On Inclusiveness
Listen up, all you beautiful, “love is love” enthusiasts who keep demanding that the Catholic Church become “more inclusive.” I’ve got news for you, delivered with all the tenderness of a medieval inquisitor: Catholic truth is exclusive. Full stop. It has to be. It was designed that way by the Guy who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” not “I am one of many equally valid paths, please don’t hurt anyone’s feelings.”
You want Catholicism to be a big tent where every idea gets a participation trophy? Congratulations—you’ve just invented Unitarianism with worse music. Truth, by its very nature, is exclusionary. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t “make space.” It doesn’t say, “Well, that’s your truth, and this is my truth, and let’s all hold hands, pass around Coca Colas and get fat.” Truth draws a line in the sand and dares falsehood to cross it. And Catholicism, for two thousand years, has been the line.
Think about it. The Church didn’t spend centuries hammering out creeds, councils, and catechisms just so some TikTok theologian could waltz in and announce that maybe the Eucharist is just a symbol and transubstantiation is, like, a personal preference. No. The Church looked at every crackpot idea—Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, modernism, you name it—and said, with the serene confidence of a bouncer at the pearly gates, “Not on the list. Out.” That’s not bigotry. That’s basic epistemology. You can’t include 2 + 2 = 5 in your math curriculum without the bridges collapsing and the airplanes falling out of the sky. Why should theology be any different?
Modern inclusion, the sacred cow of the secular left (and the sadly confused “compassionate” Boomer Catholics), pretends that every belief is equally valid so long as it doesn’t offend the narrative. It’s the intellectual equivalent of letting every kid in the spelling bee win. Everyone gets a medal, the dictionary is burned, and suddenly “cat” is spelled with a K and three emojis. Brilliant. Now apply that to the Faith. Want to ordain women? Cool, let’s “include” that. Want to bless same-sex unions while pretending it’s not marriage? Even better—diversity! Want to treat abortion as a “complex pastoral issue” instead of the direct killing of an innocent human being? Hey, we’re all on a journey.
Except the Church’s authority rests on the idea that some things are true and some things are false. Period. Jesus didn’t die on the cross so we could have a dialogue group about whether He really meant any of it. He founded a Church with keys—not a suggestion box. The Apostles didn’t go around saying, “Hey, Gentiles, bring your pagan gods to the potluck; we’ll just blend them in.” They said repent, believe, and be baptized—or remain outside. Exclusionary? You bet. Effective? Two millennia of converts, saints, and preserved doctrine say yes.
The people screeching loudest for “inclusion” never seem to notice the delicious irony: their version of inclusion is the most exclusionary project in human history. Try suggesting that maybe men aren’t women at your average diocesan synod and watch how fast you’re uninvited. Try defending the Church’s actual teaching on contraception or divorce and suddenly you’re the problem. The progressive crowd doesn’t want to be included; they want the Church to be converted. They want the deposit of faith edited like a Wikipedia page until it matches their feelings. And when the Church—shockingly—refuses to let them rewrite the Nicene Creed to include their demands they wail that it’s “hateful.”
Hateful. That’s their favorite word. Telling a man trapped in delusion that he’s not a woman is supposedly crueler than affirming his delusion while he’s on an operating table wondering why he’s still miserable. The Church’s supposed “exclusion” is actually the most merciful act imaginable: it refuses to participate in the lie. It says, with the clarity of a doctor reading an X-ray, “This path leads to death. Here’s another one.” Modern inclusion says, “Death? That’s just another lifestyle choice. Here’s a balloon and a safe space.”
Look at history. Every time the Church tried the “inclusion” experiment—French Revolution priests swearing loyalty to the state, 1960s liturgical revolutionaries turning the Mass into a folk Mass sing-along, German bishops today playing games with blessing ceremonies—the result was not a bigger, happier Church. It was empty pews, closed seminaries, and confused Catholics wondering why their grandkids think “Catholic” means “whatever feels good this week.” Truth doesn’t bend to the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age bends to Truth or it breaks itself on it.
And spare me the “Jesus ate with sinners” line. Yes, He did. He also told them to stop sinning. He didn’t say, “Your adultery is valid. Your tax-collecting extortion is a different perspective. Let’s co-create new moral frameworks together.” He said, “Go and sin no more.” That’s not exclusion; that’s invitation with conditions. The Church has always been a hospital for sinners, not a spa for people who want their vices rebranded as virtues. You’re welcome inside exactly as you are—broken, confused, sinful—but the treatment plan doesn’t involve affirming the disease.
The real tragedy is that this “inclusive” nonsense isn’t even new. It’s the same old heresy dressed up in therapy-speak and Instagram filters. Every age has its version: the Arians who wanted a softer, more palatable Christ; the modernists who wanted dogma updated like software; today’s activists who want the Church to be a UN subcommittee on feelings. The Church has rejected them all not because it hates people, but because it loves Truth too much to let it be murdered in public.
So no, Catholicism cannot be “inclusive” in the way you mean it. It cannot discard two thousand years of doctrine to make room for whatever the current cultural moment demands. It cannot pretend that contradictory propositions can both be true. It cannot turn the narrow gate into a six-lane highway. Truth requires differentiation. It requires saying “this, not that.” It requires discarding error the way a surgeon discards a tumor. Anything less is not mercy; it’s malpractice.
If that sounds exclusionary, good. The alternative is a Church that stands for nothing and therefore falls for everything. And we’ve already seen what that looks like: collapsing attendance, vanishing vocations, and bishops who sound more like corporate consultants than successors of the Apostles. I’ll take the “exclusive” Church that built Western civilization, thank you very much—the one that still dares to say some things are True, some things are false, and your feelings don’t get a veto.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pray a rosary—in Latin—for the people who think this is controversial. When I’m finished, I’ll be in a boring Traditional Latin Mass.
You’re more than welcome to attend because EVERYONE is included…
