, cannot in any way acquire merit or offer God a good of infinite value in exchange for eternal salvation (cf. Matthew 18:23-35). God could have chosen not to redeem man and would nevertheless have remained just, since the creature deserves the consequences of his own corrupted nature.

“Conditional,” by contrast, means that God does not save man without man’s cooperation. What is proper to the human act is its voluntariness. Therefore, God establishes as conditions for salvation the conversion of the will, repentance for one’s sins, adherence to revealed truth, and other similar conditions. Taken to its logical extreme, therefore, the document could even endorse the heresy of apocatastasis, that is, automatic universal salvation.

3. An Erroneous Idea of the Christian ‘Kerygma’

Once again, this document contains a crude and misleading presentation of the kerygma, that is, the essential proclamation of the Gospel. Cardinal Fernandez had already proposed this interpretation of the kerygma in the speech he delivered on the occasion of the Extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals, on January 7–8, 2026, in turn drawing on what Pope Francis had written in his Encyclical Evangelii Gaudium. The kerygma is presented as the proclamation of the “beauty of God’s saving love manifested in Jesus Christ, dead and risen.”

This, however, is not at all the proclamation of the Gospel, but a deliberately vague paraphrase of it. The kerygma is something quite different, as we read in the Bible: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:14–15). Saint Paul is even more didactic: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

The proclamation of the Gospel is not about some vague love of God in Christ that excuses and saves everyone. On the contrary: we are all born sinners before God, debtors of an infinite debt, and Christ took this debt upon Himself and paid it in our place by dying on the Cross, and He rose again to manifest to the world that what He had said He came to accomplish (namely, Redemption) had truly taken place.

In order for the merits of Christ’s Passion and Death to be applied to us, however, it is necessary to “repent,” to change one’s life and mentality according to what God wills, and to receive the sacraments, which are efficacious means of grace. God’s will, in fact, is manifested first and foremost in His doctrine, in His Law. This is the essential proclamation that Christians have carried forward since the very earliest centuries.

Relying on this false conception of the kerygma, the text warns pastors against using “scholastic,” “dogmatic,” or “moralistic” language in catechesis, promoting a model centered on emotional encounter, the inculturation of the liturgy, and interreligious dialogue. Ecumenical commitment is not presented as a secondary or optional activity, but as an “intrinsic dimension of the Church’s evangelizing mission” and even of the intergenerational transmission of the faith.

4. The (Reintroduced) Theme of the Hierarchy of Truths

In paragraph 84, explicit reference is made to the idea of a “hierarchy of truths among Christian mysteries.” This concept, originally formulated in the Second Vatican Council’s ecumenical decree Unitatis redintegratio, is taken up by the document to argue that, in the transmission of the faith, it is inappropriate “to get lost in the many areas of Catholic doctrine,” and that one should instead focus exclusively on the core of God’s love.

This approach is entirely inconsistent with the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church, particularly with the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, II-II, qq. 1–7), according to which all divinely revealed truths possess the same qualitative necessity for the profession of faith and are not arranged according to a hierarchy of importance: dogmas do not constitute a ranking of importance or negotiability, but stand in a relationship of rigorous logical derivation, necessarily proceeding from the fourteen fundamental articles of the Creed.

Consequently, the Modernist notion of this hierarchy is gravely dangerous, since it ends up downgrading defined dogmatic truths (such as the Petrine Primacy or the Immaculate Conception of Mary) to secondary or expendable contents on the altar of ecumenical diplomacy, thereby falling back into the historical heresy of latitudinarianism, solemnly condemned by the Magisterium of Gregory XVI in Mirari vos (1832) and by Blessed Pius IX in the Syllabus (1864).

This is not the first time that the synodal church proposed this concept. This category has already been widely employed both by Pope Francis in his principal magisterial documents and, more recently, by Pope Leo XIV in the Apostolic Letter In Unitate Fidei, where it was used to downplay the dogmatic significance of the Filioque.

5. The Church Must No Longer Evangelize

The document contains another statement that is particularly interesting to analyze. It says that “the Church does not engage in proselytism,” but operates solely “by attraction.” This is a highly effective rhetorical formula, which reproduces verbatim the wording of Evangelii gaudium, where it was stated that it is proper for the Church to spread by attraction rather than by “conquest.”

This concept, although it may appear poetic and persuasive, is in reality empty, a rhetorical device to justify the synodal church’s abdication of its mission, as recently confirmed also by Cardinal Vesco, when he declared that “the Church is not here to convert.” In this way, the Neo-Modernists even feel doctrinally supported in their doctrinal inactivity and in their philanthropy elevated to the status of doctrine (we will return to this when we analyze the accusation of Pharisaism that the document levels against conservative and Traditional Catholics).

The Church’s mission is thus distorted and reduced to a form of passive waiting and mere testimonial presence. This approach stands in obvious conflict with the original missionary mandate entrusted by the Risen Christ to the Apostles, which does not prescribe silent or inert radiance, but rather a dynamic, explicit, and militant action: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

From a classical theological perspective, the rigid opposition between “evangelization” and “proselytism” is entirely fictitious, artificial: historically and etymologically, making proselytes (from the Greek: “one who has arrived [at the truth]”) means bringing souls to the knowledge of and adherence to the truth, thereby tearing them away from the darkness of error and the danger of eternal damnation.

Undervaluing direct doctrinal proclamation and militant apologetics in favor of an aesthetic and sentimental conception of attraction deprives the mission of its most urgent supernatural core: the moral duty to call people to conversion and eternal salvation. The divine command to teach all nations disappears, giving way to a dialogical coexistence that neutralizes the apostolic mandate.

6. The Reversal of Reality: The Neo-Pharisee Accuses the Catholic of Pharisaism

The new document echoes the Gospel accusation that Jesus levels against the “Teachers of the Law,” implicitly accusing those priests and Catholic faithful who resort to “dogmatic-moralistic” language of Pharisaism and maintaining that the “rigid” application of doctrine generates unbearable burdens, divisions, discrimination, and exclusions contrary to God’s love.

This accusation is paradoxical: the Modernists, who are genuinely akin to the Pharisaical mentality from both a sociological and theological point of view, accuse traditional Catholics of Pharisaism.

Historically, in fact, the Pharisees were a veritable attempt to transform the Church of Ancient Israel in a “synodal” direction, as we would say today: from a religious community hierarchically established by God in the Old Testament through Moses, by means of the Levitical institution headed by the High Priest, into a horizontal community, where “experts” – the Pharisees themselves, who were for the most part not Levitical priests but lay Jews – ended up subordinating orthodoxy to orthopraxy, attributing salvific value to external works, the social ostentation of one’s own goodness, and formal observance at the expense of the interior life. Is this not precisely what Neo-Modernism is peddling?

Jesus certainly did not criticize the Pharisees for respecting the doctrine of Moses; on the contrary, He repeatedly stressed that He “did not come to abolish but to fulfill” and that “not one iota of the Law will pass away.”

Rather, He criticized the Pharisees for having sacralized human traditions. The burdens that the Pharisees imposed upon Israel are analogous to the burdens that Neo-Modernists impose upon the shoulders of Catholics today. The faithful today are burdened with measuring their morality and Catholic identity not by interior grace, prayer, or the theological virtue of charity, but by visible performances, activism, conformity to philanthropic projects, and blind obedience to worldly dictates (consider the submission of the Church during Covid, or extreme environmentalism, queer theology, and pro-immigrationism).

Just as the ancient Pharisees guided the Sanhedrin by imposing their interpretative minutiae, today the faithful are required to follow the directives of lay committees, sociologists, and horizontal ecclesial structures that override the primacy of sacramental life, imposing a psychological and social conformism disguised as “openness and dialogue.”

The “leaven of the Pharisees” condemned by Christ in the Gospel is hypocrisy. If orthopraxy is elevated above orthodoxy, that is, if pretending to help one’s neighbor is considered more important than the content of the faith, or if one even goes so far as to claim that orthopraxy coincides with orthodoxy, then the performance of external works and observance of the law inevitably end up generating the temptation to display one’s own goodness.

Almsgiving and good deeds thus become opportunities to win the approval of men and social prestige, rather than to give glory to God. Religion is reduced to a mere appearance, to a sort of moral competition in which the ostentation of works replaces the life of grace and conceals the absence of authentic theological charity. This is exactly what is happening today.

7. Female Governance and the Subordination of the Liturgy to Secular Culture

Finally, within the Vatican document “Venite ad me,” the issue of women’s presence in the highest levels of the Church and that of liturgical-pastoral openness to secular influences are explicitly linked to the alleged “transmission of the faith.”

Regarding female governance, the text observes that women constitute the overwhelming majority and the most active component of ecclesial communities, and asserts the urgency “to expand opportunities for women to participate in the leadership of ecclesial processes,” allowing them access to “those forums where important decisions regarding the life of the community are made.”

On the liturgical and cultural front, the document emphasizes that the liturgy is not a mere framework or an abstract doctrine, but the beating heart and living “experience” – note the choice of words – of the faith, which, in order to touch people’s hearts, must open itself to processes of inculturation capable of receiving the richness of different cultures, the sensibilities of metropolitan areas, and even the expressions of “subcultures” (such as the youth language of urban outskirts): Take this bread, bro!

In the document’s vision, both these elements would serve the transmission of the faith because they would make it possible to overcome languages perceived as “dogmatic” or “moralistic” and to adapt ecclesial structures to the ongoing “change of epoch,” making the Church a participatory, horizontal, democratic environment. In other words, the Church must follow the fashions of the world; the world must not follow immutable doctrine.

From an authentically Catholic perspective, however, these demands are deeply problematic. First, with regard to female governance, the demand for access to leadership roles based on secular socio-political criteria (consider gender quotas) secularizes ecclesiology, as was already done with historical Protestantism, subordinating the divine order of the hierarchical Church – established by Christ upon a priesthood and apostolic authority exclusively reserved to men – to worldly ideologies of feminist origin.

As for liturgical adaptation, the mingling of the sacred liturgy with profane fashions, secular music, and the communicative codes of “subcultures” compromises the fundamental principle according to which lex orandi and lex credendi are mutually normative. Subordinating the Mass to the logic of pleasing the masses and community acceptance obscures the nature of the liturgy as the sacred action par excellence, the objective worship owed to the infinite Majesty of God, the unbloody renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary, transforming the divine celebration into a horizontal gathering devoid of a sense of the sacred and of transcendence. In other words, devoid of the presence of God and filled with human being celebrating himself.

According to the authors of the document, however, the expression ‘fides qua’ refers to the “experience of faith,” that is, the “encounter with Jesus Christ” and the “fulfillment” of the welcoming of “God’s unconditional love into our hearts.” This is a typically Modernist conception. Indeed, among the cornerstones of Modernism we find sentimentalism, according to which what one “feels” takes precedence over what one “knows” or “must believe,” and experientialism, that is, the primacy of personal experience over the doctrine handed down by the Church (the much-hated Apostolic Tradition): if personal experience suggests something that contradicts the deposit of faith, experience must prevail.

Like many Protestant churches, it moves toward many feminine desires as opposed to Christ’s. All seven items cater to female preferences. Only Satan and man made religions, like Islam, witchcraft, and Buda will be happy with the direction.

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