The Naturalistic Premise of a Usurper’s Civil Status
The cited article from EWTN News engages in a speculative legalistic analysis concerning the civil obligations—voting in Peru, paying U.S. taxes—of the individual known as “Pope Leo XIV.” It treats this man as the legitimate Sovereign Pontiff, framing the discussion within the categories of modern international law and dual citizenship. This entire exercise is fundamentally flawed and epitomizes the modernist, naturalistic mindset that has infected the post-conciliar “conciliar sect.” The article’s very foundation—accepting “Leo XIV” as a valid pope—collapses under the weight of Catholic doctrine. A manifest heretic, which this man has proven to be by his public adherence to the errors of Vatican II and his promotion of religious liberty, ecumenism, and the heresy of collegiality, cannot be pope. As St. Robert Bellarmine definitively taught, a manifest heretic “by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.”
The article’s silence on this paramount theological and canonical reality is not an oversight; it is the deliberate omission of the only relevant question. By bypassing the issue of jurisdiction and focusing instead on the civil mechanics of a “papal” sovereign, the author participates in the great apostasy. He treats the occupant of the Vatican as a political figure subject to earthly norms, thereby reducing the Vicar of Christ to a mere head of state—a quintessential error condemned by Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, which denounces the notion that “the civil government, even when in the hands of an infidel sovereign, has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41) and that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). The article’s entire premise assumes the legitimacy of a “papacy” that has, since John XXIII, systematically dismantled the societas perfecta of the Church and surrendered its rights to secular authority.
1. Factual Deconstruction: A “Legal Expert” Within a Lawless System
The article cites Professor Antonio G. Chizzoniti, a canon law scholar, who operates entirely within the post-1917 and post-Vatican II canonical frameworks. His analysis is therefore inherently defective. He correctly notes that canon law does not require a pope to renounce prior citizenship, but he fails to apply the most fundamental canonical principle: a non-Christian cannot be pope. Bellarmine’s reasoning is unassailable: “a manifest heretic is not a Christian… therefore, a manifest heretic cannot be Pope.” The “complex layering of norms” Chizzoniti describes is the very architecture of the modernist apostasy, where the law of the “conciliar sect” has replaced the law of the Catholic Church. His conclusion that papal “head-of-state immunity” might exempt “Leo XIV” from tax obligations is a red herring. It treats the antipope as a legitimate foreign sovereign, when in reality, he is a privatus, a private individual illicitly occupying the See of Rome. The “Holy See Press Office” he references is the press office of the occupying power, not of the true Catholic Church. The historical examples he gives—John Paul II retaining Polish citizenship, Francis keeping Argentine nationality—only prove the consistent policy of the post-conciliar hierarchy to embrace naturalistic, secular identities, precisely the error Pius XI condemned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
2. Linguistic Analysis: The Language of Naturalism and Obfuscation
The article’s language is meticulously bureaucratic and neutral, a hallmark of modernist discourse. Phrases like “legal picture is not entirely settled,” “ongoing discussion,” and “unresolved” serve to normalize a situation that is, from a Catholic perspective, radically abnormal. This cautious, academic tone masks the apocalyptic reality: the See of Peter is occupied by a series of heretical antipopes. The author uses terms like “pope,” “Holy See,” and “Vatican” without quotation marks, thereby lending them a legitimacy they do not possess. This is not accidental; it is the successful implementation of the “disinformation strategy” outlined in the False Fatima Apparitions file, where the narrative is controlled by isolating true Catholics and presenting a false, normalized face of the “Church.” The article’s focus on “citizenship” and “tax obligations” is a deliberate diversion from the only obligation that matters: the public and solemn profession of the integral Catholic faith. The silence on whether “Leo XIV” professes the Catholic faith without the heresies of Vatican II is the gravest accusation. It is the silence of the “ecumenical project” that prefers to discuss administrative trivia while souls perish.
3. Theological Confrontation: Christ the King vs. the Cult of Man
The article is a textbook example of the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism,” which Pope Pius XI identified as the plague poisoning society in his encyclical Quas Primas. By reducing the papacy to a question of civil tax codes and voter registration, it completely omits the threefold authority of Christ the King: His legislative, judicial, and executive power over all nations. Pius XI wrote: “His reign… extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The article’s entire framework is anthropocentric, concerned with the “rights” and “obligations” of a man under human law, while utterly silent on the primacy of God’s law and the duty of all states to publicly honor Christ as King. This is the direct fruit of the errors condemned in the Syllabus: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood” (Error 3) and “It is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship… conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people” (Error 79). The article’s author implicitly accepts the liberal, indifferentist principle that the state is neutral in matters of religion, a principle anathematized by Pius IX. For a Catholic, the primary question is not whether a “pope” pays taxes, but whether the state recognizes the Social Reign of Christ the King and orders its laws accordingly. The article’s naturalism is a denial of Quas Primas.
4. Symptomatic Analysis: The Fruit of the Conciliar Revolution
This article is not an anomaly; it is the logical culmination of the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place. The “usurper antipope Leo XIV” (Robert Prevost) is a product of the conciliar sect’s rejection of Catholic exclusivism. His dual citizenship is a symbol of the “Christian-Islamic syncretism” and religious indifferentism that the False Fatima file identifies as a goal of the Masonic operation. The article’s treatment of the papacy as a merely sovereign entity, comparable to a president or king, mirrors the error of those who “conceived that the divine religion should be replaced by a natural religion” (Syllabus, Error 4). It is the same error that led to the “ecumenical reinterpretation” of Fatima, opening the way for “dialogue with schismatic Orthodoxy” and relativism. The “legal expert” quoted is a functionary of the new, democratized, and secularized “Church” where canon lawyers debate administrative minutiae while the deposit of faith is abandoned. This is precisely the “hermeneutics of continuity” and “evolution of dogmas” condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu: “Dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy… are merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness” (Proposition 54). The article assumes this evolution has occurred, treating the post-conciliar “papacy” as a new, evolved office with new, evolved “citizenship” norms. It is a symptom of the “synthesis of all errors”—Modernism—which “rejects the absolute and immutable character of the doctrines of the Church.”
Conclusion: A Call to Reject the Illusion
The article presents a false dilemma: how to reconcile the civil obligations of a “pope” with his sovereign status. The Catholic answer, grounded in the immutable faith, is that there is no pope. The man called “Leo XIV” is a manifest heretic, and therefore, ipso facto, deprived of all jurisdiction. Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code is clear: “Every office becomes vacant by the mere fact… if the cleric:… Publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” The “conciliar sect” that occupies the Vatican is a “paramasonic structure” (as per the False Fatima analysis) that has promulgated a new religion. Its “popes,” its “bishops,” its “priests” are, with very few exceptions, invalidly ordained or operating without jurisdiction. To engage in discussions about their civil status is to grant them a legitimacy they do not possess and to participate in the “disinformation strategy” that keeps Catholics in bondage to the “man of sin.” The only “obligation” for Catholics is to reject this entire system, to flee the “neo-church,” and to adhere to the unchangeable Catholic faith as it was believed before the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. The “key questions” the article claims are “unsettled” are settled by divine law: Christ reigns, and the antipopes do not.
Source:
Does the pope vote in Peru or pay U.S. taxes? Key questions remain unsettled (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 23.03.2026