Pope Leo XIV appoints anti-Traditionalist scholars to Vatican theological body

[Stone]

Pope Leo XIV appoints anti-Traditionalist scholars to Vatican theological body
The 24 new members include a critic of the SSPX who questioned Church teaching on baptism, 

as well as advocates of progressive approaches to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue.



Pope Leo XIV
Marco Iacobucci Epp/Shutterstock

Gaetano
Masciullo
Oct 20, 2026
This article was updated on October 21, 2026

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews [slightly adapted - not all hyperlinks included from original]) — Pope Leo XIV has appointed 24 new members to a key Vatican theological advisory body, including theologians who have challenged traditional teachings on baptism, attacked the Society of St. Pius X, and advanced progressive approaches to Catholic doctrine.

On October 19, the Holy See Press Office announced the appointment of 24 new members to the International Theological Commission for the five year 2026-2031 cycle. The new appointees were selected from a list presented by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and include Austrian dogmatist Jan-Heiner Tück; Islamic dialogue specialist Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan; and progressive theologians such as Fathers Khaled Anatolios and Tiago de Fraga Gomes.

“Can the old doctrine of the necessity of baptism for salvation be maintained so strictly after the Shoah and Vatican II? Can concern over eternal loss of salvation be cited as a theological argument for keeping the canon that allows children in danger of death to be baptized against their parents’ will today?” Professor Jan-Heiner Tück asked in a 2023 interview.

On September 8, 2023, Professor Jan-Heiner Tück publicly urged Pope Francis to revise Canon 868 §2 of the Code of Canon Law, which explicitly says that “an infant of Catholic parents or even of non-Catholic parents is baptized licitly in danger of death even against the will of the parents.”

Aligning himself with liberal and Jewish criticism, according to which consent is morally superior to the meaning of the sacraments, Tück openly questioned whether the Catholic Church can continue to teach that baptism is strictly necessary for eternal salvation following the Second Vatican Council. He urged Rome to abandon traditional sacramental dogma to avoid offending non-Catholic sensibilities.

Tück also conducted a campaign against the Society of St. Pius X. He publicly labeled the SSPX’s canonical position a “schismatic act” and a “parallel church,” demanding that the Vatican force traditionalists into unconditional submission to Vatican II’s decrees on ecumenism, religious liberty, and interreligious dialogue. Rejecting any partial recognition of the council, Tück warned of an “osmotic permeability” between traditionalist circles and right-wing political groups.

Media outlets frequently describe Tück as a “conservative” theologian because he defended male-only ordination against radical German Synodal Way proposals, opposed the posthumous rehabilitation of notorious heretic Hans Küng, and criticized the lack of clarity in Pope Francis’s responses to the well-known dubia submitted by Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Robert Sarah, and Joseph Zen.

However, Tück’s theological positions suggest that what now passes for “conservatism” is often little more than a hollow label applied to forms of progressivism that have merely fallen out of fashion. While maintaining a veneer of traditional terminology on isolated institutional points, Tück fully embraces the core tenets of neo-modernism: he demands absolute submission to Vatican II’s ecumenism, attacks the Traditional Latin Mass, seeks to alter canon law, and dismisses defenders of Catholic moral dogma.

Another problematic appointment concerns Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan, dean of the Theological Faculty of the Institut catholique de Paris. She is the first layperson dean of the local Theologicum and is a prominent advocate of interreligious dialogue with Islam and Eastern non-Catholic confessions. Having directed the University’s institute for Islamic encounter and ecumenical studies, Vivier-Muresan’s published academic work focuses on “opening up to the other believer” and advancing synodal governance, actively replacing Catholic missionary conversion with pan-religious dialogue.

Father Khaled Anatolios, a Melkite Greek Catholic priest and theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, publicly lauded Pope Francis’s “hermeneutics of mercy” as his most constructive legacy.

Anatolios argued that pastoral compassion should override objective moral norms, providing academic justification for the systematic dilution of Catholic moral theology under the guise of pastoral accompaniment. “Even those who would fault [Pope Francis] for what they consider to be misapplications of this hermeneutic should give him credit for his passionate articulation of it,” he claimed.

Spanish theologian Father Ángel Cordovilla Pérez celebrated the new appointment as an opportunity to enshrine synodality, integral ecology, and the 10th anniversary of Amoris laetitia into official papal documents.

In a 2025 academic research project, Brazilian Father Tiago de Fraga Gomes explicitly promoted the “nouvelle théologie,” the heterodox evolutionist cosmology of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and a “misericordious” pastoral paradigm that replaces fixed natural law with subjective discernment for couples in “irregular” unions.

A “fundamental theological movement that preceded the Second Vatican Council was the nouvelle théologie, of which French theologians were the main representatives, among them Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Maurice Blondel, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, seen … as inspirations,” Gomes’s research reads. In particular, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made the attempt to reconcile faith and science; with an evolutionary positioning of the world and humanity, he inspired a new and broader intelligibility of the human condition, even in its religious dimension.”

Speaking about Amoris laetitia and Francis’s willingness to introduce divorced and “remarried” couples to Holy Communion, the research also states: “The logic that the Pope understands is that of the ecclesial capacity to adopt mercy as the sole and essential pastoral paradigm, since its source is the Gospel and the practice of Jesus. On the other hand, it is true that alongside this paradigm … there is also that of stricter pastoral care, founded on a set of convincing and objective answers to human dramas, the fruit of a cold office morality.… Here lies the possibility of integration into ecclesial life, whether through participation in groups and activities, or even sacramentally. It is necessary to look at the subjectivity of the person, to draw them closer to, and never distance them from, salvation in Christ.”

Established by Pope Paul VI in 1969 to institutionalize collaboration between bishops and theologians following the Second Vatican Council, the International Theological Commission consists of a maximum of 30 scholars appointed for five-year terms to conduct specialized studies for the pope and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Far from safeguarding Traditional Catholic doctrine and morality, the commission has repeatedly served as an engine for doctrinal innovation. Notably, on August 21, 2026, the commission published “Caring for Our Common Home: A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Trinitarian God,” a theological document that legitimized Teilhardian evolutionism and “panentheism,” the heretical belief that God and the created universe interpenetrate and evolve together.