There’s quite a mystery unfolding right now at the highest levels of one of the largest churches on the planet. And it’s a pretty confounding question: Where exactly is the archbishop of Canterbury, the senior bishop of the Church of England? No one has any idea. To be clear, this isn’t a missing persons case. The post has been vacant for more than four months. And yet, to this day, the position still hasn’t been filled. As of May 12th, 2025, there is still no archbishop of Canterbury. And at least on paper, this is something of a head-scratcher. Here you have a Protestant church with something like 26 million baptized members all over the world, and hundreds of thousands of active members, by some estimates. It’s known as the “mother church of the Anglican tradition.” And yet, as of right now, there’s no clarity whatsoever as to when they’ll pick a new archbishop to lead the church.
There doesn’t seem to be any urgency, either. Lawyers are reportedly getting involved for one reason or another. The latest estimate is that it’ll be several more weeks, at a minimum, until the Church of England decides who’s in charge. And it’s not as if this vacancy was a surprise. The previous archbishop didn’t die suddenly or anything like that. Instead, it was announced months in advance that the archbishop would resign, before he finally stepped down in January. But here we are. It’s now May, and the church of England still has no archbishop.
The contrast with the Catholic Church, especially after the election of Pope Leo the 14th, could not be any more clear. On the one hand, you have total dysfunction and chaos among the Anglicans. On the other, the Catholics had a new pope two days after the conclave started. When Pope Francis died, everyone heard about it. People flooded into Rome from all over the world. And when his successor was selected, there were celebrations all over the globe. Meanwhile, almost no one has even realized that there isn’t an archbishop of Canterbury anymore. In fact, if you ask a random person on the street about the archbishop of Canterbury, there’s a very good chance that no one will have any idea what you’re talking about.
One of the reasons for this distinction is that, for quite some time, the Anglicans have been effectively leaderless, even when they’ve had an archbishop. The monarchs in England stopped caring about religion, and their bishops don’t really have the authority to do anything. So in response, they became “progressive” in a desperate bid for relevance that obviously hasn’t panned out. The Anglicans tied their fortunes to the King’s power back in the days of Henry the 8th. But once that power waned, they had no answer whatsoever. We’re left now with a very trendy church — one that supports gay marriage and so-called LGBT clergy — that also has few core guiding principles, no real authority, and ultimately no archbishop. The Church of England became liberal to win over the liberals, but in the end, the liberals don’t care. And in the process, they’ve lost the conservatives, too. So now, no one even notices the fact that, for several months, there has been no archbishop of Canterbury.
Billions of people noticed the lack of a pope, though, because the pope actually stands for something. In particular, he’s the successor of Saint Peter and the vicar of Christ, whose responsibility includes teaching and interpreting Catholic doctrine. And in the Catholic church, unlike the Church of England, doctrine does not change on a moment’s notice. It isn’t revised because trans activists or feminists or corporate overlords start screeching at maximum volume. The doctrine remains consistent because it’s not a response to political demands. It’s not beholden to polls or media pressure. This is one of the reasons why people care about the identity of the pope. It’s why they notice when the papacy becomes vacant. When you teach the word of God instead of reading the latest talking points from the Human Rights Campaign, people pay a lot more attention.
Or at least, most people pay attention. Not everyone seems to understand the implications of the selection of Pope Leo, or the point of the papacy in general. And in particular, at the moment, there appears to be a genuine panic among the media and LGBT activists about the very unsettling and incomprehensible prospect that the new pope might actually be Catholic, if you can imagine that. They’re “unearthing” some of the pope’s previous comments on same-sex relationships and abortion, for example. And they can’t believe what they’re seeing.
Here’s the Guardian’s reporting on the dismay that’s now supposedly rampant among Catholics: “After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile remarks made more than a decade ago by Father Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo the 14th, in which he condemned what he called the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ and ‘the redefinition of marriage’ as ‘at odds with the Gospel.’ In a 2012 address to the world synod of bishops, the man who now leads the church said that ‘Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel – for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia.'”
Over at “The View,” self-described “devout Catholic” Sunny Hostin offered her expert analysis of these comments. She begins by explaining that she thinks papal conclaves are “exciting” because of the whole white smoke/black smoke thing. And then she articulates her greatest fear about the new pope. Watch:
Purported "devout Catholic" Sunny Hostin fears Pope Leo XIV because of he believes marriage is between a man and a woman:
"I'm a little concerned about this choice for the LGBTQ+ community. In 2012 he gave an address to bishops, and he lamented 'the popular culture fostered and… pic.twitter.com/HirlDlUQyq— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) May 9, 2025
As a general rule, if you’re a Catholic in public life — especially one who delivers opinions and analysis every day — nobody should be surprised to learn that you are a Catholic. Your Catholicism should be evident in your worldview, politics, ideology, et cetera. But you would never know that people like Sunny Hostin are “Catholic” based on what they say and do every day. Therefore, she has to declare that, contrary to all outward appearances, she is indeed a “devout Catholic.” Even though she rejects essentially all of the fundamental moral teachings of the Catholic church — two years ago, she was demanding female priests — that’s not important. The important thing is that Sunny Hostin likes looking for the white smoke, and gets really excited during the conclaves. And based on her experience getting excited during conclaves, Sunny Hostin wants you to know that she’s very concerned about this new pope’s previous comments on gay marriage.
That’s when we heard from Ana Navarro, who describes herself as a “sinful Catholic” — as opposed to all the other Catholics apparently. And for her part, Navarro tried to calm Sunny Hostin down by explaining that the pope’s comments were from all the way back in 2012. And that’s plenty of time for fundamental church teachings to change, she says. Watch:
Self-described "sinful" Catholic Ana Navarro points out that what Hostin was quoting was from 2012, and she hopes Leo has changed his mind about Catholic doctrine:
"Maybe, you know, with the weight of the papacy and the idea that he just said when he went out on the balcony that… pic.twitter.com/8hbcaAVYwS— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) May 9, 2025
This is one of the better ways of illustrating why no one cares about the missing archbishop of Canterbury. In the Church of England, what Ana Navarro just said is totally plausible. Anglicans could very well change their fundamental positions in a matter of years.
But in the Catholic church, it’s a very different story. Of course this pope isn’t going to abolish 2,000 years of moral teaching for the sake of “accepting” LGBT lifestyles and validating LGBT “marriages.” And Pope Francis, for all the talk of his liberalism and his softer “tone” on these issues, didn’t do that either. Ana Navarro seems to think he did, but she’s wrong. Francis didn’t change church doctrine on gay marriage in any way. The church teaches, and has always taught, that the homosexual lifestyle is disordered and mortally sinful. Marriage can only occur between one man and one woman. Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms. There can’t be a gay marriage for the same reason that there can’t be a square circle. This is church teaching, whether the “devout Catholics” in the media like it or not.
At the moment, no one in the corporate press seems to realize that. Neither do many LGBT activists or academics, including people who describe themselves as Catholics. NBC News, for example, just ran this quote from someone named Jason Steidl Jack, who identifies as a “gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York.” Here’s what he had to say: “The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences.”
Again, this is a professor of religious studies at a supposedly Catholic university. And he’s openly rejecting some of the most fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church. In fact, he’s not just rejecting these teachings. He’s calling them hateful and ignorant. Of course, you can have that perspective. It’s a free country. This isn’t Canada or North Korea. You can mock whatever you want to mock, as long as Democrats don’t control the Justice Department. But I’ll make this as clear as I possibly can: If you publicly denounce fundamental tenets of the Catholic faith, then you’re not a Catholic. If you represent yourself as Catholic, for the purposes of speaking to NBC News or teaching a class at a Catholic university, even as you deny the teachings of Christ, then you are a fraud.
What we’re seeing with this panic over Pope Leo is precisely the reason why progressives can never actually be devout Catholics or devout members of any other ancient faith, for that matter. They can’t even be devout, patriotic Americans. They want to corrupt and destroy every institution that has existed for more than about 15 minutes. They deny timeless moral truths in principle. They despise tradition. They reject the wisdom of our ancestors. They believe that basically everyone who lived on Earth (and certainly every Catholic leader and theologian) has been wrong about essentially everything. They think that they alone hold the truths of the universe that nobody before them could see. If they are devoted disciples of any church, it is the Church of the Self. There is plenty of room for people like this in the Church of England, where nothing means anything, to the point that they don’t care if the archbishop disappears for half a year. But there cannot be room for people like this in the Catholic Church. For all his mistakes, the previous pope understood that. And based on these newly “unearthed” comments from Pope Leo — and the resulting howls from Left-wing activists — Catholics can be assured at the moment that the new pope understands it, too.
