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October gave us many things: fall colors, cooling temperatures, and, in Rome’s case, a papal ice blessing that would have made even the more experimental Broadway directors mutter, “Bit much, isn’t it?” Pope Leo XIV, America’s first pontiff, Chicago-bred and currently moonlighting as the chaplain of the Church of Greta Thunberg of Latter-day Alarmists, solemnly blessed a giant block of ice at an Italian climate conference. Yes, ice. Not a martyr’s relic, not a pilgrim’s rosary, not even something useful like a baptismal font. Just…frozen water. And as if to prove that reality has fully surrendered to parody, Arnold Schwarzenegger materialized to wave a large blue tarp in the air, simulating “rising sea levels” like an overfunded preschool staging of Noah’s Ark: The Musical.

All of which makes the transition from the late Pope Francis to Leo XIV less a rupture than a rueful sequel. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the chain-smoking porteño who traded Perón’s ghost for Peter’s throne, spent twelve years tilting at ecclesial windmills: Laudato Si’ thundering against climate apostasy, synodal chitchat inviting every dissenting deacon to the table, and a mercy so expansive it blurred the line between absolution and accommodation. His papacy nudged the Church leftward on the culture-war front. When he died last Easter—stroke, coma, the works—he left behind a flock somewhere between bemusement and bewilderment, just in time for his icy successor to turn the Vatican into a climate-conference sideshow.

The spectacle unfolded at the “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” conference, a three-day festival of clerical hand-wringing marking the tenth anniversary of Francis’s eco-encyclical. It promised “ecological conversion,” which in practice meant the usual maneuver: Take the latest political fashion, sprinkle holy water on it, and call it doctrine.

At the climax, activists hauled the ice on stage like a holy relic rescued from the freezer section of a Roman supermarket. Leo XIV, bedecked in full papal regalia and unintentionally evoking the opening ceremony of a very solemn ice-skating competition, made the sign of the cross and warned the world’s leaders to act with courage. Then came the moment destined for the Vatican Museum’s “Exhibits We Hope Visitors Don’t Notice”: The Pope cried out, “Will you join with us?” as Schwarzenegger flapped his tarp like a doomsday semaphore operator.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the real world: Christians are assassinated in the United States, slaughtered in Nigeria, erased across the Middle East. But Rome’s attention? Ice. Blessed ice.

This is not leadership; this is optics. It is faith hijacked by the green-industrial complex, sacraments replaced by symbolism and priests by performance artists. One shudders to imagine what the Church Fathers, men who debated the Trinity with the intensity of nuclear physicists, would say about a pontiff blessing a mini-glacier worthy of a Sir David Attenborough nature documentary.

And the script doesn’t improve when the conversation turns to migration.

Leo XIV insists that protecting borders is incompatible with being “pro-life,” a claim he repeated this autumn with the confidence of a man convinced the Sermon on the Mount included notes on asylum quotas. He warned American Catholics that supporting strong borders, particularly under the Trump administration, was a moral failing.

Tom Homan, border czar and lifelong Catholic, was having none of it. He pointed out that while the Church denounces U.S. enforcement, you can’t stroll uninvited into Vatican City without being arrested, and with penalties far more severe than those at the Rio Grande. Homan might as well have added, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto the Swiss Guard your passport.”

He reminded the bishops that more than 4,000 migrants died attempting the journey north. Add the quarter-million Americans lost to fentanyl smuggled over the border, and Leo XIV’s moral calculus looks less like charity and more like a suicide note for civil society. Yet the U.S. bishops, desperate for a good New York Times write-up, issued a “special message” condemning mass deportations and “vilification” of illegal immigrants.

In the modern Church, “prudence” appears to be the only virtue requiring a permission slip.

All of this fits the leftward drift that began in earnest under Francis and has continued without missing a beat under his handpicked successor. The conclave of May 2025 wasn’t the Holy Spirit whispering; it was Chicago machine politics in scarlet zucchettos. Leo XIV is not a brake on the Bergoglian bandwagon; he is the man who topped up the petrol, wiped the windshield, and adjusted the rainbow bumper sticker before pulling back into traffic.

And nowhere is the supposed contrast between Francis’ theatrical progressivism and the new regime more illusory than in a quiet incident this month. At the annual “lunch for the poor,” Francis’ showcase of curated compassion, 48 transgender women—twice welcomed to his head table—arrived to find their VIP seats gone. Instead of the privileged placement that had become an unofficial photo-op sacrament, they were dispersed throughout Paul VI Hall, reminding everyone that the “new direction” looks suspiciously like the old one, just with a different man holding the crozier.

For years, Francis elevated these guests to the status of ecclesial mascots for his outreach. And once you turn ideology into liturgy, expectations metastasize. Give the Alphabet People an inch, and they demand a throne at the high altar; fail to deliver the same attention, and suddenly you’ve committed a pastoral hate crime. Francis built a machine of expectations that no successor, least of all a more cautious, institutional Leo, can satisfy without plunging the Church into a quagmire of its own creation.

Which brings us to the delicious irony: While Rome now flirts with fashionable causes—blessing ice, scolding borders, turning the Gospel into a U.N. development brochure—the old mainline Protestant denominations have already sprinted off the cliff with the same rainbow flag. The Episcopalians bless same-sex marriages and wonder why the pews are empty. The Lutherans ordain transgender bishops and discover that even Scandinavians tire of virtue-signaling in subzero temperatures. The United Methodists split, leaving the rainbow-stole remnant to preside over a denomination shrinking faster than the Arnie-flapped ice block.

In other words, the mainline Protestants did exactly what progressive Catholics beg Rome to do: They embraced the zeitgeist and promptly died. Rome, for all its stumbles, has so far refused the final plunge. It still faces east, not Portland. And in 2025, that counts as heroic resistance.

Naturally, our betters call this “regression.” The rest of us, watching once-great denominations turn themselves into rainbow-bedecked mausoleums, call it survival.

In the end, the blessed ice will melt. The tarp will be folded away. The activists will jet home emitting more carbon than a medium-size diocese. And Rome will resume its curious experiment with fashionable relevance, undeterred by the fact that the Church grows strongest when it preaches eternal truth, not temporary trends.

Because in an age of genuine crisis—moral, cultural, spiritual—Rome needs to be Rome again. Not the world’s most solemn ice-blessing guild. And certainly not the chaplaincy to the faculty lounge.

The West is dying of a thousand progressive cuts. At least one ancient institution is still pretending, badly, that it isn’t terminal. For that small, melting mercy, we should probably thank the Holy Ghost…and perhaps the ghost of G.K. Chesterton raising a pint to the sheer bloody-minded continuity of it all.