EWTN News portal reports on a reflection by Fr. Roger Landry for the Solemnity of the Ascension, framed as an exhortation to missionary discipleship and charitable works. The article presents Christ’s departure as a pedagogical device to mature the faith of believers, emphasizing human agency, the Holy Spirit’s power, and the call to evangelize through works of mercy. Beneath its pious veneer, however, the article systematically omits the most fundamental truths about the Ascension: the transfer of Christ’s sovereign Kingship to His Church, the duty of nations to submit to His reign, and the absolute primacy of the supernatural order over all naturalistic reductions. This is not an isolated oversight but a symptom of the conciliar apostasy that has gutted the Church’s social Kingship and reduced the Faith to horizontal humanitarianism.
The Ascension as Pedagogical Tool, Not Royal Investiture
The article’s central thesis is encapsulated in its title: “How Christ’s ascension takes the training wheels off our faith.” Fr. Landry writes that “Jesus could have stayed on earth until the end of time as the Good Shepherd, crisscrossing the globe after every lost sheep, saving them one by one. As he ascended, however, he placed his own mission in our hands.” The metaphor of “training wheels” is revealing. It reduces the Ascension — the solemn enthronement of the God-Man at the right hand of the Father — to a pedagogical strategy, a teaching device to wean believers off dependence. This is the language of progressive education, not of Catholic dogma.
The Ascension is not described in Scripture or Tradition as Christ “taking the training wheels off” discipleship. It is the moment when “all power in heaven and on earth” is confirmed as given to the Risen Christ (Mt 28:18), when He sits at the right hand of the Father (Mk 16:19), when He enters “into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Heb 9:24). St. Paul declares that God “raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named” (Eph 1:20-21). The Fathers of the Church — St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine — unanimously interpret the Ascension as the coronation of Christ the King in His sacred humanity, not as a pedagogical withdrawal.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught with magisterial clarity that “the name and authority of king in the proper sense belong to Christ the Man; for it is only of Christ the Man that it can be said that He received power and honor and a kingdom from the Father, because as the Word, possessing the same essence as the Father, He must have everything in common with the Father, and therefore also supreme and unlimited dominion over all creation.” The Ascension is the visible manifestation of this supreme dominion. To reduce it to a “training wheels” metaphor is to strip it of its royal, judicial, and social content — precisely what the conciliar sect has done since 1958.
The Omission of Christ the King’s Social Reign
Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the Kingship of Christ over nations, states, civil societies, or the social order. This silence is deafening and deliberate. Pius XI explicitly taught that Christ’s reign “extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” He further declared: “It matters not whether individuals, families, or states, for men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals.”
The article speaks of “renewing the face of the earth” and “proclaiming the Gospel to every creature,” but never once raises the question: to whom do nations owe obedience? The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (1864) condemns the proposition that “the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (DS 2890). It condemns the separation of Church and State (DS 2923) and the idea that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State” (DS 2932). Yet Fr. Landry’s reflection, like virtually all post-conciliar catechesis, operates as if these condemnations never existed.
The conciliar document Dignitatis Humanae (1965) proclaimed a “right” to religious freedom that the entire pre-conciliar Magisterium had condemned. Pius IX called such liberty of worship a pestilence. Leo XIII warned that “the State is bound to adopt as its own the law of Christ and to make it the foundation of public life” (Immortale Dei, 1885). By omitting Christ’s social Kingship entirely, Fr. Landry implicitly endorses the conciliar revolution’s capitulation to liberalism. This is not a minor omission — it is the substance of the apostasy.
Charity Without the Supernatural: The Naturalistic Reduction
Fr. Landry invokes Pope Benedict XVI’s (Ratzinger) radio address from 1985, in which the future antipope interpreted the Ascension through the lens of foot-washing: “The true ascent of mankind takes place precisely when a man learns to turn in humility to another person, bowing deeply at his feet in the position of one who would wash the feet of the other.” This is a characteristically Ratzingerian move — the spiritualization and horizontalization of a dogma that has vertical, royal, and judicial content.
The article continues: “In order to ascend, we need first to descend humbly in acts of corporal and spiritual works of mercy, including passing on the faith to those who don’t know it or who reject what they mistakenly believe it to be.” Note the phrase: “what they mistakenly believe it to be.” This is the language of religious indifferentism. It implies that those who reject the Faith may simply have a mistaken understanding of it, rather than being in rebellion against the one true God and His one true Church. The pre-conciliar Church taught that error has no rights, that the Catholic Church is the only true religion (a dogma defined by the Fourth Lateran Council, the Council of Florence, and confirmed by Pius IX’s Syllabus), and that the salvation of souls — not social harmony — is the supreme law (Salus animarum suprema lex).
The article’s emphasis on charity as “one of the most effective ways” to evangelize is not wrong in itself, but it becomes pernicious when detached from the supernatural order. The pre-conciliar Church taught that the primary end of the Church is the salvation of souls through the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, and the preaching of sound doctrine. Works of charity are means ordered toward this end, not substitutes for it. The conciliar sect has inverted this order, making social action the primary mission and reducing the Mass to a “meal of fraternity” — precisely what the Protestant revolutionaries at the Council intended.
The “Problem of Evil” as an Excuse: Capitulation to Modernist Objections
Fr. Landry acknowledges several obstacles to evangelization: “Whether they think erroneously that science has disproven faith, or the problem of evil has refuted the possibility of a good God, or the clergy sex-abuse scandals have invalidated the Church’s witness, or the frigidity with which so many secularized Christians live their faith has revealed its incapacity to inspire…” This list is itself a catalogue of capitulation.
First, the “problem of evil” is not a new objection. St. Augustine addressed it fifteen centuries ago. The Church has always taught that God permits evil for the sake of a greater good, that His ways are inscrutable, and that faith is not a conclusion of human reason but a supernatural virtue. To present the problem of evil as a serious intellectual obstacle is to concede ground to the rationalism that Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood” (DS 2883).
Second, the invocation of “clergy sex-abuse scandals” as an obstacle to faith is particularly damaging. The pre-conciliar Church taught that the holiness of the minister does not affect the validity or efficacy of the sacraments (ex opere operato). Judas Iscariot was an apostle, and his betrayal did not invalidate the apostolate. To suggest that the sins of clerics “invalidate the Church’s witness” is to adopt a Protestant, Donatist ecclesiology — the very heresy that St. Augustine and St. Cyprian fought against. It is also to ignore that the conciliar revolution itself — with its abandonment of seminary discipline, its liturgical novelties, and its embrace of the world — created the conditions for the crisis. The article offers no such analysis, because it cannot: it is a product of the same system that produced the scandal.
The Holy Spirit Without the Church: Pneumatological Vagueness
The article speaks frequently of the Holy Spirit — “the descent of the Holy Spirit,” “the Holy Spirit helps us,” “the same blessing of the Holy Spirit that made their joint witness fruitful” — but never defines the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Church with any precision. The pre-conciliar teaching is clear: the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church (as Pius XII taught in Mystici Corporis, 1943), and He operates through the Church’s sacramental and magisterial structures. The Holy Spirit does not work apart from the Church; He is given to the Church and through the Church to the world.
The conciliar sect, by contrast, has developed a pneumatological ecclesiology in which the Spirit is said to work in all religions, all cultures, and all peoples — a teaching condemned by Pius XII and implicitly retracted by no one since. The article’s language — “the Holy Spirit helps us to fulfill… the awe-inspiring responsibility Christ has given us” — is compatible with this vague, universalist pneumatology. It does not specify that the Holy Spirit works through the sacraments of the Catholic Church, through the Most Holy Sacrifice, through the preaching of the true bishops, and through the obedience of the faithful to the Magisterium. This silence is not accidental; it is the conciliar method.
The Exodus Metaphor: Spiritual Journeys Without Dogmatic Content
The article concludes with a flourish of metaphor: “Christ’s ascension is meant to lead us on an exodus not merely in the future, but here and now: an exodus from the self toward God and others, a journey from fear to trust, a passover from the flat earth of a world without God to the multidimensional reality of Christ’s kingdom.”
This is the language of the “hermeneutic of continuity” and the “spiritual journey” — the conciarist replacement for dogma. What does “the multidimensional reality of Christ’s kingdom” mean? The pre-conciliar Church taught that the Kingdom of Christ is the Catholic Church, a visible, hierarchical, perfect society with the authority to teach, govern, and sanctify. Pius XI declared: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men.” The Council of Trent defined the Church with juridical precision. The First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility and the Church’s authority to bind consciences.
But Fr. Landry’s “kingdom” is a metaphor, a “multidimensional reality” — which is to say, nothing definite at all. It is the conciliar method: evacuate dogmatic content, replace it with poetic language, and call it “deepening.” This is what St. Pius X condemned as Modernism: “The dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths of divine origin but are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (Lamentabili, prop. 22). The article does not explicitly teach this, but it operates within its framework.
Conclusion: The Training Wheels of the Faith Were Never Removed
The article’s central metaphor — that Christ’s Ascension “takes the training wheels off our faith” — encapsulates the conciarist error. The pre-conciliar Church never taught that the faithful were left to their own devices after the Ascension. She taught that Christ gave His Church the Magisterium, the sacraments, and the hierarchy as permanent means of salvation. “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Mt 28:20). The “training wheels” — if we must use the metaphor — are the sacraments, the Mass, the catechism, the authority of the true bishops. They were never removed. What the conciliar revolution did was discard them, replacing the Traditional Mass with the Novus Ordo, sound doctrine with “pastoral sensitivity,” and the social Kingship of Christ with interreligious dialogue.
Fr. Roger Landry, chaplain at Columbia University and “National Eucharistic Preacher” appointed by the U.S. “bishops,” is a product of this system. His reflection, however well-intentioned, cannot escape the gravitational field of the conciarist apostasy. It omits Christ’s social Kingship, reduces the Ascension to a pedagogical device, spiritualizes charity to the point of naturalism, capitulates to Modernist objections, and replaces dogmatic content with metaphor. It is, in short, a perfect specimen of the conciliar Church’s theological bankruptcy.
The faithful who desire the fullness of the Catholic Faith must reject this reductionism and return to the unchanging teaching of the pre-conciliar Magisterium: that Christ is King, that His Church is the only ark of salvation, that the Mass is the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary, and that the Holy Spirit works through the sacraments and the hierarchy of the true Church — not through the “multidimensional realities” of the conciliar imagination. As Pius XI proclaimed: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” There are no training wheels. There is only the Cross.
Source:
How Christ’s ascension takes the training wheels off our faith (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 14.05.2026