Commentary: Vatican II is God: The Consistory Begins

By Chris Jackson, Hiraeth In Exile, January 8, 2026

This consistory opens the way a religion opens: with its sacred text, proclaimed as the key to everything.

Leo XIV does not treat Vatican II as one council among many, held inside a long Catholic memory and judged by what the Church already received. He treats it like the hinge of history, the moment the Church “begins,” the point where the past becomes raw material and the future becomes mandate. He reads Lumen gentium as program, not as reference. He frames it as light. Then, almost immediately, he announces a whole catechesis series dedicated to Vatican II, presented as permanently relevant, permanently urgent, permanently required for reading the world.

That is why the atmosphere feels frightening. This is not mere emphasis. This is enthronement. A council becomes the interpretive tribunal. Everything earlier remains permitted as quotations, provided it gets translated into the conciliar dialect and fitted into the approved frame. The vocabulary does the policing. The priorities enforce the boundary. The “new ecclesial season” becomes a line you are expected to accept as a fact of nature, like gravity, as though Catholic identity started in the 1960s and any path back must count as rebellion.

Once a council functions this way, it stops being a chapter. It becomes genesis. It becomes the alpha and the omega. It becomes the book that rewrites the shelves.

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