EWTN News portal reports on the installation of Mr. James Golka as the new “Archbishop” of Denver on March 25, following his transfer from the “Diocese” of Colorado Springs. The article presents a sentimental interview in which Golka describes his appointment as unexpected, attributes it to the “Holy Spirit” working through the structures of the conciliar sect, and shares anecdotes about his family, his vocation, and the recent deaths of his parents. He outlines priorities of “getting to know priests,” defending life, and “listening to God’s plans.” The entire piece is a masterclass in the banal, naturalistic, and spiritually vacuous pastoralism that defines the post-conciliar anti-church, devoid of any supernatural urgency, doctrinal clarity, or awareness of the crisis of faith.
The Appointment Mechanism: Obedience to the Usurper in Rome
The article begins by framing Golka’s appointment within the context of the new “pontificate” of Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), noting that the world is “analyzing and monitoring the new pope’s appointments.” This immediately situates the entire narrative within the conciliar sect’s self-referential ecosystem. Golka himself describes receiving the call from the papal nuncio, the representative of the antipope in the United States, and his immediate, unquestioning “yes.” He states: “if the Holy Spirit is asking through the Church and the Holy Father, you have to say yes.” This statement, while sounding pious, reveals the fundamental error of the post-conciliar mentality: the automatic equation of the will of whoever occupies the Vatican with the will of God. There is no mention of examining whether Leo XIV holds legitimate authority, whether his appointments conform to Catholic doctrine, or whether the entire conciliar structure itself is in schism and heresy. The assumption is that the “Church” is synonymous with the paramasonic structure currently occupying Rome, and obedience to it is obedience to the Holy Spirit. This is precisely the blind obedience that St. Pius X warned against in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), where he described the Modernist as one who “listens” to authority without the critical faculty of faith, surrendering to the “religious sense” rather than the immutable deposit of revealed truth.
Golka’s self-deprecating humor — “I thought I was safe, if you will” and “I’m just a guy from Nebraska” — while perhaps endearing in a natural sense, is symptomatic of the conciliar church’s deliberate cultivation of mediocrity and anti-intellectualism. The era of bishops who were theological giants, defenders of the faith, and uncompromising guardians of doctrine has been replaced by affable administrators whose primary qualification is their willingness to fit seamlessly into the bureaucratic machinery of the neo-church. There is no indication that Golka was chosen for his theological orthodoxy, his defense of traditional doctrine, or his opposition to the errors condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu or the Syllabus of Errors. Instead, the nuncio reportedly said the Holy Father “discerns and prays,” a vague appeal to interiority that substitutes for any objective criterion of selection.
The “Holy Spirit” and the Conciliar Sect: A False Theology of Obedience
Throughout the interview, Golka repeatedly invokes the “Holy Spirit” as the guiding force behind his appointment and his ministry. He says: “I believe that if the Holy Spirit is asking through the Church and the Holy Father, you have to say yes.” He also states: “God has a plan for this archdiocese and he knows why he brought me here and why he brought all of us here.” This language, while superficially Catholic, is deployed within a framework that is entirely conciliar and modernist. The “Church” through which the Spirit supposedly speaks is the post-Vatican II conciliar sect, an institution that has systematically denied, obscured, or contradicted virtually every major dogma and moral teaching of the Catholic faith. To claim that the Holy Spirit guides an institution that promotes religious liberty (contrary to Pius IX’s Syllabus, errors 15, 77-78), false ecumenism (contrary to Pius XI’s Mortalium Animos), and the democratization of the Church (contranted to the teaching of Vatican I and the entire pre-conciliar Magisterium) is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit by attributing to Him the fruits of apostasy.
The theology of obedience displayed here is not the Catholic obedience of a St. Robert Bellarmine, who taught that a manifest heretic ceases to be Pope and can be judged by the Church, but rather the blind, uncritical submission demanded by the conciliar revolution. Golka does not question the legitimacy of Leo XIV, does not examine whether the “appointments” of the antipope conform to the divine constitution of the Church, and does not consider the possibility that the entire structure he serves is the “abomination of desolation” spoken of by Our Lord (Matt. 24:15). His obedience is not to Christ the King, whose reign over all nations and institutions Pius XI so powerfully proclaimed in Quas Primas (1925), but to the bureaucratic apparatus of the anti-church.
Sentimentality in Place of Supernatural Faith
The most striking feature of the article is its overwhelming sentimentality. Golka shares extensively about his parents’ deaths, describing them as “incredibly beautiful” and recounting a conversation with his father in which the latter said: “I’m going to die tomorrow or the next day, but I can do more for you from heaven that I can from here. So you can trust that.” At his installation, Golka claims to have felt his parents’ presence so vividly that they were “tangible,” and his father reportedly said: “We’re going to stand in front of God and intercede for our family for all of eternity.”
While the communion of saints and the intercession of the faithful departed are indeed Catholic doctrines, the way they are presented here is deeply problematic. There is no mention of purgatory, no prayer for the souls of his parents, no expression of hope that they may be in need of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for their purification. Instead, the language is purely sentimental and subjective — “I felt their presence,” “they were tangible” — as if the supernatural reality of the communion of saints could be reduced to a feeling experienced during a liturgical ceremony. This is the conciar church’s characteristic replacement of objective supernatural faith with subjective emotional experience. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the faithful departed may be aided by the suffrages of the living, especially the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Yet Golka, installed in the cathedra of Denver, makes no mention of offering the Most Holy Sacrifice for his parents’ souls. The omission is deafening and reveals the spiritual poverty of the conciar pastoralism he embodies.
Furthermore, Golka’s account of his vocation is similarly naturalistic. He describes drawing a picture of his parish priest in second grade, visiting his brother in the seminary in eighth grade, and thinking: “This is where God’s calling me.” He mentions grieving “the loss of children I wouldn’t have” but being assured by God that “many people would treat me as father.” There is no mention of the supernatural character of the priesthood, the power of orders, the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, or the awesome responsibility of caring for souls in the state of grace. The priesthood is presented as a vocation of pastoral care and emotional support, not as the power to consecrate, absolve, and offer propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead. This is the conciliar reduction of the priesthood to a merely functional, naturalistic role — precisely the error condemned by Pius XII in Mediator Dei (1947) and by the Council of Trent.
The Priorities: What Is Not Said
Golka lists his top priorities for Denver: getting to know his priests and parishes, defending life in Colorado, and “listening more intently” to God’s plans. The defense of life is commendable in the abstract, but in the context of the conciar church, it is often reduced to a political position rather than a supernatural imperative rooted in the doctrine of baptism, the state of grace, and the eternal destiny of souls. There is no mention of the primary duty of a bishop: to teach, govern, and sanctify the faithful in accordance with the immutable doctrines of the Catholic faith. There is no mention of the necessity of the Most Holy Sacrifice, the sacraments, the preaching of sound doctrine, the condemnation of heresy, or the salvation of souls through the one true Church.
Most glaringly, there is no mention of the crisis of faith within the conciar structures themselves. There is no acknowledgment that the “priests” he seeks to “get to know” may be apostates, heretics, or men who have never received valid orders due to the changes in the rite of ordination introduced by the conciliar sect. There is no mention of the necessity of the Traditional Latin Mass as the true expression of Catholic worship, no warning about the sacrilegious nature of the Novus Ordo Missae, and no recognition that the “parishes” he visits may be centers of modernist indoctrination rather than places of authentic Catholic worship. His stated goal of “listening to God’s plans” is vacuous without the framework of faith, doctrine, and the recognition that God’s plan for His Church has already been revealed in the deposit of faith and the teachings of the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
The Language of the Conciliar Sect
The article is replete with the characteristic vocabulary of the post-conciliar anti-church. Golka is described as a “pastor who cares for the people,” language that reduces the episcopal office to a therapeutic, managerial role. He speaks of “discernment,” “listening,” and “God’s plans” — the buzzwords of the conciliar church’s retreat from objective truth into subjective interiority. There is no mention of dogma, heresy, the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation, the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal, or the social reign of Christ the King. The entire narrative is framed within a naturalistic, horizontal perspective that ignores the supernatural mission of the Church entirely.
The article also refers to “Pope Benedict XVI” appointing Golka’s predecessor, Archbishop Samuel Aquila, without any critical examination of Benedict XVI’s status as a manifest heretic and antipope. The seamless continuity between the “pontificates” of Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV is assumed, as if the conciar sect were the true Church rather than a counterfeit institution that has systematically dismantled the Catholic faith. This is the “hermeneutic of continuity” condemned by every serious Catholic who recognizes the radical rupture between the pre- and post-conciliar church.
Conclusion: The Spiritual Bankruptcy of Conciliar Pastoralism
The interview with Mr. James Golka is a perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with the post-conciliar anti-church. It is sentimental where it should be doctrinal, naturalistic where it should be supernatural, obedient where it should be discerning, and vacuous where it should be prophetic. Golka is presented as a likable, humble man — “just a guy from Nebraska” — but likability is not a qualification for the episcopate. The Church has never sought “nice guys” as bishops; she has sought men of faith, learning, and courage, men who would lay down their lives for the truth of the Gospel and the salvation of souls. What we see in Golka is the product of a system that has abandoned the supernatural mission of the Church in favor of a horizontal, humanistic, and ultimately satanic parody of Catholic pastoral care.
The faithful who desire the true faith must reject the conciar sect and its appointments, must seek out the true Mass and the true sacraments, and must pray for the restoration of the Catholic Church — not the continuation of the abomination that currently occupies the Vatican. As St. Pius X wrote in Pascendi: “We admonish, therefore, priests, superiors, and all who are engaged in the sacred ministry, to stand firm and hold fast to the faith delivered to the saints.” The faith delivered to the saints is not to be found in Denver’s “archbishop” or in the structures of the conciar anti-church. It endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, who reject the modernist revolution, and who await the restoration of all things in Christ — not through the “plans” of the conciliar sect, but through the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the re-establishment of the social reign of Christ the King over all nations, including the United States of America.
Source:
‘I’m just a guy from Nebraska’: Archbishop Golka reflects on unexpected call to lead Denver (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 20.06.2026