Vatican’s Naturalistic Distortion of Augustine’s Restless Heart
The Vatican News portal (December 17, 2025) reports on an address by antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) during his “general audience,” where he claims financial investments “are out of control and unjustly concentrated at the bloody price of millions of human lives.” While superficially condemning economic injustice, the text constitutes a prime example of modernist reduction of supernatural truth to naturalistic sentiment.
Subversion of St. Augustine’s Doctrine
The antipope’s reference to Augustine’s cor inquietum (“restless heart”) deliberately severs the Doctor of Grace’s teaching from its doctrinal anchor: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (Confessions I.1) – where “rest” means sanctifying grace achieved through the sacraments, not psychological comfort. Augustine explicitly taught that outside the Catholic Church – the “City of God” – there is no true rest (De Civitate Dei, XIX.17). By divorcing “restlessness” from actual grace, the conciliar sect reduces the theological virtue of hope to existential angst, echoing Modernist subjectivism condemned in Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici gregis: “They make all consist in… religious sentiment which springs from the needs of the heart” (§14).
Omission of Christ’s Social Kingship
When decrying “bloody” economic systems, the text ignores Pius XI’s definitive teaching: “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty” (Quas Primas, §19). The true solution to injustice is public veneration of Christ the King and adherence to Rerum Novarum‘s condemnation of usury (Leo XIII, §4). Instead, the address promotes a Marxist-tinged naturalism that treats economic matters as purely temporal, violating Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Condemned Proposition #55).
Naturalistic Anthropology Replacing Sacramental Order
The assertion that “we are a heart” constitutes ontological heresy, reducing man to his emotions while ignoring the hylomorphic composition of body and rational soul (Council of Vienne, 1312). This contradicts Pius XII’s Humani Generis (§36) on the soul’s spirituality. Worse, the text never mentions:
– The necessity of baptism for salvation (Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, Council of Florence)
– The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as source of grace
– The Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell)
This silence proves the conciliar sect’s apostasy from supernatural faith, reducing religion to ethical humanism – precisely the “cult of man” denounced in Paul IV’s Cum ex Apostolatus Officio.
Modernist Contamination of Eschatology
The claim that Christ’s Resurrection enables us to find “meaning” in daily life inverts Catholic eschatology. Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis (§80) teaches that our earthly pilgrimage is “a time of suffering and trial” ordered toward eternal beatitude. The text’s focus on “peace and joy” in this life smells of the condemned Protestant error of realized eschatology.
Symptomatic of Conciliar Apostasy
This address exemplifies the hermeneutic of rupture with Tradition:
1. Naturalism: Reducing religion to social activism while ignoring the necessity of contemplative prayer and sacramental life.
2. Subjectivism: Defining “heart” as emotional center rather than the seat of intellect and will (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.75 a.2).
3. Omission of Judgment: No warning that receiving “Communion” in invalid rites constitutes sacrilege (St. Pius X, Lamentabili, #46).
As St. Pius X warned: “Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine… called vital immanence” (Pascendi, §6). This discourse – like all conciliar teachings – manifests the anti-Church’s intrinsic contradiction: feigning concern for humanity while destroying the only means of salvation – the immutable Catholic Faith.
Source:
Pope at Audience: Unjust investments come at 'bloody price of millions of human lives' (vaticannews.va)
Date: 17.12.2025