Nothing to see here, just a little HERESY…
Leo XIV to Ecumenical Group with Orthodox: ‘Rome, Constantinople, and All Other Sees Not Called to Vie for Primacy’
‘Pope’ Leo XIV in Castel Gandolfo on July 13, 2025
Today at Castel Gandolfo, the ‘Holy Father’ Robert Prevost (‘Pope Leo XIV’) received in audience participants in a so-called Orthodox-Catholic ecumenical pilgrimage from the United States. The Vatican has published some photos here.
Aside from the usual ecumenical blather about “restoring full unity among all Christ’s disciples” — as if one could be a disciple of Christ without belonging to His flock, which is the Roman Catholic Church exclusively — ‘Pope’ Leo dropped a bombshell regarding papal primacy. He told the men and women gathered:
Unity among those who believe in Christ is one of the signs of God’s gift of consolation; Scripture promises that “in Jerusalem you will be comforted” (Is 66:13). Rome, Constantinople and all the other Sees, are not called to vie for primacy, lest we risk finding ourselves like the disciples who along the way, even as Jesus was announcing his coming passion, argued about which of them was the greatest (cf. Mk 9:33-37).
(Antipope Leo XIV, Address to Participants in Orthodox-Catholic Ecumenical Pilgrimage from U.S., Vatican.va, July 17, 2025; underlining added.)
Yes, ‘Pope’ Prevost just conveyed that Rome has no primacy over the other dioceses. Granted, he did not say it explicitly, but his words, especially if read in context, strongly imply it and admit of no reasonable alternate understanding. There is no translation problem here, since Prevost spoke in his native English, addressing a group from his own home country, the United States.
As a reminder, here is the Catholic dogma regarding the Petrine primacy:
If anyone then says that the blessed Apostle Peter was not established by the Lord Christ as the chief of all the apostles, and the visible head of the whole militant Church, or, that the same received great honor but did not receive from the same our Lord Jesus Christ directly and immediately the primacy in true and proper jurisdiction: let him be anathema.
If anyone then says that it is not from the institution of Christ the Lord Himself, or by divine right that the blessed Peter has perpetual successors in the primacy over the universal Church, or that the Roman Pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in the same primacy, let him be anathema.
If anyone thus speaks, that the Roman Pontiff has only the office of inspection or direction, but not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in things which pertain to faith and morals, but also in those which pertain to the discipline and government of the Church spread over the whole world; or, that he possesses only the more important parts, but not the whole plenitude of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate, or over the churches altogether and individually, and over the pastors and the faithful altogether and individually: let him be anathema.
(First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, Canons of Chapters 1, 2, and 3; Denz. 1823, 1825, 1831. Anyone who thinks that the “perpetual successors” canon refutes Sedevacantism, please click here.)
All this is pretty clear.
Certainly, Novus Ordo apologists like Jimmy Akin, Patrick Madrid, or Michael Lofton could argue that Leo is not denying papal supremacy; after all, it is true that the world’s dioceses are not supposed to compete for primacy, since the primacy clearly belongs to only one particular diocese, and that is Rome. However, such a line of argument would be nothing more than spin, for it is clear that Leo did not mean that.
How do we know? For one thing, if it were indeed what he meant, he could simply have said so. He could have said that the other dioceses are not supposed to compete for primacy with Rome, since the primacy by divine right belongs to Rome alone, and this is a settled issue; but he chose not to.
Secondly, we know that Leo wasn’t asserting the primacy of the Roman church but rather calling it into question because to assert it would have been a great affront to the Orthodox in his audience, who would have blown a gasket. It would have constituted a significant setback in ecumenical relations jeopardizing the ‘progress’ made over the last few decades.
Instead, Leo XIV gave every indication that none of the dioceses are supposed to claim primacy over any of the others. To do so, he said, would be to imitate the disciples when they were arguing over who was the greatest among them (see Mt 18:1; Mk 9:33; Lk 9:46;22:24).
Now, this particular argument is not new. It was also the reasoning advanced by the Lutheran authors of the Magdeburg Centuries during the so-called Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. St. Robert Bellarmine, the Church’s Doctor of the Papacy, refuted them thus:
To the argument of the Magdeburgenses I respond that the Apostles did not clearly understand the promise made to Peter [in Matthew 16:18-19], until after the resurrection of Christ; and nevertheless they did suspect that Peter perhaps had been constituted the chief of all, and so they argued among themselves. And it is not surprising that they did not understand, because the Lord had spoken metaphorically. But they were so dull that they really did not understand many other things he said to them. For, in Mark 9:9-10 the evangelist writes: As they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of man should have risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what the rising from the dead meant.
But Origen, Chrysostom and Jerome in comments on Matt. 18 bear witness to the fact that, because of the suspicion which they had about the primacy of Peter, they did argue among themselves. And what the Magdeburgenses say is not true, namely, that the Lord had not said that Peter had already been designated as their leader. For, what is the meaning of these words in Luke 22:26: Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader ήγούμενος as one who serves? Did he not surely call one of them greater and the leader?
(St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., On the Sovereign Pontiff, Book I, Chapter 13; in Controversies of the Christian Faith, trans. by Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. [Keep the Faith, 2016], pp. 672-673; italics given.)
Thus far St. Robert’s refutation.
There is another point to be made with regard to Leo XIV’s use of this old Protestant objection. By saying that for Constantinople and Rome to compete for primacy would mean to imitate the disciples quarreling over who was the greatest among them, Prevost is implying that the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholics are equally disciples of Jesus Christ. That, of course, is false, since “the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing” (Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Humani Generis, n. 27), and the Eastern Orthodox are not a part of it, as is easy to demonstrate.
For example, the Holy Office under Pope Pius IX denounced…
the idea that the true Church of Jesus Christ consists partly of the Roman Church spread abroad and propagated throughout the world, partly of the [Orthodox] Photian schism and the Anglican heresy, as having equally with the Roman Church, one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. To take away the dissensions which distract these three Christian communions, not without grievous scandal and at the expense of truth and charity, [this false idea of procuring Christian unity] appoints prayers and sacrifices, to obtain from God the grace of unity.
(A Letter of the Supreme Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition to all the English Bishops, Sep. 16, 1864)
Convoking the First Vatican Council a few years later, Pope Pius IX addressed…
all those who, whilst they acknowledge the same Jesus Christ as the Redeemer, and glory in the name of Christian, yet do not profess the true faith of Christ, nor hold to and follow the Communion of the Catholic Church.
He went on to point out that…
whoever will carefully examine and reflect upon the condition of the various religious societies, divided among themselves, and separated from the Catholic Church, which, from the days of our Lord Jesus Christ and his Apostles has never ceased to exercise, by its lawful pastors, and still continues to exercise, the divine power committed to it by this same Lord; cannot fail to satisfy himself that neither any one of these societies by itself, nor all of them together, can in any manner constitute and be that One Catholic Church which Christ our Lord built, and established, and willed should continue; and that they cannot in any way be said to be branches or parts of that Church, since they are visibly cut off from Catholic unity.
(Pope Pius IX, Apostolic Letter Iam Vos Omnes, Sep. 13, 1868)
In 1954, just three years before the establishment of a Communist-controlled national church, Pope Pius XII instructed Chinese Catholics that…
even when the increased number of Chinese clergy will no longer need the aid of foreign missionaries, the Catholic Church in your nation, as in all the others, will not be able to be ruled with “autonomy of government,” as they say today.
In fact, even then, as you well know, it will be entirely necessary for your Christian community, if it wishes to be part of the society divinely founded by our Redeemer, to be completely subject to the Supreme Pontiff, Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth, and be strictly united with him in regard to religious faith and morals. With these words — and it is well to note them — is embraced the whole life and work of the Church, and also its constitution, its government, its discipline. All of these things depend certainly on the will of Jesus Christ, Founder of the Church.
(Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Ad Sinarum Gentem, nn. 10-11)
Is this the doctrine preached by Leo XIV? Of course not. If it were, no Eastern Orthodox people would be interested in paying him an ecumenical visit.
No, Leo XIV preaches the opposite: “May our return to the roots of our faith [sic] make all of us experience the gift of God’s consolation…”, he said at the very end of his July 17 ecumenical address (underlining added).
Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Leo XIV had received a delegation from the ‘Ecumenical Patriarchate’ of Constantinople, in which he called the Roman see and the Constantinopolitan see “sister churches”, as has been standard practice since July 25, 1967, when ‘Pope’ Paul VI suggested this term be used to describe the relationship between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches (see Apostolic Brief Anno Ineunte to schismatic patriarch Athenagoras I, whom he was visiting in Turkey).
A downgrading of the papal primacy is also in sync with Prevost’s ongoing push for ‘synodality’, which he adopted from his predecessor of unhappy memory, Francis.
Besides, Leo’s heretical comments fit right in with the ‘study document’ the Vatican’s ecumenical office released just over a year ago, entitled The Bishop of Rome: Primacy and Synodality in the Ecumenical Dialogues and in the Responses to the Encyclical Ut Unum Sint.
Ut Unum Sint was ‘Pope’ John Paul II‘s 1995 landmark encyclical on ecumenism, in which he tried to find a way to make the Papacy less objectionable to non-Catholics. He expressed his intention “to find a way of exercising the [papal] primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation” (Ut Unum Sint, n. 95).
That’s what this is all about.
We should aso not forget that Leo XIV’s effective denial of papal primacy mirrors that of Joseph Ratzinger (later ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI) in his book Principles of Catholic Theology (1982 in German; 1987 in English):
…Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium. When the [heretical-schismatic] Patriarch Athenagoras, on July 25, 1967, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Phanar, designated him as the successor of St. Peter, as the most esteemed among us, as one who presides in charity, this great Church leader was expressing the essential content of the doctrine of primacy as it was known in the first millennium. Rome need not ask for more. Reunion could take place in this context if, on the one hand, the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development, while, on the other hand, the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form she has always had.
…
Patriarch Athenagoras himself spoke … strongly when he greeted the Pope in Phanar: “Against all expectation, the bishop of Rome is among us, the first among us in honor, ‘he who presides in love’ (Ignatius of Antioch, epistola “Ad Romano”, PG 5, col. 801, prologue).” It is clear that, in saying this, the Patriarch did not abandon the claims of the Eastern Churches or acknowledge the primacy of the West. Rather, he stated plainly what the East understood as the order, the rank and title, of the equal bishops in the Church — and it would be worth our while to consider whether this archaic confession, which has nothing to do with the “primacy of jurisdiction” [defined at Vatican I] but confesses a primacy of “honor” (τιμή) and agape [love], might not be recognized as a formula that adequately reflects the position Rome occupies in the Church — “holy courage” requires that prudence be combined with “audacity”: “The kingdom of God suffers violence” [cf. Mt 11:12].
(Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1987], pp. 197-199, 217; underlining added.)
For a more detailed investigation into these manifestly heretical words of Joseph Ratzinger, with screenshots and full context, please see our post:
Just like his Novus Ordo predecessors, Leo XIV gives every impression that Catholics and Orthodox are equal before God.
Let him be anathema!
Image source: Shutterstock (Riccardo De Luca – Update)
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