Belfast’s “Catholic” College: 125 Years of Apostate Formation
The EWTN News portal (December 29, 2025) celebrates St. Mary’s University College’s 125th anniversary, praising its role as Northern Ireland’s “only Catholic higher education institution” that trains teachers for “every Catholic school” in the region. Principal Peter Finn boasts of an identity rooted in “faith and service” and “Gospel values,” while the article highlights alumni like Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and New Orleans Saints kicker Charlie Smyth. Governing body chairman Alan McGuckian (presented as “Bishop of Down and Connor”) and the college’s partnership with Queen’s University Belfast are emphasized as marks of legitimacy.
Naturalism Masquerading as Catholic Education
The college’s claimed “Catholic” identity collapses under scrutiny. No institution recognizing post-1958 antipopes or adopting the conciliar sect’s revolutionary principles can claim continuity with Catholic education. Pius XI’s encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929) mandates that Catholic education must form souls for eternal salvation through “submission to the deposit of truth entrusted to the Church” (n. 17). Yet St. Mary’s celebrates “international engagement” and “conflict resolution” – code for indifferentism and the modernist heresy condemned by Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907):
“They affirm that the Church… is by her very nature incapable of fitting into the social environment… unless she subject herself to it as to a supreme rule of life.”
Theological Contradictions in Governance
The article’s reference to Alan McGuckian as “Bishop of Down and Connor” is an ontological impossibility. As a conciliar sect appointee recognizing antipopes since John XXIII, McGuckian lacks jurisdiction. Canon 147 of the 1917 Code invalidates any episcopal appointment made without papal mandate – which ceased to exist after Pius XII’s death in 1958. The college’s governing body thus operates under illegitimate authority, rendering its religious education program canonically void.
Subversion of Teacher Formation
St. Mary’s boasts that its teachers staff Northern Ireland’s “Catholic” schools. Yet these schools operate under the UK’s 1998 Education Act, which mandates “promotion of equality of opportunity” and “good relations between persons of different religious belief” – principles directly contradicting Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864):
- Condemned Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State.”
- Condemned Proposition 48: “Catholics may approve of the system of educating youth unconnected with Catholic faith and the power of the Church.”
The college’s “certificate in religious education” – validated by conciliar sect authorities – inevitably teaches the heresies of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae.
Historical Revisionism
The article invokes the Dominican founders’ 1900 mission to form teachers “proficient in religious knowledge.” This is weaponized nostalgia. Today’s Dominicans at St. Mary’s operate under the 1968 Order of Preachers General Chapter that embraced “the spirit of renewal proposed by Vatican Council II” – a council condemned by Archbishop Lefebvre as “the French Revolution in the Church”. The order’s abandonment of the Regula Sanctorum Patrum (Rule of St. Augustine) and Thomistic formation disqualifies them from transmitting Catholic tradition.
Celebrity Alumni: Markers of Apostasy
The praise for Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (a cultural Catholic who wrote pagan mythology into verse) and Charlie Smyth (prioritizing NFL sports over catechesis) reveals the college’s true ethos. Pius XI’s Quas Primas (1925) warned against such naturalism:
“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, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”
St. Mary’s produces not soldiers of Christ, but functionaries for the conciliar sect’s secular humanist project. Its 125-year history culminates in what St. Pius X called “the suicide of altering the Faith” (Pascendi, 39).
Source:
Northern Ireland’s only Catholic college celebrates 125 years of training teachers (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 29.12.2025