Knowing When to Swallow: Leo XIV Omits Controversial Line in Common Recitation of ‘Ecumenical’ Creed

Cleverly skips line that omits ‘Filioque’…

Knowing When to Swallow: Leo XIV Omits Controversial Line in Common Recitation of ‘Ecumenical’ Creed

The Rev. Robert Prevost engaging in strategic swallowing on Sep. 14, 2025

On Sunday, Sep. 14, 2025, Robert F. Prevost (‘Pope Leo XIV’) presided over an ecumenical liturgical celebration officially entitled “Commemoration of the Martyrs and Witnesses of the Faith of the 21st century”.

Leo was joined by representatives of various heretical and schismatic sects, and ‘Cardinal’ Kurt Koch, the head of the Vatican’s so-called Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, also happily participated. “The prayer service [of] Sept. 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, commemorated 1,624 Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants who died for their faith between 2000 and 2025”, reports Catholic News Service.

The very idea of celebrating “witnesses of the Faith” together with heretics — even including deceased heretics themselves as witnesses of the Faith — is an inherent contradiction, one that would have elicited hearty laughter before the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and certainly been entirely out of the question. In fact, it was Vatican II’s revolution in ecclesiology that was needed to make such a charade even a remote possibility.

The absurdity of the Sep. 14 ecumenical service in Rome manifested itself also in other ways, however. One particularly amusing moment was the Second Reading, which was taken from the Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy:

I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming, and his kingdom: Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables. But be thou vigilant, labour in all things, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil thy ministry. Be sober. For I am even now ready to be sacrificed: and the time of my dissolution is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day: and not only to me, but to them also that love his coming. Make haste to come to me quickly.

(2 Timothy 4:1-8)

Apparently the irony was lost on the motley crew assembled there.

The ‘Ecumenical’ Creed: Denying the Faith while Appearing to Confess It

Things got even more interesting, however, when it came time to pray the Creed. According to the liturgical booklet issued by the Vatican for the event, it was the “ecumenical version” of the “Profession of Faith” that everyone was to pray (see pp. 35-36). That profession is in essence the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, albeit in an atrocious translation.

So, what’s the problem with praying that ancient Creed? In and of itself, nothing — and more on that in a moment. But in the context of the ecumenical commemoration of Sep. 14, reciting that Creed together is quite another story.

For one thing, it was prayed in unison with heretics, who do not accept each line of the Creed in the same sense in which the Catholic Church understands and teaches it. Secondly, the Creed omits the defined truth that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (Latin, ‘Filioque’), a dogma that is rejected by the Eastern Orthodox as heresy. In other words, the only way a common recitation of ‘the Creed’ was possible during that celebration was through deliberate ambiguity and calculated omission, allowing each participating individual to potentially mean something different even as they all pronounced the same words together.

Let the absurdity of the situation sink in for a moment: The fact that the abridged Creed was prayed together with heretics at an event that purported to celebrate steadfastness in the confession of Faith, is irony on stilts! And to call it a ‘common confession’ of ‘the Faith’ would be a lie!

But it gets more interesting still, for it seems that Leo XIV decided to leave his own mark on the event by engaging in what we might call ‘strategic swallowing’.

When the Creed was being recited and it came time to profess belief in the Holy Spirit, everyone was to pray these lines (bold print added):

Crediamo nello Spirito Santo,
che è Signore e dà la vita,
e procede dal Padre.

In English, the Vatican-supplied translation reads:

We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.

As expected, the line “who proceeds from the Father” does not include “and the Son” (in Italian, “e dal Figlio”).

So, what did Leo do? Did he recite the line as printed, thereby giving aid and comfort to those who deny the dogma of the Filioque? Or did he add the phrase on the spot, thereby risking offense to the ecumenists gathered, especially the Orthodox, and possibly straining ecumenical relations?

Clever Leo did neither. Rather, he swallowed at that precise moment, causing him to be silent for the abridged line altogether.

Take a look at this brief video we made of the incident:

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Those who point out that the Filioque clause was only later added to the Creed by the Catholic Church and was not part of the original Nicene and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds are certainly correct, but they are missing the point.

Of course it is not wrong to pray the older Creeds, in and of itself; but what is wrong is praying the older Creeds because one does not believe that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and from the Son, or because one wants to be able to recite the same text in unison with people who reject this Catholic dogma:

In the name of the Holy Trinity, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, with the approbation of this holy general Council of Florence we define that this truth of faith be believed and accepted by all Christians, and that all likewise profess that the Holy Spirit is eternally from the Father and the Son and has His essence and His subsistent being both from the Father and the Son, and proceeds from both eternally as from one principle and one spiration; we declare that what the holy Doctors and Fathers say, namely, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, tends to this meaning, that by this it is signified that the Son also is the cause, according to the Greeks, and according to the Latins, the principle of the subsistence of the Holy Spirit, as is the Father also. And since all that the Father has, the Father himself, in begetting, has given to His only begotten Son, with the exception of Fatherhood, the very fact that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, the Son himself has from the Father eternally, by whom He was begotten also eternally. We define in addition that the explanation of words “Filioque” for the sake of declaring the truth and also because imminent necessity has been lawfully and reasonably added to the Creed.

(Council of Florence; Bull Laetentur Coeli; Denz. 691)

Therefore, praying the more ancient Creed, which omits “and the Son”, in order that one can pray it together with heretics who deny its truth, is entirely illicit and to be condemned, and is a grave sin.

To demonstrate this, let’s consider the following evidence.

On Jan. 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII sent an apostolic letter to Cardinal James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, in which he condemned the idea

…that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. It does not need many words, beloved son, to prove the falsity of these ideas if the nature and origin of the doctrine which the Church proposes are recalled to mind. The [First] Vatican Council says concerning this point: “For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention to be perfected by human ingenuity, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence that meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother, the Church, has once declared, nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them” [Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, Chapter 4].

(Pope Leo XIII, Apostolic Letter Testem Benevolentiae)

Omitting certain points of doctrine or obscuring their clear and certain meaning in order to ‘promote Christian unity’, is precisely what just happened at the interreligious commemoration on Sep. 14.

Furthermore, on Dec. 20, 1949, the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII instructed the world’s Catholic bishops regarding theological discussions with non-Catholics and warned that  “by no means is it permitted to pass over in silence or to veil in ambiguous terms the Catholic truth regarding the nature and way of justification, the constitution of the Church, the primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, and the only true union by the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ” (Ecclesia Catholica, II).

Although this does not make reference to the Filioque, it is clear that the Holy Office was not suggesting that some truths can or should be obfuscated for the sake of dialogue; rather, it was simply enumerating some of the more common issues that are typically disputed by Protestants and often put “under a bushel” (cf. Lk 11:33) by timid Catholics out of a fear of ‘offending’ potential converts or even out of embarrassment.

Lastly, let’s also consider that on June 14, 1761, Pope Clement XIII had already warned that manipulating words or meanings can change what would otherwise be a laudable confession of Faith into a work of darkness: “…the matter is such that diabolical error, when it has artfully colored its lies, easily clothes itself in the likeness of truth while very brief additions or changes corrupt the meaning of expressions; and confession, which usually works salvation, sometimes, with a slight change, inches toward death” (Encyclical In Dominico Agro, n. 2).

Although Prevost knew exactly at what point in the Creed to swallow, that doesn’t get him off the hook, morally speaking. After all, the ecumenical liturgy over which he presided was put together by his very own team and bears his personal approval, at least implicitly. This means that no one is more individually responsible for what took place at that ‘commemoration of martyrs’ than ‘His Holiness’, Leo XIV.

Moreover, regardless of what his lips may not have pronounced during the actual recitation of the Creed, he still participated in — indeed, he presided over — the entire ceremony, of which that mutilated profession of Faith with unbelievers was an integral part. Whether he pronounced every word on the page or not, is not relevant. If one participates in a ceremony, one is understood to be assenting to everything that is an official part of it, and one cannot claim for oneself the right to issue a line-item veto, so to speak, for individual elements one decides to disagree with. That is why Catholics are forbidden from participating in non-Catholic services altogether (see Canon 1258) and not just in the heretical parts of their ceremonies. Nowhere will one find ecclesiastical legislation instructing Catholics that it is fine to attend non-Catholic liturgies as long as one closes one’s mouth and withholds one’s assent at the right times.

Final Remarks

For those interested in exploring the Filioque controversy more, St. Thomas Aquinas defends the dogma in his Summa Theologica, part I, question 36, article 2 (and following): “Whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son?”. He also treats of it at greater length in his Against the Errors of the Greeks.

However, the main point of the present article was not to vindicate the Filioque, nor to refute the ecumenical martyrdom heresy (which we have done here).

Rather, it was to point out how absurd and impermissible it is to use ambiguity and omission to be able to pray the Creed with unbelievers, regardless of who swallows at what point.

Image source: YouTube (screenshot)
License: fair use