David Hahn opened this week with the news that Pope Leo personally ordered the Vatican to stop using artwork by Fr Marko Rupnik, less than a month into his pontificate. The disclosure came from Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Lourdes, who confirmed that the remaining Rupnik mosaics on the shrine's facade will be permanently covered ahead of Pope Leo's visit at the end of September. "The Holy Father's visit to Lourdes is an opportunity to take another step forward on this issue," Micas said, adding that Vatican officials contacted him in early August specifically to ensure the Pope would not see any of the mosaics during his trip. Hahn walked through the case's troubled history: Rupnik was excommunicated in 2020 for absolving a sexual accomplice in confession, saw that excommunication lifted within weeks, was expelled from the Jesuits in July 2023 after allegations spanning 1985 to 2018 detailed in a 150-page dossier, and still faces a canonical trial with judges only appointed in October. For Hahn, Leo's swift action on the artwork only sharpens the question of why the same urgency has not yet reached the courtroom.
From there the show turned to a Justice Department report that finally explains why the FBI, under the Biden administration, treated traditional Catholics as a security concern. The 231-page report, published on 27 August, traces the origins of the 2023 "Richmond Catholic Memo" to an investigation of a genuinely dangerous man, an individual identified only as "Target 1," who was found with Molotov cocktails and a 3D-printed gun after his release from prison. The problem, Hahn explained, was that Target 1 attended an SSPX chapel despite not being Catholic himself, and the priest who was interviewed about him, "Priest 1," found himself under FBI assessment simply for declining to become an informant. From there the inquiry widened to SSPX communities, an FSSP parish in Virginia and traditionalist Catholicism generally, with the memo comparing the movement's worldview to "Islamist ideology." The DOJ's own review concluded the Bureau had relied on biased, poorly verified material and unjustifiably investigated two priests who had no connection to criminal activity. Hahn drew a pointed lesson for viewers tempted to disengage from politics altogether: "you may decide that you aren't interested in politics, politics can remain very interested in you."
Next came a theological rebuttal aimed at NATO major general Ruprecht von Butler, who commands the alliance's Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger and claimed this week to be "truly in line with Pope Leo" on just war theory. Von Butler, a Protestant, argued that war can never really be just while simultaneously insisting he would fight to defend the innocent regardless, telling reporters "I'm prepared to take that guilt upon myself." Hahn used the moment to walk through the actual criteria of just war doctrine and to reread Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas more carefully, noting the Pope's explicit qualification that his critique comes "without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense." Where von Butler treats all violence as morally corrupt, Hahn argued, Leo is doing something narrower: developing the Church's moral language for an age of AI-driven weapons and instant escalation, not declaring self-defence illegitimate.
The episode closed on brighter news out of West Virginia, where Bishop Evelio Menjívar, the Salvadoran-born bishop installed in July, has announced sweeping new access to the Traditional Latin Mass across his diocese. Menjívar, whose appointment The Guardian had framed as part of Pope Leo's "resistance to Trump," rejected that reading outright, saying a president and a bishop simply "speak from different pulpits." On 28 August he named Fr Timothy Grassi as his Episcopal Delegate for the older rite, with the Mass at Our Lady of Seven Dolors Mission in Wheeling moving from monthly to weekly from 20 September and further provision promised in Charleston. Hahn set the news against a bleaker national picture, citing Bishop Mark Eckman's decision not to renew the Latin Mass at St Titus in Pittsburgh and Bishop Michael Martin's reduction of Charlotte's four locations to one, and paired it with the Latin Mass Society's 56-mile pilgrimage from Ely to Walsingham, which chairman Joseph Shaw says has drawn increasingly young crowds since Traditionis Custodes.
Taken together, the episode is really a study in how institutions actually use the authority they hold. A pope acts decisively to remove a disgraced priest's art but has yet to bring the same urgency to his trial. An FBI field office stretches a legitimate lead into a dragnet against an entire religious tradition. A NATO commander borrows the language of Catholic moral theology while, in Hahn's account, misreading it. And one bishop, handed the same canonical tools that others have used to restrict the old Mass, chooses instead to expand it. None of these stories turn on how much power an institution has. Each turns on what it chooses to do with it.
