Weigel’s Lament Over Speyer: The Neo-Conservative Blindness to the Conciliar Apostasy
The National Catholic Register portal (August 12, 2026) publishes a commentary by George Weigel, the house neo-conservative of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, titled “Spiraling Down in Speyer.” Weigel surveys the statistical collapse of the Diocese of Speyer — zero ordinations, four seminarians, 5.1% Mass attendance, an 87% reduction of parishes into nine corporate “synodal” units managed by “executive boards” — and correctly identifies the proximate cause as apostasy. Yet he locates this apostasy in the German bishops’ defiance of “Pope Leo” (Robert Prevost, the current usurper Leo XIV) regarding the blessing of same-sex unions, while ignoring the fons et origo of the disaster: the Second Vatican Council and the false magisterium of the conciliar “popes” from John XXIII onward. Weigel’s analysis is a classic exercise in ignotum per ignotius, treating the symptoms as the disease while preserving the conciliar novelties that caused the gangrene.