[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Sometimes highly indecent, scandalous public acts are the stepchildren of larger, hidden scandals.
You have only to look at the Vatican and the papacy of Leo XIV to understand how this works.
In mid-October, an unidentified man walked up to the Altar of Confession in St. Peter’s Basilica, pulled down his trousers and began urinating. The basilica was crowded with international tourists attending the 9 a.m. Mass. As security guards rushed in and dragged the man away, he bent over to pull up his trousers, an action that exposed his bare buttocks to worshippers.
The urination incident was said to have shocked Pope Leo, who immediately called for the re-consecration of the altar with prayers, holy water and incense.
“Who would do such a thing?” concerned Catholics asked, many perhaps shrugging their shoulders at what happened in this sacred space just several weeks before.
The Church-sanctioned incident that occurred weeks before might have been perceived by Saint Padre Pio, were he alive today, to be the root cause of the urination episode in St. Peter’s.
In its zeal to be more inclusive, the Church opened a portal that should not have been opened.
Think back to Pope Paul VI’s 1972 comment that, “From some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God,” and you begin to understand the most recent leakage from that fissure: the September 2025 procession of a loud, disrespectful, sloppily dressed, obscenity-inclined group of LGBT Catholics who marched into St. Peter’s with a rainbow cross and an arrogant attitude that seemed to broadcast the following message: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”
Ironically, despite the fact that some of the “devout” LGBT activists were openly grabbing the buttocks of their boyfriends, there was no papal rush afterwards to purify the space with holy water and incense.
The disrespect shown by that motley crew went down without any word of censure by the Vatican. Legacy media praised the pilgrimage as the beginning of a new renaissance, waxing endlessly about how the Catholic Church was entering a new era.
Only four brave bishops had the verve to say a Mass of Reparation for the rainbow clown show, but there was no such central “cleansing” ceremony in St. Peter’s itself. The few bishops involved in the Reparation Masses even attracted the scorn of radical, leftist German bishops for not getting with the program.
Pope Leo, meanwhile, remained silent about the rainbow circus. Perhaps his mind was on news of an exotic gift coming his way: a pure white miniature Arabian horse from the Michalski Stud Farm in Poland. When the beautiful horse was presented to the ice-cube (climate change) blessing pontiff, photos of the event went viral.
“The pope looks so happy!” clueless Catholics exclaimed. “And just look at that pretty horse!”
Meanwhile, in the Eternal City that doesn’t seem so “Eternal” anymore, the Vatican announced it was going to honor Muslim scholars’ request for a prayer rug in a designated space in the Apostolic Library.
The library has often been described as a universal library with Arabic, Jewish and Ethiopian collections containing some 80,000 manuscripts as well as ancient copies of the Quran.
The laying down of a prayer rug in the name of religious liberty and dialogue seems like an accommodating, harmless gesture, but in reality it is a powerful symbolic first step — another whiff of brimstone from Paul VI’s open fissure — that will likely have disastrous consequences in the future.
As Islam slowly continues to conquer Western Europe with illegal migration and high birth rates, the Vatican, in its craze to be seen as an ecumenical “mother” with welcoming open arms, has apparently forgotten how Islam conquers by small, incremental steps.
Now that Islam has a foot in the Vatican, that prayer space over time will likely lead to other developments, perhaps the building of a small mosque in Vatican City.
What is certain is that the prayer rug will lead to other Muslim requests.
Future Islamic horrors may well include the eventual capture of St. Peter’s itself, which would provide a harmonious alignment with that other “imprisoned” temple, Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia.
Elected in May 2025 by a cabal of cardinals eager to promote open borders, ecology-as-religious doctrine, and the philosophy that all religions — possibly even Scientology and WICCA — lead to God, Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago is also building on Pope Francis’ overreach to Muslim communities.
In his inaugural homily, Prevost-as-Pope invoked the 2019 Document on Human Fraternity signed with Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb in Abu Dhabi, stressing “fraternity” across different religions.
But building bridges with Islam is not like building bridges with the Orthodox East or with the ginger-haired new female Archbishop of Canterbury.
“The designated and determined goal of the conquest of the world for Allah has been reinvigorated again and again in world history from the time of Muhammad in the seventh century,” Jesuit priest James Schall wrote in On Islam.
“These revivals and expansions,” he continued, “which have been only temporarily halted by superior counterforce, have roots in the Quran itself and in its commentaries.”
Or, as Ayatollah Khomeini commented, “If Islam is not political, it is nothing.”
In February 2025, another unidentified man desecrated the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica when he climbed on top of it and threw six candelabras on the altar to the ground. After trashing the candelabras, he removed the altar cloth before being detained by security.
In all of these incidents, the suspects are handled gingerly and respectfully by Vatican gendarmes. The velvet glove treatment is odd but to be expected, especially if the suspect is an illegal alien or Muslim.
Overall, the gentle treatment is indicative of the new ‘soft’ Catholicism re-packaged for world consumption under the smiliest of popes, Leo XIV.
Smiling Leo gives heretical bishops in Germany a pass; Muslims in the Vatican get a wink and a special Oriental carpet; irreverent LGBT pilgrims get blessings while James Martin-types get huge Vatican promotions.
There will of course be more scandalous obscene incidents in St. Peter’s and in the Vatican as long as Pope Leo continues the woke, globalist agenda of previous Pope Francis.
As the authentic Catholic Church continues to be dismantled, the smoke from Paul VI’s fissure will affect people inclined to mental illness in different ways. Visible and shocking desecrations like men urinating on the altar will follow future Church-sanctioned scandals, such as Leo’s apparent appointment to the Vienna Archbishopric of a bishop who is pro-women’s ordination, pro-married priests, and an advocate for putting women in the College of Cardinals.
You might say the tradeoff of scandals here is a strange kind of cosmic seesaw balance arranged by angels.
For instance, when the culprit who climbed onto the main altar at St. Peter’s was apprehended, the Vatican news agency released a statement stating that he was a “person with a serious mental disability.”
Yet what “mental disability” led to the 2019 Pachamama scandal when three statues of the Andean fertility goddess were openly displayed in St. Peter’s?
Not to worry. The pope has a nice smile and he welcomes everybody, even a pale horse. That’s all that matters.
Speaking of pale horses, here’s Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
