Confrontation or Synodality? The New Parallel Magisterium against Pope Francis in the Twenty-First Century

Remarks for the Society of the Divine Word, May 28, 2025

Back in 1990, what was then called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued a document, Donum Veritatis, “The Gift of Truth,” “On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian.” This was a positive development. By 1990, it was clear that the church was dealing with a new reality for the first time in its history. Consider the theologians you might be able to name off the tops of your heads before the 20^th century—Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, Bellarmine, even Arnold Janssen who dipped a few toes into the early twentieth century. Notice that there’s not one layperson among them. By the second half of the twentieth century, lay academic theologians had become something much nearer to the norm. In the words of (lay) theologian Massimo Faggioli, “There is no denying that, thanks largely to Vatican II, a substantial change has already occurred, especially in countries where the church and higher education have worked together to give lay Catholics—and in particular women—access to teaching and research positions in Catholic theology.”[1] Suddenly, new voices and new perspectives joined the theological conversation. Inevitably, tensions arose.

I’d want to say that this tension always existed, even before Vatican II. Thomas Aquinas described the roles of bishops and theologians in terms of the cathedra pastoralis and the cathedra magistralis—the pastoral and academic teaching roles. The bishop is an authentic teacher of the magisterium by grace of the Holy Spirit, but the academic theologian (this included Aquinas, who was not a bishop) also plays a vital role by raising new questions and “widen[ing] the boundaries” in which we reflect on life, the church, and the Spirit.[2] This is an old story, but the twentieth century inclusion of new voices raised new problems that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith attempted to address with Donum Veritatis by naming the problem in a particular way—a “parallel magisterium”—and, if you’ll forgive me, a section is worth quoting—

Dissent is generally defended by various arguments, two of which are more basic in character. The first lies in the order of hermeneutics. The documents of the Magisterium, it is said, reflect nothing more than a debatable theology. The second takes theological pluralism sometimes to the point of a relativism which calls the integrity of the faith into question. Here the interventions of the Magisterium would have their origin in one theology among many theologies, while no particular theology, however, could presume to claim universal normative status. In opposition to and in competition with the authentic magisterium, there thus arises a kind of "parallel magisterium" of theologians.[3]

To put the matter in the plainest possible language—new questions raised by new voices were viewed through a lens of “Dissent” by the CDF in 1990 and the possibility was raised that lay academic theologians were creating a “parallel magisterium” that competed with the authentic teaching of the church.

But then a funny thing happened. In 2013, Pope Francis was elected. As we know, he brought a different tone and a different style to the papacy. He also offered gestures of welcome to LGBTQ+ persons, in a very narrow way he encouraged blessing LBGTQ+ people in relationships, he welcomed the cultural contributions of the Global South at the Synod on the Amazon, he restricted the Latin Mass, he suggested divorced and remarried persons might receive Communion in the right pastoral circumstances, he appointed women to leadership positions in the Curia, and he called the whole church to conversation together in a synodal way that complicates a simply hierarchical view of the church, complements hierarchy with a more inclusive role for the whole People of God in the future of the church. I doubt I surprise you when I say that this did not go down well with every Catholic around the world and certainly not in the United States. Pope Francis faced a ferocious and unprecedented sort of opposition. And, what’s funny is that once that happened the “parallel magisterium” switched places. Suddenly, the suggestion was that the pope had become a dissenter, and the real guardians of Catholic faith were not the pope and the bishops but a profitable coterie of an entirely new sort of person—social media influencers.

We’ll want to note an important difference here. Generally, the influencers who have been Francis’s critics have not been academic theologians. Their parallel magisterium lacks the legitimacy of Aquinas’s cathedra magistralis, the legitimate role that academic theologians play in the life of the church. But their influence has also been much greater than any academic theologian I can think to name. They have much wider audiences. I am thinking here for example about someone like Michael Voris, the creator of a website and social media channels under the name Church Militant who once addressed Pope Francis in an online video, saying—

Your actions and omissions have left you unable to reign over the Church in any meaningful way. You have no credibility, no moral authority, not a shred of decency left….[4]

Voris won praise from other online influencers like Father Dwight Longenecker and Father John Zuhlsdorf, blogs like One Peter Five and Southern Orders. In the online environment that’s free advertising, and at the peak of his influence Voris was reaching about 1.5 million people each month. But viewership is only part of the story. Publicly-available tax filings tell the story I really want to focus on. In the year after he made a racist attack on Cardinal Wilton Gregory (calling him, among other things, forgive me, an "African Queen"), Voris’s two organizations, Church Militant and St. Michael’s Media, brought in a combined $7.8 million.[5] That was in just one year, and after he said that about Cardinal Gregory.

Voris isn’t in business anymore. He still is tangled up in court battles over a different defamation that came after what he said about Cardinal Gregory, and his organization has largely collapsed. He was perhaps the worst of the peddlers of an online parallel magisterium I want to talk about today. But the phenomenon I’m trying to tell you about hardly was confined to Voris and Church Militant.

The kind of paranoid dissent we see in someone like Michael Voris is not really a new phenomenon. Long ago, conspiracists spread lies that Pope John XXIII was a Freemason who facilitated the Masonic capture of the church and warned that the church was spreading heresies. Before the internet, The Wanderer and Crisis Magazine and the books of Malachi Martin all were homes for this same sort of stuff, often with a whiff of antisemitic ugliness and never without the condemnatory tone that communicated a depth of rage at the modern world and a church that would reach out to a modern world. But the internet unleashed that conspiracism in a new kind of way. I wrote about this in my 2018 book, Good Intentions: A History of Catholic Voters’ Road from Roe to Trump, because it also intersected the growing culture wars that have pervaded life in the United States as much as life in the church. The sort of Catholicism that wondered openly about whether the pope was a good Catholic, I am saying, became a business model across the last twenty-five years—and, a very successful one.

Chief among the businesses that profited was the Eternal Word Television Network. Several years ago while researching a different project I was able to read the minutes from a U.S. bishops’ meeting in 1980, when a delegation of bishops was sent to Irondale, Alabama to investigate the new cable television network being built by the Poor Clares. The bishops wondered whether they also should found a television network. The delegation reported their judgment at the next bishops’ meeting: they concluded to leave television to the sisters. The decision would prove fateful. In 1997, Mother Angelica attacked Cardinal Roger Mahoney on-air, saying, “I'm afraid my obedience in [his] diocese would be absolutely zero, and I hope everybody else's in [his] diocese is zero.” She was later forced to apologize, but that didn’t stop her from picking another fight with Birmingham Bishop David Foley in 1999 over the use of the ad orientem posture during Mass—the bishop had prohibited it, she didn’t like that.

By the late 1990s, Mother Angelica could feel sure of her power in the Roman Catholic Church. EWTN began with about 60,000 viewers in 1981. By 1992, EWTN had access to 31 million homes and, at the time when Mother Angelica was writing complaints to the Congregation for Divine Worship about Bishop Foley in 1999, EWTN had international distribution and reached 70 million homes. No pastor or bishop could match the reach of her voice, or her perspective on what is or is not Catholic enough—so much, she felt free to rally Catholics against them on her airwaves. This was an entirely new kind of situation, and that phenomenon only has grown. Now EWTN’s website boasts that—

EWTN is truly everywhere. We use cutting edge technology to make our content available on a wide variety of platforms, enabling people to stream and watch EWTN Catholic media programming on demand whenever and wherever they choose.[6]

They reach Catholics on television, but also EWTN reaches into our pockets on our smartphones with social media posting, videos, and a dedicated app. In more recent years, EWTN merged with the National Catholic Register, and their Catholic News Agency has taken on greater importance in day-to-day reporting on the church since the U.S. bishops were forced to close their own Catholic News Service (because the bishops no longer could afford it). Beyond all that is shortwave radio broadcasts, book publishing, and other websites too. EWTN and their understanding of our church is everywhere. It’s just that they are not the pope, they are not the bishops, and they exceed the reach of the institutional church in almost every way.

In 2000, Mother Angelica stepped back from running the network and empowered a new board to oversee it. The situation continued to develop. In 2019, on EWTN’s air, Father Gerald Murray accused Pope Francis of illegitimately “chang[ing] the teaching of the church” when Pope Francis adjusted the Catechism to say that capital punishment is “inadmissible.”[7] On the same broadcast of “The World Over,” Raymond Arroyo welcomed Steve Bannon, who said—

I've got a problem, not with the dogma, or the theology, but [Pope Francis] has been after the populist, nationalist sovereignty movement since he became pope. … He takes the side of the globalists, the Macrons of the world, the Merkels of the world in every situation.[8]

This is platforming an unabashed partisan to criticize the pope on the airwaves of a “Global Catholic Network.” But EWTN is able to do all of these things for a very simple reason—Can you think of a Catholic parish or diocese that has seen their collections triple since 2001, the year we learned about the sex abuse crisis? In that period EWTN has gone from receiving a little less than $30 million in contributions each year in 2001 to nearly $90 million just in 2022.[9] In that period, they’ve collected about $1.1 billion.

Hold those figures in mind while you recall what you probably already know: giving to dioceses and parishes and religious communities is down across the same period. That is verified by a 2015 study published in the Journal of Public Economics which found long-term declines of contributions to the Catholic Church following the revelations of the sexual abuse crisis going back to the 1980s.[10] After the 2018 revelations about Theodore McCarrick, a Pew Research study found a quarter of U.S. Catholics began attending Mass less often and giving less.[11] A post-pandemic study published by Villanova University found that the combination of these effects had become profound: fewer parishioners are carrying the burden to support ministries with their contributions.[12] While there has been some rebound since the pandemic, the Villanova study found that U.S. parishes on the whole have an average 11% less to spend in their budgets than they did just before the pandemic. And all this goes on while Catholics send more money year after year to EWTN and other organizations like them.

We certainly remember that Catholics also were sending money to Michael Voris’s Church Militant during the same period. And, it goes even farther than that. We could make a list of these organizations, all raising more money than parishes and dioceses, all reaching past pastors and bishops to define the church in the minds of their audiences, and all—to one degree or another—pursuing what we might call a parallel magisterium that has been quarrelling with Pope Francis. In the last several years, from 2018 to 2022, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty increased its fundraising by 153%. Fidelis (CatholicVote) has increased 227% in that period. Lifesite, in that period, up 267% year-over-year. Word on Fire nearly quintupled its fundraising, reaching 467% their 2018 level in 2022.[13] And while the message that Pope Francis was wrong has been selling well in all of these places, remember also that none of these organizations bear the burdens that parishes, dioceses, or communities like the SVD’s bear. No ministries to help the poor, or the hungry, or the homeless, or the sick are supported by these organizations, they have no elderly members of their communities to support. They have one ministry—to sell their brand of Catholicism. And, for the greater part, it has sold quite well.

In order to turn today’s conversation a little more into the direction of good news, I need to dwell just a little on one more unsavory feature of all of this. While I’ve been describing this very lucrative business model, I’ve been talking about that way that this all reminds me of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s parallel magisterium. This has been a presentation of the church that is at least somewhat apart from the church itself—these organizations, and the way that money and technology permit them to reach past pastors and bishops, to attack cardinals and the pope, all in the name of a supposedly purer Catholic faith. I want to say a bit more about that.

The Catholic Church has been in an argument with the modern world for centuries. A lot of it had to do with the Reformation and the loss of the church’s political power. From the Council of Trent to the Syllabus of Errors, the church made several tries to claw the world back into the comfortable and familiar past where Christendom was unbroken and Rome sat at its center. That never quite worked. By the mid-twentieth century, the dam broke with the Second Vatican Council. For about twenty years, during what we might call the first phase of the Council’s reception, the church seemed to be a different place. Yet as early as 1968, some of the Council’s most enthusiastic supporters—like Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger—began having second thoughts. In due course, Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger gave rise to the second phase of the Council’s reception. In part this was characterized by something like Donum Veritatis, that 1990 document I mentioned at the beginning, where Cardinal Ratzinger worried about academic theologians and a “parallel magisterium.” If the first phase of the Council was about hitting the gas pedal, the second phase was about tapping the brakes and slowing down ways that the Council was changing the church.

That slowing down was a slowing down of the embrace of the world that the Council had brought about—maybe even, a sort of pushing the world away. It was during that second phase of the Council’s reception that the church began to embrace what I tend to think of as a “sign of contradiction” narrative. As John XXIII had promised to ‘open the windows and let in fresh air’ with Vatican II, the John Paul II papacy increasingly settled into a different sort of posture. The Canticle of Simeon in Luke’s Gospel tells of Jesus as “a sign that will be contradicted”(Lk 2:34), and the 1980s saw Pope John Paul pursue that metaphor as a way to engage the world. He used the phrase phrase “sign of contradiction” dozens of times throughout his papacy, but it gathered real momentum after the mid 1980s. John Paul used it at least 45 times, beginning with an Angelus message in 1979. But 39 of those 45 came after 1987.[14] From 1987 until quite recently, there has been a prevailing view that the church should be a sign of contradiction set against the world. That prevailing view has characterized the Roman Catholic Church and its encounter with the world for two generations. It has had a profound effect. It intersected the arrival of the internet and it offered a sort of Manichaean way to think about the church as only a kind of opposition against the world. The world was wrong, the church was right. That message could be reinforced over and over again on website, on blogs, on social media, and on television to raise money. The money, in turn, has made it all much easier to spread the message. All that was needed finally was a figure on whom this very lucrative sign of contradiction business could fix its target. Mother Angelica had Cardinal Mahoney. Michael Voris had Cardinal Gregory. Lord knows how many people like the ones I’m describing have used Cardinal Bernardin as a target. But the figure who really focused this spirit of opposition was Pope Francis.

Contradiction has been the spirit of the second phase of the reception of the Council. It began as contradiction with the world, but in time it became contradiction among Catholics and, in the end, it became contradiction with the pope, himself. I don’t want to caricaturize this. Notice I am not using terms like “conservative” or “traditionalist” or “progressive” or “liberal,” words that I think do caricaturize what we’re discussing. We want to be careful to name what is at work here carefully and as objectively as we can. What’s happened is not something so simple that we can boil it down to good guys versus bad guys. Simeon was right in Luke’s Gospel. Christianity should remember it is something different from the world even while it is also a ministry to the world. Jesus is a sign that is contradicted by the world. Our Catholic faith should make a difference by being different. But along the way of re-asserting that basic and important truth across the last few decades, it has seemed to me that we lost sight of who is doing the contradicting—or, who should be. Jesus is a sign that is contradicted by the world. The world contradicts us. But we still have a ministry to the world, and our ministry should be defined by encounter, accompaniment, and service. The church is contradicted, but the church should not contradict—at least, not as its primary way of meeting the world. Who would accept our ministry when we do that? Who would accept the outstretched hand of someone constantly contradicting them?

This spirit of contradiction is what was frustrated so much by meeting Pope Francis, I think. Francis certainly understood that the church and Christian faith call us to something different. But he also understood that the church must greet the world with open arms, every time. The world contradicts us. We continue to offer our welcome, our service, and our desire for relationship because we are different.

This, I think, is where we come to the good news. Just as there was a first phase of the reception of the Council defined by trying new things and there was a second phase of the reception of the Council defined by this spirit of contradiction, it seems quite clear to me that Pope Francis began a third phase of the reception of the Council. Pope Leo now will continue it. And, what will define it?

Pope Leo already has told us, in his first words to us—

we want to be a synodal Church, a Church that moves forward, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close above all to those who are suffering.[15]

And, a few days later he told the cardinals about his determination for the church—

to renew together … our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council…[as] Pope Francis masterfully and concretely set it forth in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, from which I would like to highlight several fundamental points: the return to the primacy of Christ in proclamation; the missionary conversion of the entire Christian community; growth in collegiality and synodality; attention to the sensus fidei, especially in its most authentic and inclusive forms, such as popular piety; loving care for the least and the rejected; courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities.[16]

This is the roadmap. This is where we are going. This is the church “that moves forward,” and “forward,” I think means moving past the divisions and the arguments of the last several decades.

Like Pope Francis before him, Pope Leo is coming to the papacy not from the church’s European or Roman center, but from the global church at the margins toward that center. He has spent his ministry absorbing the developments since the Second Vatican Council as a minister and pastor at the peripheries, and I think this is the critical detail that needs to be understood in order to understand where we are. The second phase of the Council’s reception held a divided church and a church set against the world as its foundational premise. Not surprisingly, what we got was a divided church and a church set against the world. But the premise is possible only when there is a privileged narrative, when one voice or one set of voices counts more than others. It is only when we think of the church as a center that exports itself identically to the margins that it is possible to become preoccupied with a “parallel magisterium,” because the concern about a “parallel magisterium” only arises when new voices are added to the conversation. And, a parallel magisterium set against Pope Francis only became possible because the privileging of those voices at the center had become so pronounced that a pope from the margins elicited a—to use a word I intend only for being precise—elicited a deranged response, one that dared to challenge the pope and call him a poor Catholic. What was missed in that deranged response was that the truth of the Francis papacy was not that it was a “liberal” papacy or a “progressive” papacy, but that it was a global papacy. Francis invited us to see the church as a church of many churches and to permit everyone to come to the table together as themselves. A perspective that privileges a few voices at the center will find that hard to understand. A perspective that understands the church as a global reality cannot see it any other way.

The words we hear over and over from Leo are “peace” and “unity.” When we see the church as a global reality in, I think, the only way that Leo can see the church, those words are not placeholders for good feelings. They have definite content. Unity, I think we can say, refers to the real catholicity of the church—the two senses of the church’s universality. The church does indeed have a center in Rome, and the church also is a gathering of particular churches, histories, customs, and contexts from around the world and across time. Unity must function as a conversation between both of those dimensions of catholicity or we fail to have a church. Peace, of course, has justice as its precondition—“If you want peace, work for justice,” Pope Paul told us. Peace is our condition when every person in the church finds their place at the table, gathered around our faith in the church and the Gospel. Unity and peace are linked by this justice, and Pope Francis has given us a word to gather all of those meanings together—synodality, a word Pope Leo also has used and a renewal he has promised to continue.

The synodal, third phase of the council’s reception now is firmly underway, and it is underway because Peter’s successor today has a missionary, contextual outlook much as Pope Francis did. There is no getting away from it. I want to emphasize that I am not saying that anyone has won or lost here—that would be a sin against unity and peace. It is really more like that whole argument about contradiction and confrontation with the world is over now because we can see that the church is a bigger place than that. It always was bigger, of course, but now we all can see it. There’s no ignoring it anymore.

I cannot close without noting that those very profitable organizations I named, the ones that sell division so lucratively in the name of the church, are all still here. They haven’t gone away. They’re going to hang on for a long while I think. The leader of one of them, Brian Burch, is going to be the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Pope Leo will have his work cut out for him to overcome the power that the technology and all that money give those groups. Political leaders who thrive on division are still here too, and they are powerful. The church and the world haven’t changed overnight with the ending of the conclave. The Eschaton has not arrived.

But a new era is here. We now are in it. Contradiction and confrontation as the style of the church had their day. The way forward is synodality, the gathering of the whole People of God and all the churches that make up the church, together in dialogue with one another and with arms wide open to the world. The vision of the Second Vatican Council now is in the mature phase of its reception by the church. And of course, that means the hard work is only starting now. Now we must not only change the minds of people who have preferred confrontation and contradiction for so long, but also must make space for them next to us at the Great Banquet because, after all, we are not the church without them. Unity and peace demand that we build up a church that really is for all—the Latin Mass traditionalist and the gay person, the Roman Rite and the twenty-two other rites in communion with Rome, women and men, the Global North and the Global South. All of us. A true catholicity that welcomes all of the peripheries to a center we all share together.

Under the guidance of the Spirit, supported by the prayers of Pope Francis and other holy women and men, with the leadership of Pope Leo, that work belongs to all of us—co-workers in the vineyard of the Lord together on a joyful pilgrimage toward truth, unity, justice, and peace.

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[1] Massimo Faggioli, “Endangered Species: Is There a Future for Lay Catholic Theologians?” Commonweal (17 December 2018), published online at: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/endangered-species-0.

[2] Pope Francis, “Greeting of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Members of the International Network of Societies for Catholic Theology” (10 May 2024).

[3] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis, 34.

[4] See: https://ronconte.com/2019/03/05/michael-voris-versus-pope-francis-part-1-mortal-sin/.

[5] The Form 990 filing for St. Michael’s Media for 2022 records total revenue of $4,871,476. For the same year, the Form 990 filing for Church Militant records total revenue of $2,941,377.

[6] See: https://www.ewtn.org

[7] Michael Sean Winters, “Arroyo's EWTN Show is Anti-Francis, Pro-Trump Propaganda,” National Catholic Reporter (10 April 2019), published online at: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/distinctly-catholic/arroyos-ewtn-show-anti-francis-pro-trump-propaganda.

[8] Quoted at: Ibid.

[9] All figures drawn from the Form 990 filings of the Eternal Word Television Network (EIN 63-0801391) from 2001 to 2023.

[10] See: Nicolas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Truglia, “Losing My Religion: The Effects of Religious Scandals on Religious Participation and Charitable Giving,” (July 2015), published online at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1922950.

[11] Pew Research Center, “Catholics See Clergy Sex Abuse as Ongoing Problem” (11 June 2019), published online at: https://pewrsr.ch/2Wp2WHy.

[12] Matthew F. Mannion, MSCM, “Study of COVID-19 Impact on U.S. Catholic Parish Giving” (1 February 2023), published online at: https://www1.villanova.edu/dam/villanova/VSB/Centers/center-for-church-management/Villanova%20Study%20of%20COVID-19%20on%20US%20Catholic%20Parish%20Giving%20February%202023.pdf.

[13] According to their Form 990 tax filings, Becket’s went from $6.2 in 2018 to $11 million in 2022. Fidelis went from $3.3 million to $9.3 million. Lifesite, from $1.6 million to $5 million. Word on Fire from $1.5 million to $11.4 million.

[14] Tally by author, and reported at: Steven P. Millies, “Dear US Bishops: Modern Society Is Not the Enemy,” National Catholic Reporter (14 August 2024), published online at: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/dear-us-bishops-modern-society-not-enemy.

[15] Leo XIV, “First Blessing ‘Urbi et Orbi‘ of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV,” (8 May 2025), available online at: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/urbi/documents/20250508-prima-benedizione-urbietorbi.html.

[16] Leo XIV, “Address of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals,” (10 May 2025), available online at: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2025/may/documents/20250510-collegio-cardinalizio.html.