The article from the National Catholic Register, reporting on the activities of the individual occupying the Vatican as “Pope Leo XIV” on Good Friday 2026, describes a liturgical spectacle devoid of supernatural substance. The antipope personally carried the cross during the Via Crucis at the Colosseum, an event framed not as a re-presentation of the one Sacrifice of Calvary but as a symbolic “journey” focused on human authority and dignity. The meditations, authored by a Franciscan friar, emphasized that “every authority must answer before God for the manner in which it exercises the power it has received,” including temporal powers like war and human dignity, and extended this to “the power we exercise in our daily lives.” The antipope concluded by quoting St. Francis of Assisi, praying for the grace “to do for you alone what we know you want us to do and always to desire what pleases you,” and to “follow in the footprints of your beloved Son.” This presentation systematically omits the core Catholic doctrines of sin, propitiatory sacrifice, divine justice, and the absolute sovereignty of Christ the King over all nations, replacing them with a vague, humanistic spirituality of “journey” and “footprints.”
Theatrical Naturalism: The Cross as a Symbol, Not a Sacrifice
The central act—carrying the cross—is presented as a personal, physical journey undertaken by the antipope. The language is purely naturalistic and psychological: “live our lives as a journey,” “follow in the footprints.” This is a deliberate reduction of the sacred mystery. The true Via Crucis is not a symbolic walk but a liturgical re-presentation of the unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary, the one eternal offering of Christ to the Father for the redemption of sins. The cross is not a symbol to be carried in a procession for personal edification; it is the instrument of our salvation, the very means by which divine justice was satisfied and mercy won for souls. The antipope’s action, stripped of the sacrificial context of the Most Holy Mass, becomes mere theater—a performance of piety that explicitly contradicts the theology of the cross expounded by St. Paul: “For the word of the cross, to them indeed that perish, is foolishness; but to them that are saved, it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). The focus on the “footprints” of Christ emphasizes imitation (a natural moral effort) over participation in His divine life through grace and the sacraments. This is the essence of Modernism: reducing supernatural realities to natural, immanent experiences.
Omission of Divine Justice and the Kingdom of Christ
The meditations, as reported, are a masterpiece of doctrinal evasion. They speak of “authority” answering before God for “the power to trample upon human dignity or to safeguard it.” The concept of “human dignity” here is a purely naturalistic, post-Enlightenment construct, utterly foreign to Catholic theology which grounds dignity in the imago Dei and the Redemption. More gravely, there is complete silence on the primary reason for Christ’s Passion: to satisfy divine justice for sin and to establish His reign. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas on the feast of Christ the King, explicitly links the rejection of Christ’s kingship to the societal evils of his time: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The antipope’s meditation ignores this fundamental truth. It does not mention that Christ suffered and died because He is King, and that His kingship demands the submission of all human authority—political, familial, ecclesiastical—to His divine law. The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX condemned precisely this naturalistic focus. Error #56 states: “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God.” The meditation’s emphasis on human authority answering for itself, without anchoring that accountability in the strict, juridical demands of God’s eternal law, is a direct echo of this condemned error. The Quas Primas encyclical further declares that Christ’s kingdom “encompasses all men” and that rulers must “publicly honor Christ and obey Him,” for “His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments.” The antipope’s words contain not a whisper of this absolute, non-negotiable claim of Christ the King over all societies. Instead, the focus is on a vague, internalized “journey” and personal exercise of power, which is the precise opposite of the Catholic doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ.
The “Footprints” of Modernism: Evolution, Not Revelation
The antipope’s prayer to “follow in the footprints” of Christ is a loaded phrase in the context of the post-conciliar revolution. It implies a dynamic, evolutionary process of discovery, where the “footprints” are a path to be discerned and followed anew in each generation. This is the heresy of the “development of doctrine” condemned by St. Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis and the decree Lamentabili sane exitu. Proposition #58 of Lamentabili anathematizes: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” The “journey” metaphor inherently contains this modernist principle: doctrine and life are not fixed truths to be believed and obeyed, but a path to be walked, subject to the “discernment” of each generation. This stands in stark contrast to the unchanging faith. As the Syllabus (#24) teaches: “The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect”—but it also teaches that she has the spiritual power to bind and loose, to define truth definitively. The antipope’s language effaces this definitive, juridical character of revelation. The “footprints” suggest a vague guide, not the depositum fidei guarded by the Church. Furthermore, the choice of a Franciscan friar to write the meditations is symbolically potent. The authentic St. Francis of Assisi was a pillar of Catholic orthodoxy, a man of radical poverty and penance who lived in absolute submission to the Pope and the Church’s teaching. The modern Franciscan “custos of the Holy Land” represents the post-conciliar, ecumenical, and naturalistic re-interpretation of Franciscan spirituality, now focused on “dialogue,” “human dignity,” and “peace” in a secular sense, as seen in the meditations’ focus on temporal power. This is the “spirit of Assisi” apostasy, where the Catholic distinctiveness of the Incarnation and Redemption is muted in favor of a generic religiosity.
Symptomatic Apostasy: Silence on Sacraments, Grace, and Judgment
The gravest accusation against the article and the event it describes is its total omission of the supernatural economy of salvation. A Catholic Good Friday liturgy, even in the stripped-down post-conciliar rite, must at least allude to the sacrifice of the Mass, the Passion as atonement for sin, and the hope of resurrection. The article reports nothing of this. The antipope’s prayer speaks of being “inwardly cleansed, interiorly enlightened and inflamed by the fire of the Holy Spirit,” but this is presented as a general spiritual desire, not as the effect of the sacraments (Baptism, Confession, Eucharist) which are the sole ordinary means of grace and sanctification. There is no mention of sin, no mention of the necessity of the sacrament of Penance for mortal sin, no mention of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, no mention of the particular judgment that follows death. This is not an oversight; it is the systematic elimination of Catholic supernaturalism. The focus is entirely on this-worldly “authority,” “dignity,” and personal “journey.” This is the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place (Mt. 24:15): the replacement of the true worship of God with a man-centered, naturalistic religion. The antipope, as the head of the conciliar sect, leads this apostasy. His very presence at the Colosseum, a site of ancient Christian martyrdom, is a grotesque parody. The early martyrs died for the faith—for the truth of the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the authority of the Church—not for a vague “human dignity” or the right to “exercise power” in daily life. They died to be united to Christ’s sacrifice; the antipope uses the symbol of the cross to promote a religion of immanent human progress.
Contrast with Unchanging Catholic Doctrine
The true Catholic faith, as taught before the catastrophic Second Vatican Council, is diametrically opposed to this modernist presentation.
* **On the Cross:** The cross is the lex talionis satisfied by God Himself. It is the sole propitiation for sin. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might offer us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). The liturgical action of Good Friday is the solemn commemoration of this unique, all-sufficient sacrifice, not a “journey” of personal discovery.
* **On Authority:** All authority, including that of the state, is derived from God and must be exercised in subordination to His law. As Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas: “It matters not whether individuals, families, or states, for men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals… The state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations… it cannot depend on anyone’s will.” The antipope’s meditation reduces this to a vague accountability before God, stripping it of the concrete, juridical demands of the Social Kingship of Christ condemned by the Syllabus (§§ 39-44).
* **On the Journey of Life:** The Catholic life is not a vague “journey” following “footprints.” It is a state of grace maintained through the sacraments, fought through penance and mortification, and directed with the certainty of faith to the beatific vision. It is a battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil, with the Church as the Ark of Salvation. The modernist “journey” is an individualistic, immanentist pilgrimage where the “footprints” are discerned through personal experience and contemporary “signs of the times,” in direct opposition to the immutable truths of the faith.
Conclusion: The Antichurch’s Liturgical Apostasy
The event reported is not a Catholic liturgical act. It is a carefully choreographed piece of religious theater designed to promote the conciliar sect’s humanistic, evolutionist, and implicitly pantheistic worldview. By stripping the Via Crucis of its sacrificial, sin-atonement, and juridical dimensions, and by reframing it as a naturalistic “journey” about human authority and dignity, the antipope and his collaborators commit a profound sacrilege. They take the most sacred mysteries of our faith—the Passion and Death of the God-Man—and reduce them to a banal moral exemplar. This is the logical fruit of the Modernism condemned by St. Pius X, which “consists in the complete transformation of the very idea of religion” (Pascendi). The faithful are not called to “follow footprints” in a vague sense; they are called to submit their intellect and will to the defined dogmas of the faith, to receive the sacraments as the sole channels of grace, and to labor for the restoration of all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10) through the true Church, which endures outside the conciliar structures. The only “journey” for a Catholic is the narrow way (Mt. 7:14) of orthodox faith, sacramental life, and final perseverance, under the absolute and universal reign of Christ the King, a reign the antipope and his sect explicitly deny in both doctrine and practice.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV on Good Friday Urges the Faithful to ‘Live Our Lives as a Journey’ in Christ’s Love (ncregister.com)
Date: 04.04.2026