Professor Kwasniewski, AI Detective And then we arrive at the Catholic Identity Conference, Michael Matt’s annual Pittsburgh project devoted to “uniting the clans.” This year Peter Kwasniewski is scheduled to speak Friday, October 2, on “The Traditional Latin Mass—What Truly Unites All the Clans.” Bishop Robert Mutsaerts of the Netherlands speaks the next afternoon on “The Catholic Response to a (Synodal) Church in Crisis.” The clans are already uniting beautifully. On September 19, Kwasniewski posted a lengthy complaint about articles he believes are produced by artificial intelligence. Then came his exhibit. Kwasniewski posted a GPTZero scan assigning “100% AI probability” to Bishop Mutsaerts’ recent essay, “The Church in Crisis — and How We Must Not Save Her.” He lamented that such articles “WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT if they had been written by people” and questioned the ethics of sharing an article “if it’s not written by a person.” There is one small problem. A GPTZero score does not establish authorship. Even GPTZero says so. The company explicitly acknowledges that human writing can be classified as AI and tells educators confronted with a positive result to seek writing history and other evidence. Its own published guidance states that a detector score “should not be treated as proof on its own.” Independent 2026 research makes the point more forcefully. Studies of AI detectors have found contradictory classifications, false positives and significant weaknesses depending upon the kind of writing being tested. One recent study found GPTZero generated false positives on genuinely human texts; another warned that detector results should not be standalone evidence of authorship. Perhaps Mutsaerts used AI. Perhaps he used it for editing. Perhaps a translator or aide did. Perhaps he wrote every syllable himself. Kwasniewski’s screenshot proves none of those possibilities. But why bother asking? Upload. Scan. Anathematize. And then everyone meets in Pittsburgh the following week for the Unite the Clans Mixer. You cannot make this stuff up. Although Professor Kwasniewski may want to run that sentence through GPTZero before believing me.
Michael Matt Calls Our Lady “The Ultimate Feminist” While Dr. Kwasniewski Accuses Fellow Catholic Identity Conference Speaker, Bishop Robert Mutsaerts, of Using AI
At a conference devoted to authentic Catholic femininity, Matt recast Our Lady in the language of feminist power. The surrounding Trad Inc. circus makes the problem even clearer.
Michael Matt went to Littleton, Colorado, last weekend to address a Catholic women’s conference whose stated purpose could hardly have been clearer. Restore Tradition says its mission is to cut through the “delusions of the modern world” and teach “God’s design for men and women.” The conference promised women a rediscovery of “authentic femininity.” On Friday morning, Father Chad Ripperger delivered a talk titled “The Sins of Eve, Feminism and Our Lady.” Abby Johnson followed later that day with “A Personal Journey from Feminism to Authentic Femininity.”
So naturally, on Saturday afternoon, keynote speaker Michael Matt called the Blessed Virgin Mary the greatest feminist in the history of creation.
I wish I were exaggerating.
Addressing the women in attendance during his September 26 keynote, Matt declared:
“You need to lead us back to sanity and I hope and honestly believe only you can do it. The feminine power harnessed from the ultimate feminist in the history of the universe, Our Lady, who with one word, with her fiat, co-redeemed all men on earth. You wanna talk about a feminist? She’s it!”
(Clip courtesy of Sede Picante)
That is an astonishingly bad statement.
It is bad Mariology. It is bad theology of the sexes. It imports the categories of the Revolution into a Catholic discussion supposedly devoted to escaping those very categories. And it takes the greatest exemplar of Christian womanhood who ever lived and stuffs her into a political ideology built around female emancipation, equality understood as sameness, autonomy, social power and rebellion against the old Christian order.
Apparently feminism has finally been defeated. We simply baptized it.
Our Lady Was the Antithesis of a Feminist
Read the Annunciation again.
The Archangel Gabriel announces something humanly incomprehensible. Mary does not answer with a manifesto about feminine agency. She does not announce that she has discovered her power. She does not inform Joseph that the patriarchy has been placed on notice.
“Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.”
Those are her words.
The Magnificat carries the same spirit. God “hath regarded the humility of his handmaid.” Mary exalts the mighty works of God, His mercy, His justice and His raising of the humble.
Humility. Obedience. Virginity. Maternity. Sacrifice. Receptivity to grace. Total conformity to the will of God.
These are Marian categories.
“Feminine power harnessed” sounds like something cooked up by a corporate consultant for a Women in Leadership luncheon.
There have always been powerful Catholic women in the proper sense. Queens protected the Faith. Mothers formed saints. Abbesses governed monasteries. St. Catherine of Siena rebuked churchmen. St. Joan of Arc led soldiers. Nobody needs a timid or sentimental vision of womanhood.
Yet Catholic womanhood never required turning femininity into masculinity with softer facial features. Its grandeur came precisely from the gifts proper to woman, brought to supernatural perfection through grace.
Pius XI addressed the ideological issue directly in Casti Connubii. He warned against an emancipation that devalues motherhood and domestic life and against what he called “false liberty and unnatural equality” between husband and wife. He simultaneously affirmed the equal dignity of their human persons. His argument depended upon distinction, order and complementarity rather than the modern obsession with making the sexes interchangeable.
This is exactly why calling Mary “the ultimate feminist” is grotesque.
One can rescue almost any word by redefining it. Perhaps “feminist” now means “an important woman.” In that case St. Anne was a feminist, St. Monica was a feminist, the Poor Clares are feminists, and eventually every woman who ever said a Rosary gets her membership card.
Words have histories. Feminism has one too.
And the Catholic response to an ideology cannot simply consist of grabbing its favorite nouns and announcing that Catholics really invented them first.
Matt’s Power Problem
The strangest part of Matt’s remarks comes immediately before the “ultimate feminist” line.
“You need to lead us back to sanity.”
Only women can do it, he says.
Why?
The remark sounds flattering in the room. That is probably why it was said. A man stands before several hundred women and tells them that they possess the mysterious power required to rescue civilization after men botched everything.
Applause line secured.
Catholic teaching is more demanding than flattery. It tells men to become men again. Fathers are supposed to lead families. Priests must act like spiritual fathers. Bishops must govern. Husbands must sacrifice themselves for wives and children. Women possess their own indispensable vocation, dignity, authority and influence, especially through motherhood and the formation of the family.
If men have become cowards, the Catholic solution is to restore men to their duties. Handing the civilizational steering wheel to women because the men have driven into a ditch merely repeats the feminist premise in Catholic costume.
Matt somehow managed to attend a conference created to defend the differences between men and women and then tell women that they must assume the leadership men have abandoned.
There may have been a simpler keynote available.
Men, do your duty.
Women, do yours.
Both become saints.
Too complicated, apparently.
Mary Did More Than Say One Word
The Mariology gets stranger.
Matt said Our Lady “with one word, with her fiat, co-redeemed all men on earth.”
Mary’s fiat was indispensable to the mystery of the Incarnation. Her willing cooperation with the divine plan stands at the beginning of her unique participation in Christ’s redemptive work. Yet old Catholic theology is considerably richer and more careful than Matt’s applause-line condensation.
St. Pius X describes Mary’s association with redemption through her entire union with Christ, especially her participation in His suffering at Calvary. He then makes the theological distinction Matt omitted: what Christ merited de condigno, Mary merited subordinately de congruo. The treasures of redemption remain the “exclusive fruit” of Christ’s death, even as Mary participates in an utterly singular way in His work.
Mary’s greatness does not arise because she seized feminine power. She received everything from God and returned everything to Him. Her cooperation with redemption reaches its awful summit beneath the Cross, where the Mother watches the Child she gave flesh to bleed to death.
Turning all of that into “one word,” “feminine power” and “ultimate feminist” manages to inflate feminism while flattening Mariology.
Quite an achievement for one paragraph.
Professor Kwasniewski, AI Detective
And then we arrive at the Catholic Identity Conference, Michael Matt’s annual Pittsburgh project devoted to “uniting the clans.”
This year Peter Kwasniewski is scheduled to speak Friday, October 2, on “The Traditional Latin Mass—What Truly Unites All the Clans.” Bishop Robert Mutsaerts of the Netherlands speaks the next afternoon on “The Catholic Response to a (Synodal) Church in Crisis.”
The clans are already uniting beautifully.
On September 19, Kwasniewski posted a lengthy complaint about articles he believes are produced by artificial intelligence.
Then came his exhibit.
Kwasniewski posted a GPTZero scan assigning “100% AI probability” to Bishop Mutsaerts’ recent essay, “The Church in Crisis — and How We Must Not Save Her.” He lamented that such articles “WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT if they had been written by people” and questioned the ethics of sharing an article “if it’s not written by a person.”
There is one small problem.
A GPTZero score does not establish authorship.
Even GPTZero says so.
The company explicitly acknowledges that human writing can be classified as AI and tells educators confronted with a positive result to seek writing history and other evidence. Its own published guidance states that a detector score “should not be treated as proof on its own.”
Independent 2026 research makes the point more forcefully. Studies of AI detectors have found contradictory classifications, false positives and significant weaknesses depending upon the kind of writing being tested. One recent study found GPTZero generated false positives on genuinely human texts; another warned that detector results should not be standalone evidence of authorship.
Perhaps Mutsaerts used AI. Perhaps he used it for editing. Perhaps a translator or aide did. Perhaps he wrote every syllable himself. Kwasniewski’s screenshot proves none of those possibilities.
But why bother asking?
Upload. Scan. Anathematize.
And then everyone meets in Pittsburgh the following week for the Unite the Clans Mixer.
You cannot make this stuff up. Although Professor Kwasniewski may want to run that sentence through GPTZero before believing me.
Candace and the Celebrity Problem
The same judgment problem has surfaced before.
Michael Matt invited Candace Owens to speak at the 2024 Catholic Identity Conference. His own subsequent video emphasized something remarkable: he invited her before she had even publicly announced her conversion to Catholicism.
Owens entered the Church publicly in April 2024. The CIC took place September 27–29. Within roughly five months of becoming Catholic, a celebrity political commentator was appearing as a major attraction at something called the Catholic Identity Conference.
That decision looks even more questionable now.
In 2026 Owens launched a serialized investigation centered on Erika Kirk, the widow of murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The Washington Post reported that the series raised insinuations about Kirk while initially producing little concrete evidence, and later reporting described Owens as advancing unsubstantiated theories that reached even the murdered man’s widow.
Whatever one thinks about every unresolved question surrounding that murder, Catholic instinct regarding a grieving widow ought to begin somewhere other than monetized insinuation.
“Pure religion and undefiled” includes care for widows in their tribulation.
Maybe celebrity converts need time for formation before being placed on Catholic stages as exemplars. This used to be obvious.
And Then There Was Chorbishop Spinosa
Another longtime CIC figure was Chorbishop Anthony Spinosa.
Spinosa appeared at the Catholic Identity Conference repeatedly over many years. He delivered the keynote in 2017, appeared again in 2018 and 2019, spoke in later years, and was among the clerics featured at the 2025 conference.
In August 2026, Spinosa was charged in Ohio with public indecency and procuring after an alleged sexual incident in a public park. He pleaded not guilty. Bishop Elias Zaidan relieved him of his duties at the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon while the civil case proceeds. As of September 14, the case had been continued for thirty days.
Those are allegations. Spinosa is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Nor could Michael Matt reasonably have been expected years ago to foresee a future criminal accusation. That would be absurd.
The lesson lies elsewhere.
Traditional Catholics have developed a disastrous habit of converting conference appearances, podcasts, photographs and personal friendships into certificates of orthodoxy. Someone appears on the right stage, knows the right people, praises the Latin Mass and gives the right signals. Suddenly he becomes part of the approved ecosystem.
Then the ecosystem protects its own mythology.
This is especially strange among people who built their public identity around exposing institutional failure.
“Unite the Clans” Has Become a Substitute Magisterium
Here we reach the deeper problem.
Michael Matt has spent years promoting “Unite the Clans.” The Catholic Identity Conference deliberately gathers Catholics who disagree about enormous questions because they share attachment to Tradition and opposition to the postconciliar revolution. Even sympathetic coverage of the 2025 CIC described Matt repeatedly emphasizing that coalition.
There was once something attractive in the idea. Traditionalists spent decades fighting each other while the revolution occupied nearly every institution that mattered.
But a coalition can become an ideology of its own.
Who belongs to the club starts mattering more than whether an argument is true. Conference stages confer credibility. Personal relationships soften criticism. Celebrity invitations become proof of relevance. A man can say something completely ridiculous and survive because he has spent thirty years collecting the right friends.
Meanwhile sedevacantists and other Catholics outside the approved circle are routinely treated as extremists because they ask the one question the coalition cannot comfortably answer: what exactly happened to Catholic authority if Catholics must spend sixty years resisting the authorities who claim to possess it?
The spectacle is revealing.
The postconciliar crisis is supposedly grave enough to justify resisting Rome, rejecting liturgical revolution, denouncing episcopal cowardice, forming alternative Catholic institutions and gathering yearly conferences to strategize against an ecclesiastical catastrophe.
Yet somehow the crisis is never grave enough to disturb the permanent social structure of Trad Inc.
The same personalities return. The same conferences. The same panels. The same reassuring language about unity. The same gatekeepers decide which questions may be pursued all the way to their conclusions.
Then one of them goes to a conference against feminism and calls Our Lady the ultimate feminist.
Perhaps the crisis is larger than they think.
Give Us Catholic Categories Again
I do not want a feminist Blessed Virgin.
I want the one Catholics have always known.
The Immaculate Virgin who called herself the handmaid of the Lord. The Mother who gave Christ His human flesh. The woman whose soul magnified God rather than herself. The Mother of Sorrows who remained beneath the Cross when almost everyone else fled. The Queen whose exaltation came through humility, purity, obedience, suffering and supernatural charity.
That woman is infinitely more magnificent than any feminist caricature.
Catholic women deserve better than ideological leftovers reheated with Marian seasoning. Catholic men deserve better than being told women alone can lead civilization back to sanity. And Catholics generally deserve teachers who can speak about the sexes without borrowing their vocabulary from the revolution they claim to oppose.
Michael Matt wanted to flatter a room full of women.
Instead he accidentally demonstrated the problem.
When the editor of The Remnant can stand before a conference explicitly devoted to recovering authentic femininity and call Our Lady “the ultimate feminist,” Catholic Tradition has ceased to be a set of precise inherited truths and begun to function as a brand.
There is a cure for that.
Open the old books again. Use Catholic words. Make Catholic distinctions. Stop translating the Faith into the slogans of its enemies.
And when Our Lady says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” perhaps allow her to mean it.
See Sede Picante’s entertaining and informative analysis of Michael Matt’s full address below:
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