The February 2026 edition of the Vatican’s *Piazza San Pietro* magazine reports a response from the post-conciliar antipope “Leo XIV” to an atheist who claims to “yearn for God” while rejecting belief. The antipope quotes St. Augustine out of context to declare that “those who love God… cannot be atheists,” and concludes that the “real problem with faith is not believing or not believing in God, but seeking Him!” He posits a false dichotomy between “seekers and non-seekers of God,” claiming “we are all longing for Love, we are all seekers of God.” This statement, emanating from the conciliar sect’s “Pope,” is a masterclass in theological bankruptcy, stripping the Catholic Faith of its supernatural, dogmatic, and hierarchical essence and replacing it with a nebulous, naturalistic sentimentality utterly condemned by the pre-1958 Magisterium.
The Apostasy of “Seeking” Over Believing
The core error of the antipope’s message is its fundamental redefinition of faith. The Catholic Faith, as defined by the First Vatican Council and hammered home by St. Pius X against Modernism, is a supernatural assent to divinely revealed truths, grounded in the authority of God revealing. The antipope’s formulation, “the real problem with faith is not believing or not believing in God, but seeking Him!” is a direct repudiation of this. It echoes the condemned propositions of *Lamentabili sane exitu*: “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities” (Prop. 25) and “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Prop. 26). Faith is reduced from an intellectual assent to revealed *dogma* to a subjective, emotional, and indefinite “search.” This is the “vague seeking” of the Modernist, who “understands dogma in a sense that is ever changing” (*Pascendi Dominici gregis*, St. Pius X).
Silence on the Supernatural: Sin, Grace, and Hell
A thorough analysis must expose what is omitted. The antipope’s letter is a void of supernatural terminology. There is no mention of:
- Original Sin: The starting point for any Catholic discussion of man’s relationship to God. Rocco’s “drama” is presented as an existential restlessness, not the consequence of Adam’s fall and the loss of sanctifying grace.
- Sanctifying Grace: The “love of God” he yearns for is presented as a vague sentiment, not the indwelling of the Holy Trinity received in Baptism.
- The Sacraments: The means by which God’s grace is *objectively* given are completely absent. The path to God is an interior, individual “search,” not the reception of the sacraments instituted by Christ.
- The Necessity of the Catholic Church: The axiom *Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus* is ignored. The “seeker” is not directed to the one true Church as the necessary ark of salvation, but left in his subjective quest.
- Hell and Final Judgment: The gravity of rejecting God’s revealed truth—eternal damnation—is unmentioned. The tone is therapeutic, not prophetic.
This silence is not accidental; it is the very essence of the conciliar sect’s “anthropocentric” shift, condemned by Archbishop Lefebvre and others as a “naturalistic humanism” that places man’s experience at the center, displacing God’s sovereignty and law.
Profanation of St. Augustine
The antipope’s use of St. Augustine (“You were within me, but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!”) is a deliberate and blasphemous distortion. Augustine’s *Confessions* describe the soul’s journey *within the Catholic Church* through grace to the immutable Truth of God. It is a journey *from error to faith*, from sin to grace, culminating in baptism and communion. To use this text to validate an atheist’s state of “yearning” while rejecting belief is to strip it of its sacramental and dogmatic context. Augustine sought the *Truth incarnate in the Church*; the antipope suggests one can “seek” while remaining in heresy/atheism. This is the hermeneutics of discontinuity, reading the Fathers through the lens of Modernist immanence.
The “Seeker” as Modernist Archetype
The figure of the “seeker” is the perfect subject for the post-conciliar “Church of dialogue.” He is never called to repentance, faith, or submission. He is praised for his “restlessness,” which is identified as God himself. This inverts the Catholic order: God is not the object of faith to be known and loved through His revelation; He is a subjective feeling to be “found” through one’s own path. This is pure subjectivism, the religion of the “conscience” exalted by Vatican II’s *Dignitatis humanae* and condemned by Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors* (Props. 15-16 on religious indifferentism) and by St. Pius X as the “distrust of the human intellect” leading to “vague seeking.”
Christ the King vs. the “Seeker” Paradigm
Pius XI’s *Quas Primas* (1925), instituting the feast of Christ the King, provides the starkest contrast. The encyclical states that the “plague” of its time was the denial of “Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.” The solution was the public, liturgical confession that “all power in heaven and on earth has been given to Him,” and that states and individuals have a **duty** to publicly obey His law. The antipope’s message is the antithesis: it privatizes religion to an interior “search,” removes any claim of Christ’s reign over laws, institutions, or the public square, and replaces the **objective duty to submit the intellect and will to Christ the King** with the **subjective feeling of seeking**. Where Pius XI calls for society to be “ordered on the basis of God’s commandments,” the antipope offers a therapeutic platitude for an individual’s “drama.”
The Sedevacantist Diagnosis: A Manifest Heretic
From the perspective of unchanging Catholic doctrine (the sole criterion), the occupant of the Vatican is a manifest heretic. The *Defense of Sedevacantism* file demonstrates from Bellarmine, canon law (Canon 188.4), and *Cum ex Apostolatus Officio* that a manifest heretic *ipso facto* loses all ecclesiastical office. The antipope’s teaching here—that faith is primarily about seeking, not believing; that an atheist in good conscience may be a “seeker of God”; that the distinction is not believer/non-believer but seeker/non-seeker—is a **manifest heresy**. It denies the necessity of faith as a theological virtue, the objectivity of revelation, and the primacy of the intellect over the will in religion. It is a repackaging of the Modernist synthesis condemned by St. Pius X. Therefore, according to the pre-1958 theological framework, he is not a legitimate pope but an antipope, and his “magisterium” is devoid of authority.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation
The article from the Vatican News service is not a pastoral letter; it is a symptom of the total apostasy of the post-conciliar structure. It presents a “god” who is the projection of human restlessness, a “faith” that is a vague sentiment, and a “Church” that is a therapist for existential anxiety. This is the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place: the conciliar sect occupying the Vatican teaching a religion that is Catholic in name only, a syncretic, naturalistic, and heretical system. The only response for a Catholic is the absolute rejection commanded by Pius IX against indifferentism and by St. Pius X against Modernism: flee to the true, immemorial Tradition, outside the walls of the conciliar Babylon.
Source:
Pope: We are all seekers of God and His love (vaticannews.va)
Date: 24.02.2026