Key observations about the article:
1. It’s from NC Register (National Catholic Register), a mainstream Catholic media outlet
2. The author, Brendan Towell, draws on Benedict XVI’s “dictatorship of relativism” concept
3. It references Pope Leo XIV (the current antipope per the instructions)
4. The article uses the “cut flowers” metaphor for Western civilization detached from Christian roots
5. It appeals to St. Thomas More as a model of fidelity
6. There are significant omissions and problematic assumptions
Let me construct the full analysis now.
[Antichurch] The Cut Flowers Metaphor: When the Neo-Church Preaches Roots It Uprooted
NC Register portal reports a June 22, 2026 commentary by Brendan Towell, Director of Spirituality and Mission for Secondary Schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, employing the metaphor of “cut flowers” to describe Western civilization’s detachment from its Christian roots. The article invokes St. Thomas More, Pope Benedict XVI, and — with notable approbation — the current antipope Leo XIV, all in service of diagnosing the West’s spiritual crisis. Yet the diagnosis, while containing superficial observations that even a child of the Faith might recognize, is fatally compromised by its refusal to name the true disease: the conciliar revolution itself, which Towell’s own institutional masters orchestrated and which he serves.
The Metaphor’s Partial Truth and Total Evasion
Towell’s central image — that the West enjoys the “cut flowers” of Christian civilization while having severed the roots — is not without a kernel of observable reality. He writes that “we could sever ourselves from the roots of Christian civilization while continuing to enjoy its fruits: human dignity, moral equality, sacrificial love, the conviction that the weak matter.” This is, on the surface, a description that any Catholic familiar with the social reign of Christ the King would recognize as partially accurate. Pius XI proclaimed in Quas Primas that “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.” The Towell article, in its own confused way, circles around this truth.
But here the analysis must sharpen its blade. Towell identifies the disease as a vague “separation from roots” beginning with Henry VIII and ripening through modernity into what Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism.” This is a diagnosis that conveniently absolves the conciliar church of any responsibility. The implication is that the West drifted away on its own — as if the men occupying the Vatican since 1958 did not actively participate in, encourage, and accelerate that drift. Towell’s metaphor of “cut flowers” is self-serving: it implies that the institution he serves — the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, a node in the global conciliar network — still possesses the roots. It does not. The very structures Towell inhabits are among the principal axes by which the roots were severed.
The Thomas More Appeal: Weaponizing a Saint Against the Saint’s Own Church
The invocation of St. Thomas More is particularly cynical. Towell writes that More “insisted, in substance, that he could not set his private judgment, or even the will of Parliament, against ‘the general council of Christendom.'” This is true, and it is precisely why More’s witness condemns the conciliar church rather than supports it. More appealed to “the general council of Christendom” — that is, to the universal, perennial teaching of the Catholic Church across time. He refused to accept that a national parliament or a king could redefine the constitution of the Church.
Yet what did the architects of the Second Vatican Council do if not precisely this? They set the accumulated weight of two millennia of Catholic Tradition against the “spirit of the age,” and they chose the spirit of the age. The declaration Dignitatis Humanae on religious liberty directly contradicts the teaching of Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, of Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (propositions 77-80), and of Leo XIII in Immortale Dei. The conciliar document on non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, opened the door to the very indifferentism that Pius IX condemned in proposition 15 of the Syllabus: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”
More died precisely to defend the principle that the Church’s constitution, authority, and doctrine are received from Christ and cannot be rewritten by human will — whether that will is exercised by Henry VIII or by the “Spirit of Vatican II.” Towell’s use of More is therefore not merely anachronistic; it is an act of intellectual theft. He invokes a saint who was martyred to defend the very Tradition that Towell’s own institutional superiors have spent seven decades dismantling. More refused to sever himself from the “living body of the Church across time.” The conciliar church performed that severance. Towell cannot have it both ways.
The Benedict XVI Borrowing: A Symptom, Not a Cure
Towell’s reliance on Benedict XVI — Joseph Ratzinger — as a prophetic voice deserves particular scrutiny. He cites Benedict’s warning about the “dictatorship of relativism” and the claim that “faith is not the enemy of reason but its fulfillment.” These phrases are rhetorically pleasing, but they must be weighed against the man’s actual record.
Ratzinger was a peritus (theological expert) at Vatican II, one of the principal architects of the progressive faction that shaped the conciliar documents. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly a quarter century, he was the chief doctrinal officer of the Church during the period of its most catastrophic theological disintegration. As “pope,” he promulgated no corrective to the conciliar errors; instead, he canonized conciliar figures, advanced the very ecumenism that Pius XI implicitly warned against in Mortalium Animos, and treated the Traditional Latin Mass as a concession rather than a right — his Summorum Pontificum being a disciplinary bandage on a hemorrhaging wound that he himself had helped inflict.
To invoke Benedict XVI as a diagnostician of relativism while ignoring that he was one of relativism’s most sophisticated enablers within the Church’s own structures is to mistake the arsonist who calls the fire department for the fire chief. Towell’s appeal to Benedict is not a sign of depth; it is a sign of captivity to the very hermeneutic of continuity that Benedict himself championed — the pretense that Vatican II represents a legitimate development rather than a rupture, a thesis that St. Pius X would have recognized as the very essence of Modernism, which he defined as the synthesis of all heresies.
The Leo XIV Endorsement: The Antipope as Authority on Dignity
Perhaps the most revealing passage in the entire article is Towell’s appeal to the current antipope: “Pope Leo XIV, speaking on the dignity of men and women, emphasized that human dignity is not something we invent or negotiate but something we receive.” Towell calls this “a quiet but necessary reminder: what is given must be grounded.”
Let us be precise about what is happening here. Towell is citing a manifest usurper of the Chair of Peter — a man who holds office in a structure that has, since at least the death of Pius XII, been characterized by the public, persistent, and systematic propagation of doctrines contrary to the Faith. The teaching that a manifest heretic ceases to be Pope ipso facto is not a novel opinion; it is the position of St. Robert Bellarmine, who wrote in De Romano Pontifice that “a Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” This is confirmed by the 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 188.4), which states that every office becomes vacant “by the mere fact and without any declaration” if the cleric “publicly defects from the Catholic faith.”
The men who have occupied the Vatican since 1958 have, through their official acts, their promulgation of heretical conciliar documents, their advancement of ecumenism with false religions, their modification of the sacramental rites, and their endorsement of religious liberty as a natural right, publicly defected from the Catholic faith. Leo XIV is not a legitimate pontiff; he is the current occupant of an office that has been vacant in truth — though filled in appearance — for decades. For Towell to cite Leo XIV as an authority on human dignity is as if a subject of a usurped kingdom were to cite the usurper’s proclamations as though they carried the authority of the true king.
Moreover, the content of the citation is itself revealing. That human dignity is “received, not invented” is indeed Catholic teaching — it was taught by the Church for two thousand years before Leo XIV repeated it. But the conciliar church’s actual practice contradicts this principle at every turn. The same institution that proclaims dignity “received from God” simultaneously engages in dialogue with every false religion on equal terms, treats the Mass as a communal meal rather than the propitiatory Sacrifice of Calvary, and has effectively abandoned the Church’s exclusive claim to be the ark of salvation — the very claim that Pius IX made in proposition 16-18 of the Syllabus and that Leo XIII affirmed in Satis Cognitum.
The Omission That Condemns: No Mention of the True Church’s Crisis
The most damning feature of Towell’s article is not what it says but what it does not say. Read the entire piece carefully: there is no mention of the Second Vatican Council as a cause of the crisis. There is no mention of the Novus Ordo Missae as a rupture with the Church’s liturgical Tradition. There is no mention of the systematic destruction of Catholic seminaries, religious orders, and Catholic education that occurred under the conciliar regime. There is no mention of the new rites of ordination, which — as even Cardinal Oddi acknowledged — raise serious questions about the validity of priestly ordinations conferred under the Pauline rite. There is no mention of ecumenism as the organized betrayal of the Church’s missionary mandate. There is no mention of the fact that the conciliar church has, by its own admission, entered into “fraternal dialogue” with Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox communities — thereby implicitly denying the teaching of Pius XI in Mortalium Animos that “the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it.”
This silence is not accidental. It is theological complicity. Towell’s article performs the quintessential conciar maneuver: it diagnoses symptoms (the West’s moral decline) while systematically ignoring the cause (the conciar destruction of the Church from within). It is as though a doctor, observing a patient bleeding to death from a wound inflicted by the doctor’s own colleague, were to comment on the fragility of human tissue while refusing to name the knife.
The “Replanting” That Replants Nothing
Towell concludes with a call to action: “The task before us is not to admire the flowers. It is to replant them.” He assigns this task to Catholic schools, which he says must “lead students back to the source — to the vision of the human person that makes dignity, freedom and rights intelligible in the first place.”
But what “source” does Towell propose? It is not the unbroken Tradition of the Catholic Church — the Mass of the Ages, the Baltimore Catechism, the Syllabus of Errors, Quas Primas, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Lamentabili Sane Exitus. It is, implicitly, the very conciar synthesis that has produced the crisis he describes. Towell works for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia — a conciar institution that teaches the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), a document whose treatment of religious liberty, ecumenism, and the relationship between Church and state directly contradicts the pre-conciliar Magisterium. He cannot “replant” students in soil that his own institution has poisoned.
Furthermore, Towell’s vision of “replanting” is entirely naturalistic. It speaks of “cultural memory,” “moral vocabulary,” and “formation” — the language of educational administration, not of supernatural faith. There is not a single mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, grace, the state of mortal sin, the necessity of baptism, the reality of Hell, or the obligation of nations to submit to the social reign of Christ the King. His “replanting” is a project of cultural restoration, not of supernatural conversion. It is, in the final analysis, a humanistic project dressed in Christian language — which is precisely the Modernist project that St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi.
The Augustinian and Ressourcement Facade
A brief note on Towell’s stated interests — “Augustinian Studies” and “Ressourcement Theology” — is warranted. Ressourcement, the theological movement associated with Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and others, was one of the principal intellectual feeders of the conciar revolution. Its call to “return to the sources” was not a return to the perennial teaching of the Church but a selective retrieval of patristic and medieval texts wrenched from their dogmatic context and deployed to justify theological novelty. The nouvelle théologie was condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis (1950) as a dangerous innovation. That Towell lists this movement among his interests, while working within a conciar structure, confirms that his intellectual formation is entirely within the orbit of the revolution he claims to critique.
Conclusion: The Orphan Who Does Not Know He Is Orphaned
Towell’s article is, in the final analysis, a perfect specimen of conciar self-criticism: it identifies real symptoms, expresses real concern, invokes real saints and real popes — but does so entirely within the framework of the revolution that caused the disease. It is the conciar church criticizing the world for becoming what the conciar church made it.
The West is indeed orphaned. But it was orphaned not by some vague “separation from roots” beginning in the sixteenth century; it was orphaned by the organized, systematic, and deliberate destruction of the Catholic Church’s institutional, liturgical, and doctrinal life by the men who seized control of the Vatican beginning in 1958. The true roots are not in the conciar structures that Towell serves. They are in the unbroken Tradition of the Faith — in the Most Holy Sacrifice as offered for two thousand years, in the sacraments as instituted by Christ and administered according to the Church’s perennial discipline, in the Magisterium as exercised by the true popes up to and including Pius XII, and in the social reign of Christ the King as proclaimed by Pius XI.
St. Thomas More refused to deny his father. The conciar church denied its Father — not the Eternal Father, Whom it still professes in words, but the Vicar of Christ, whose authority it has usurped and whose teaching it has contradicted. Towell, as a servant of that structure, cannot lead anyone back to the roots. He can only lead them deeper into the desert.
Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei (there is no power on earth that can compare to the Church of Christ) — but that Church is not the one whose payroll Brendan Towell collects.
Source:
The Cut Flowers of a Fatherless West (ncregister.com)
Date: 22.06.2026