Obedience for You, Dialogue for Them

Seventeen hundred years after the Council that smashed Arianism, Leo XIV has finally made the long-threatened pilgrimage to Nicaea.
On paper, it looks glorious: an apostolic journey to Türkiye and Lebanon, ecumenical prayer over the ruins of a basilica at İznik, a declaration with Bartholomew at the Phanar, a Mass in Istanbul that even manages to say “consubstantial with the Father.”
But we live in the post-conciliar Church, where the camera frames the ruins while the doctrine slips out the side door.
For decades Rome has reshaped the papacy from the visible center of unity into a negotiable “service.” Ratzinger said Rome “must not require more from the East” on primacy than what was “lived in the first millennium.” The Bishop of Rome treated Vatican I as something to be “re-received” ecumenically. Leo’s May 18 homily spiritualized the “rock” into wounded love and avoided any mention of binding jurisdiction.
What began as academic speculation has become choreography: a week of …