Did Leo XIV Bring a Catholic Awakening Or Was It the Other Way Around?

Cancel Culture was canceled after the 2024 election. A Catholic awakening began with the 2025 Conclave. Did Pope Leo XIV bring it, or did it bring us Pope Leo XIV?

May 28, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

On Sunday, May 18, 2025, I watched much of the Inaugural Mass for Pope Leo XIV broadcast by EWTN from St. Peter’s Square. Like many, I was amazed not only by the size of the crowd — estimated by The Wall Street Journal to be about 200,000 — but also by the makeup of that crowd. Jubilant young men and women, thousands of young families, priests, seminarians, religious sisters, energetic Catholic youth, and men and women of all ages celebrated the moment with brilliant smiles and deep respect. Not since the papacy of John Paul II have I witnessed such an outpouring of energy and exuberance in a Catholic setting.

I wrote a post back in 2018 entitled, “The Once and Future Catholic Church.” It began with a troubling but truthful account from the early days of Islam in the Seventh Century AD. It told a story that has since been spun into acceptability and normalcy across once-Catholic Europe. The brief story and its aftermath are historically important. We will link to that post again at the end of this one.

That post also profiled a fine article entitled “The Catholic Crisis” by Sohrab Ahmari in the May, 2018 issue of Commentary magazine. It was a review of the book, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism by Ross Douthat. At the time of his review, Sohrab Ahmari was a recent and celebrated convert to the Catholic faith. He was also the London editor for The Wall Street Journal. His Review and Douthat’s book were written during the papacy of Pope Francis. Here is an excerpt describing their experience and that of many before the Conclave of 2025:

“There is reason to worry that lately a spirit of relativism has entered the Roman Church that threatens to undermine its unity and catholicity. That should concern Catholics and non-Catholics, because the Church is the living bedrock of the West and one of the last bastions of the principle that moral truth is moral truth yesterday, today, a thousand years from now.”

That sacred trust, which the Church must hold and defend, calls to mind for me one of the basic tenets of Scriptural faith that is too often overlooked in any quest to abandon yesterday in anticipation of tomorrow: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

During the 12-year pontificate of Pope Francis, both of the Catholic writers cited above experienced a papacy that “thrived in ambiguity.” Among their list of perplexing notions was a media-hyped comment by Pope Francis that called into question the existence of hell. Defenders of the Pope excused the incident as a misreading of the Pope’s remarks by left-leaning atheist journalist, Eugenio Scalfari. However, as Mr. Ahmari pointed out it was the fifth interview Pope Francis had granted to that particular journalist.

At the same time, Pope Francis was unresponsive to requests for dialogue and clarification in a series of Dubia posed by Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke and other conservative prelates. The Pope, according to Ahmari, “first ignored and then ridiculed them.”

Sorab Ahmari also reported on Douthat’s “fascinating speculation” on the projected future of liberal Catholicism:

“Liberals simply don’t have the numbers … . Theological liberalism is in demographic decline, and liberal orders struggle to attract vocations. Church coffers may be full, but the pews are empty. The leading lights of theological liberalism are octogenarians, and there are no successors in the wings. Conservatives and traditionalists, meanwhile, have the numbers, the intellects and the energy. Orders that prize orthodoxy are thriving worldwide.”

The Conservative Rise

It is important to acknowledge where we have been. Two weeks before the Conclave and the election of a new pope, The Wall Street Journal published a most interesting Front Page analysis entitled, “Conservative U.S. Catholics Gain Sway” by Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner (WSJ, April 22, 2025). It was published on the day after the death of Pope Francis implying that much of its research and content was written prior to that development. The authors described that their analysis “focused attention on the Vatican’s fraught relationship with an American flock undergoing cultural and theological changes … .”

Consulting a number of Vatican observers and insiders, the authors presented keen insights on what they expected from the Conclave. The result, however, was entirely unexpected. The Conclave completed its mission just one day after it commenced. The Journal authors had cited a brief final meeting between Vice President JD Vance and Pope Francis on the day before the Pope’s death:

“For Francis, it was a final encounter with the conservative wing of American Catholicism that is flourishing and increasingly assertive at a time when the Church, more broadly, is struggling.”

Of interest, a companion article in the days before the Conclave, “Who Are the Frontrunners for the Papacy?” by Marcus Walker (WSJ, April 22, 2025) presented ten cardinals seen as “front-runners,” a misleading term that suggests a political campaign. Despite the secrecy of a conclave, it is by no means certain that any of the names proposed were “running” for the office. The one ultimately elected, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, was presented in the Journal article as a “dark horse.”

However, one of the commentators made a prescient statement before the Conclave began. In a lecture on the growth of Catholic conservatism, theologian David Deane spoke of JD Vance and his brief meeting with Pope Francis on the day before his death: “Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity … . Seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this.”

This was followed in the Chaffin and Zitner article in the Journal by a reflection from Timothy Gray, President of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school of theology outside St. Louis, MO that “emphasizes a return to the rigors of Scripture and Tradition”:

“A lot of progressives think that if the Church could just accommodate the modern world, it will stop its decline. But everywhere the Church has embraced the modern world and its contemporary values, it has died.”

Such comments may have been prophetic. The Conclave commenced just ten days later. After deliberating for only four voting sessions in less than two days, the Conclave elected “the dark horse,” Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, formerly Superior General of the Order of Saint Augustine.

The Catholic Project

In 2022, The Catholic Project, a research initiative of Catholic University in Washington, DC published the striking results of a survey of 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests. It found that among those ordained after 2010, 80 percent identify as conservative or orthodox while those who identify as liberal or progressives have faced a virtual collapse. Stephen P. White, Executive Director of The Catholic Project, called this “a massive shift among priests,” adding that this trend is rapidly spreading not only in the United States, but throughout much of the Western world.

A separate research project on Catholic priests by the Augustine Institute documented that younger priests tend to be much more conservative and traditional that older priests. This bears out from observations in comments and emails from our readers who find this distinction to be a positive development. Writing at the time for The Wall Street Journal, Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca reported on the strains of this trend in “Catholic Ideological Split Widens” (WSJ, Dec. 19, 2022):

“U.S. Catholic bishops elected conservative leaders (in 2022) continuing to resist a push from Pope Francis to put issues such as climate change and poverty on par with the bishops’ declared priority of opposing abortion.”

The bishops appointed by Pope Francis tended to mirror his priorities. His elevation of San Diego Archbishop Robert McElroy, a leading liberal among U.S. bishops, to the College of Cardinals and then as Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, is an example. That appointment was preceded two years earlier by the sudden, highly controversial removal of popular conservative Bishop Joseph Strickland from the Diocese of Tyler, Texas leaving many in that diocese and among conservatives throughout the United States reeling from the loss.

According to a WSJ article, Pope Francis had expressed his own discontent with some leaders in the U.S. Church. In 2023, he cited a “very strong, organized reactionary attitude” against him by conservatives in the U.S. Church, adding: “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless.” Seemingly in response, he removed Bishop Strickland from his post stirring up a reaction, manifested in distrust, among a majority of conservative U.S. Catholics.

There is thus a growing disparity in liberal versus conservative views as newly appointed bishops are more liberal while priests emerging from U.S. seminaries over the last few decades are more conservative and traditional. When seminarians and younger priests do not have their views of the Church and Catholic practice affirmed, stress and disillusionment develop and increase.

Since the 1980s, successive annual priesthood ordinations have grown more conservative. Each successive 10-year grouping in the ordained priesthood supports Church teaching on moral and theological issues more strongly than in the decade before. Those ordained after 2010, as a whole, are the most conservative. Younger priests represent a generation disillusioned with the ideas of progressive religious pluralism.

This had left an ever widening chasm between Pope Francis, his Episcopal appointments, and younger priests in the United States. The Catholic Project Study also revealed that 80 percent of U.S. priests ordained before 1980 approved strongly of Pope Francis, while only 20 percent of those ordained after 2010 shared that high approval.

According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, 19 percent of Americans report that they identify as Catholic. That dropped from 24 percent in a 2007 survey. In the 1970s, in excess of 50 percent of U.S. Catholics participated in Mass weekly. Today that has dropped to 25 percent. Catholic voters in 2020 were virtually split between left and right politically. In 2024 they turned sharply for Donald Trump increasing Catholic vote support for him by an 11 point margin.

Pope Leo XIV has been widely presented in the media as “the first American Pope.” In actuality, however, he has served the Church as a citizen of the world. Is all this priestly interest in respect for orthodoxy a plague upon the Church? Or is it the whispering of the Holy Spirit, a whispering that also placed Leo XIV in the Chair of Peter? Ponder for a moment the massive crowd in St. Peter’s Square in the Inauguration Mass for His Holiness Leo XIV for your answer. Perhaps there is something to be said for a pope to be in the world but not of it.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Pope Francis Had a Challenge for the Prodigal Son’s Older Brother

The Vatican Today: Cardinal George Pell’s Last Gift to the Church

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Pray for the papacy of Pope Leo XIV

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Pope Leo XIV Defamed by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests

In 2018 this exposé of SNAP’s shady tactics to increase settlements over accused priests was widely ignored. After the Conclave of 2025 it exploded on the Internet.

May 21, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

It did not take long. In the weeks leading up to the Conclave of 2025, Pope Leo XIV was accused by SNAP — the U.S.-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — of negligently investigating and then covering up a decades-old account of alleged clergy sexual abuse. Lifted out of all context, the story is missing its most important element: the simple truth. To its great credit last week, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights responded to this story by providing the truth and context that the story lacks. I am grateful to the Catholic League for having the Holy Father’s back, not to mention my own.

At about the same time, an article that I wrote in 2018 about SNAP’s deceptions and destructive malfeasance suddenly went viral after the Conclave of 2025. The Catholic League pounced on that as well, and courageously republished it anew under the title, Father Gordon J. Macrae On SNAP’s Deception.

That fact alone conveyed to me the urgency of this account of how and when SNAP activists terrorized the Church and priesthood for two decades.

So here it is again, apparently by popular demand of SNAP itself by raising the same tired old story with a new target: Pope Leo XIV. The papacy of Pope Leo XIV should not be tainted by a repeat of the dishonest rhetoric from this shady and morally compromised anti-Catholic activist network. SNAP can no longer mask the truth revealed in these pages.

Please read and share, as so many in Europe have done:

Abused by the Survivors Network of those abused by Priests

If there exists a Catholic priest still in denial about the agenda of SNAP, it’s because he has lived with his head in the sand blind to the threat lying in wait for him.

In 2009, at the same time I began writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, Catholic League President Bill Donohue invited me to write a feature article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. My article, “Due Process for Accused Priests,” began by describing an important phenomenon.

In 2002, just as the national story of Catholic priests and sexual abuse emerged out of Boston to sweep the country, psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on a phenomenon called “availability bias.” It revealed the power of the media to not just report the news, but to reshape it to fit media bias, to cultivate it, to take a story’s small microphone and turn it into a megaphone.

Activist organizations have trained people to harness this force to sway what others adopt as a bias. It is not new, just newly analyzed. One of the most potent deployments of “availability bias” is one I have quoted before in these pages. It comes from Mein Kampf, the 1926 book by Adolf Hitler that gave rise to the Nazi party in Germany:

“The great mass of people will more easily fall prey to a big lie than to a small one.”

After my 2009 Catalyst article was published, I was subjected to an open assault by David Clohessy, Executive Director of the activist organization, SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Matt Abbott at Renew America forwarded my article to Mr. Clohessy and invited a response posted at Renew America entitled, “Imprisoned Priest, Sex Abuse Victim Clash.”

David Clohessy was obviously perturbed by what I exposed about the lawsuit settlement process and how it is advanced and cultivated by “self-serving contingency lawyers and various agenda-driven groups using scandal for their own ends.” Mr. Clohessy had long derided Church officials for entering into secrecy agreements to keep settlement amounts from public view.

On January 17, 2017, former SNAP employee Gretchen Rachel Hammond filed a lawsuit against SNAP in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. Ms. Hammond had been SNAP’s Director of Development before leaving the organization and filing her lawsuit. The named parties in the suit included David Clohessy, SNAP’s Executive Director, and Barbara Blaine, SNAP’s founder and president, and a member of SNAP’s board of directors.

Ms. Hammond’s lawsuit alleged that she was a victim of retaliatory discharge for questioning the allegedly corrupt practices of this organization. These included claims that SNAP and its leaders received substantial kickbacks in the form of “donations” from attorneys to whom SNAP officials referred clients or potential clients.

The lawsuit exposed that lawyers in California, Chicago, Seattle, and Delaware made major “donations,” some of them in six-figure amounts, and that SNAP leaders “concocted a scheme to have other attorneys make donations to a front foundation” to mask “attorneys’ kickbacks” to the organization.

The lawsuit also alleged a pattern of collusion between SNAP officials and plaintiff lawyers to maximize publicity for the purpose of fueling bigger payouts. It accused SNAP officials of callous disregard for the real interests of real sexual abuse survivors. Among the lawsuit’s other allegations were these:

• SNAP engaged in a commercial enterprise motivated by its directors’ and officers’ personal and ideological animus against the Catholic Church.

• SNAP conducted business premised on farming out abuse survivors as clients for specific attorneys who file lawsuits and collect settlements from the Catholic Church.

• Attorneys routinely gave SNAP confidential plaintiff claims and other privileged information in order for SNAP to maximize payouts with sensational press releases.

• SNAP claimed that it existed to provide support for survivors of clergy sexual abuse, however at all relevant times, SNAP did not have a single grief counselor or rape counselor on its payroll. SNAP would ignore survivors who reached out to SNAP for legitimate counseling.

• Ms. Hammond alleged that she was told by SNAP official Barbara Dorris to ignore calls from survivors who were seeking only counseling.

• Despite accepting funds for counseling and aiding survivors of sexual abuse, SNAP squandered those funds to advance its own interests and those of its leadership.

• SNAP set out to deliberately jeopardize the ability of accused priests to receive due process and fair trials.

• In 2011, SNAP oversaw fundraising for a charge brought against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Court at The Hague; however SNAP used the funds to pay for lavish hotels and other extravagant travel expenses for its leadership.

The Fallout

When the lawsuit became public, David Clohessy resigned as Executive Director, and SNAP founder and president, Barbara Blaine also resigned. They have since settled the lawsuit by a secrecy clause just like the ones for which Mr. Clohessy had railed against Catholic bishops over the last two decades.

After the settlement, others among SNAP’s more notorious leaders also resigned as reported by David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report in “SNAP R.I.P.” Barbara Dorris, who replaced David Clohessy as Executive Director, and Regional Director Joelle Casteix both resigned. Among the revelations uncovered by David Pierre was that SNAP published the email addresses and personal phone numbers of accused priests to generate harassment.

Ms. Hammond’s lawsuit was only one of several brought against SNAP, but it was the one that appeared to finally expose what had long been suspected of SNAP and its leaders. Simultaneously in 2017, Father Joseph Jiang, a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, filed a defamation lawsuit against SNAP.

Charges brought against Father Jiang were heavily promoted by SNAP leaders who, as they do whenever a priest is accused, issued a public call for anyone else who wants to accuse the priest. When Father Jiang passed a polygraph test [ I did, too, by the way, twice ] the charges were dismissed in 2015.

In 2016 a federal judge ruled that SNAP made false statements against Father Jiang “negligently and with reckless disregard for the truth.” SNAP and the parents of the minor who had falsely accused him settled the lawsuit.

As part of its settlement, SNAP issued a public apology, but the ever complicit news media failed to mention that SNAP was forced to do so in the wake of a false claim and lawsuit. SNAP’s apology, written by its legal counsel, included this statement:

“The SNAP defendants never want to see anyone falsely accused of a crime. Admittedly, false reports of clergy sexual abuse do occur. SNAP apologizes for false or inaccurate statements… its representatives made which in any way disparaged Father Joseph Jiang.”

In reporting this story, some Catholic media outlets continued to refer to SNAP as “a victims’ support group” or “a victim advocacy group.” It’s a bad habit that blindly gives legitimacy of purpose to SNAP which it does not have, and has never had.

Pope Benedict’s “Crimes Against Humanity”

The most important and visible source exposing SNAP’s corruption and reckless disregard for truth is a document by Catholic League President Bill Donohue entitled, “SNAP Implodes.” It provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the path of destruction SNAP and its leaders have left in the Church and priesthood under the false guise of advocating for real victims.

Among the most manipulative of David Clohessy’s “advocacy” was an instruction to accusers to attend SNAP press conferences. To play on the emotions of reporters, Clohessy urged those awaiting settlements to “display holy childhood photos” before the news cameras, and… “If you don’t have compelling holy childhood photos we can provide you with photos of other kids that can be held up for the cameras.”

If that doesn’t infuriate Catholics who have any regard left for truth, then what would? SNAP had a much worse perversion of justice than was first hyped, and then covered up, by the news media. It was the most destructive publicity stunt SNAP and its leaders have devised or condoned to date.

Both Bill Donohue and the Hammond lawsuit cited this one (see the final bullet point in Ms. Hammond’s lawsuit above). What they do not reveal is that SNAP used the false case against me to help bring it about.

David F. Pierre, Jr., moderator of The Media Report exposed this SNAP media stunt in “The Hague Tosses SNAP’s Nutty Lawsuit Against the Vatican, SNAP’s Latest P.R. Stunt Exposed.” That was before I even knew that I was a part of this story. In 2011, SNAP and the Center for Constitutional Rights — located at 666 Broadway in Manhattan — jointly filed a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court.

The ICC is an independent judicial institution with the power to hold trials and impose sentences for the most serious crimes of international concern: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The ICC was approved by international treaty in 1998 and officially came into being on July 1, 2002, after 60 countries ratified the treaty.

The court is headquartered in The Hague, The Netherlands. Of interest, in May of 2002, President George Bush declined to sign the treaty and refused to allow the ICC to have jurisdiction over United States cases. So SNAP’s target was not U.S. Catholic priests and bishops, but the Pope himself.

SNAP duped the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights to compose and file the briefs with information provided by SNAP in collaboration with plaintiff lawyers hoping for a precedent to tap Vatican assets in their never-ending quest for big bucks. I first learned of my involvement in this story from an article by journalist JoAnn Wypijewski, in “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.” Here is an excerpt:

“The Center for Constitutional Rights [CCR] . . . joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity… To CCR’s shame, Father [Gordon] MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief with respect to allegations… which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case [as] cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

SNAP, apparently in retaliation for my Catalyst articles calling for independent investigation of dubious claims, fed information to the Center for Constitutional Rights that would fuel a case against the Vatican. They made no attempt to contact me or my defense, nor did they contact Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal who researched and published extensively on the same story, but with polar opposite conclusions.

And SNAP did this without attempting to contact James Abbott, the former FBI Special Agent who spent three years investigating this case before dismissing it as a fraud. (Agent Abbott’s affidavit is cited at the end of Ryan A. MacDonald’s recent post, “#MeToo and #HimToo: Jonathan Grover and Father Gordon MacRae” which also lays out the fraud behind this story).

In the end, to its great credit, the International Criminal Court declined to accept jurisdiction or the crimes against humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI, but that was no surprise. Everyone involved knew that this fiasco would go nowhere, and it was never really SNAP’s goal. It was merely a publicity stunt for David Clohessy and SNAP to heighten pressure for quick and lucrative financial settlements.

The people who terrorized American Catholic priests for the last quarter century are gone now. Their fraud is exposed. Their coffers are empty. Their leaders have fled. In “SNAP Implodes,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue summed up what I had come to know at a very personal level in this moral panic that SNAP promoted and extorted for profit over the last 25 years:

“SNAP officials function as borderline gangsters out to destroy innocent persons. It is motivated by hate and exploits the very people it claims to serve. Justice demands that it be shut down by the authorities before it does any more harm.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Once again, you would serve the cause of truth and justice if you share this post and ask your contacts to do the same. Eyes may also be opened by these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

• David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

• Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates

• To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants

• The Catholic League: SNAP Implodes

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”